A01=Anke te Heesen
Author_Anke te Heesen
Category=GBA
Category=NHD
Category=NHT
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780226322865
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2002
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
