ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys continental European children’s literature from its beginnings to the First World War. While conventional chronologies often cite Comenius’s Orbis Pictus (1658) as the first European book intended for young readers, I also include references to premodern examples that shaped this development. The geographic focus is on German- and French-language traditions with brief excursions to peripheries in the north, east, and south. As institutions including the family, schools, and the children’s book industry changed or emerged in response to shifting ideologies of childhood, children’s books similarly reflected these transformations in their content, goals, and materiality.
