Sebastian Munster (1488-1522) was born in Nierder-Ingelheim a small town of the Rhenish Palatinate, on the Rhine between Mainz and Bingen. From 1503 to 1508 studied arts and theology at Heidelberg, where he entered the Franciscan Order in 1505. His truly formative years were those from 1509-1518 (or later), when he pursued his studies first under the versatile humanist Konrad Pellikan and subsequently under the Swabian mathematician Johann Stoffler. From 1509 to 1514 or 15, at the monastery of St. Katherina in Rufach in the upper Alsace, and then at Pforzheim, Pellikan, who used the Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch as a text-book, was Munster's instructor in Hebrew and Greek, cosmography and mathematics, in fact in almost the whole range of studies to which his mature life was dedicated.

In 1524 he was appointed to teach the Hebrew language at the University of Heidelberg. Most of Munster's earlier Hebraistic publications came from the press of Johann Froben, Erasmus's printer; Munster also worked as press-corrector for Adam Pteri, who in 1520 printed his German translation of Luther's Wittenberg theses. In 1529, soon after his move to Basel, he left Franciscan Order and adhered to Lutheranism; and in the following year he married Adam Petri's widow, thus gaining for himself a measure of financial security and the services of the substantial printing-house of his stepson Heinrich Petri, who was to produce, sometimes in collaboration with Michael Isingrin, most of his later works.