Zwischen Jakobsleiter und Eselsbrücke

As a moral, didactic genre that relies chiefly on the interplay between images and texts, emblematics lies at the crossing point between literature, visual arts and pedagogy. This study investigates the role played by picture books and the 'painted word' in education between 1650 and 1750. At the heart of the research is an interest in understanding how things were received. The opening hypothesis is that educating a child with the help of picture books replaced the practice of adults teaching themselves by reading emblem books. The disappearance of emblem books in the first half of the 18th century and the emergence of children's books as a genre is thus placed in the context of theories that replace rhetoric with the aesthetics of beauty, where sensuality is given a greater value as a faculty of 'intuitive cognition'. In relation to the genre of children's books, the development of emblem books cannot just be perceived as evidence of a shift from rhetoric to aesthetics but also as an indication that ideas on memory and education/imaginaton were changing around the year 1700 in conjunction with the establishment of pedagogy as a subject in its own right.>