The World in a Box by Anke Te Heesen
This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments - the whole world filed in a box of images. As Anke te Heesen deminstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how 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 show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both Enlightenment thought and the developing middle class in Germany. 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 believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.
"This is a truly magnificent book - the most impressive histoire totale of an object that I have readte Heesen provides a fascinating series of perspectives on the German bourgeois Enlightenment through minute study of the production, physical make-up, marketing, reviewing, and educational uses of Stoy's world in a box." - Nicholas Jardine, University of Cambridge
Anke te Heesen is a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, Germany. She is coeditor of Sammeln als Wissen: Das Sammeln und seine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226322872 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226322874 |
| Title | The World in a Box |
| Author | Anke Te Heesen |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2002-05-01 |
| Number of pages | 244 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |