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 demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order....

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 demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order....