SOURCE: An introduction to Three Centuries of Children 's Books in Europe, edited and translated by Brian W. Alderson, 1967. Reprint by The World Publishing Company, 1968, pp. xi-xviii.

Hürlimann offers a brief and general history of European children's literature in the excerpt that follows, touching on the major trends and publications.

Almost exactly three hundred years ago, in the age of Franz Hals and Rembrandt, Velazquez and Murillo, a little book was published in Nuremberg entitled Orbis sensualium pictus. Its author was the Moravian bishop Jan Amos Komensky or Comenius and, like the great painters of his time, he was among the first to recognize the child as an individual. . . . [The] importance of the man lies in the effort which he made to introduce a new humanity into the idea of education at a time when Europe was still suffering from the effects of the Thirty Years War...