Reviewed by: The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia Judith Hawley (bio) Anke Te Heesen . The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xii + 236 pp., illus. $60.00, $20.00 paper. First published as Der Weltkasten: Die Geschichte einer Bildenzyklopädie aus dem 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1997). Johann Siegmund Stoy was a little-known professor of pedagogy who produced and sold educational books and children's games. In Nuremberg in March 1789 he published a pamphlet that exploited the anniversary of the execution of a notorious murderer to defend himself against people who had stabbed him in the back by slandering him (among other things, his enemies impugned his motives for resigning his ministry in the church). A failed pastor, a hypochondriac, defensive, socially ill at ease, why does Stoy merit the full academic treatment that Anke Te Heesen accords him in this rigorous and wide-ranging study? She admits that his contributions to educational theory and practice were less important than those of such as Johann Amos Comenius, Johann Bernhard Basedow, and Friedrich Justin Bertuch working before and after him. Moreover, his main publication was received unfavorably in the press, and later installments had far fewer buyers than the first. Nonetheless, Heesen maintains that Stoy and his "Picture Academy" deserve our attention because they are "an epitome of the Enlightenment. All of his activities," she argues, "and his thoughts about God, pictures, and education are the very essence of how Enlightenment was understood toward the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 6). Originally published between 1780 and 1784 in nine parts, adding up to a fifty-two-week course of education, Stoy's "Picture Academy for the Young" comprised two octavo volumes of text and fifty-two sheets of copperplate illustrations. Each of the plates comprised a tableau of images divided into nine fields; they could be assembled by the purchaser in one of three formats: either bound as a folio volume, or mounted on card stock as large posters, or cut into nine images and then mounted on cards and filed in a "specially designed box with separate partitions for each subject field" (p. 199). Part encyclopedia, part scrapbook, [End Page 441] the "Academy" could be further personalized if the owners supplemented the plates with additional images pasted onto sheets, or onto cards that could be filed in the box. Stoy suggested numerous ways in which adults and children could use the text and images in private study or in the classroom. The main point that Heesen stresses is that, in accordance with Enlightenment theories about the attainment and function of knowledge, Stoy's "Picture Academy" fostered "the acquisition of reason and virtue" (p. 43) by means of sensible knowledge: the student could both see and handle the images. Furthermore, under the direction of the text or the teacher who worked from it, the separate images could be categorized, connected, and ordered in meaningful ways. Each of the nine images or fields was devoted to a subject such as ordinary life, secular history, nature, myth, or moral instruction. At the center of each plate was a larger image derived from Scripture, to which the other eight images were supposed to be thematically related; the connection was not always immediately obvious, and the ingenuity of the teacher and student would be stretched in finding the significant link and drawing appropriate moral lessons from it. With its illustrations of everything from the miraculous cures of Christ to surgical operations, from the oracle of Delphi to a tailor and his customer, Stoy's encyclopedic book/box is innately interdisciplinary in scope. Moreover, it enables its possessor to talk about other related topics. The compartmentalized box is the most important aspect of Stoy's design and of Heesen's interpretation of it. As Heesen says, "the object itself determines which historiographic approach . . . analysis must take. Piece by piece, compartment by compartment, my study advances toward an encyclopaedic vision of the eighteenth century" (p. 10). Like the object of study, her methodology is both compartmentalized and comprehensive...