Sale!

The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia

Amazon.com Price:  $33.63 (as of 25/04/2019 12:49 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was once the Picture Academy for the Young, a well-liked encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to chop out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the entire world filed in a box of images.

As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an acceptable moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to show children easy methods to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to turn how the varieties of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy’s Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was once believed that knowledge may well be contained and controlled.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Engineering and Transportation » Engineering » Reference » Foreign Language Study and Reference » Foreign Language Dictionaries and Thesauruses » The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia

Recent Products