This week I’ve been browsing around the net looking for examples of battledores and hornbooks. The net is a really good resource for doing this. They’re some of the earliest resources made for teaching children how to read. The hornbooks came first. They typically just have the alphabet, some simple vowel/consonant combinations and then the Lord’s prayer. The Battledores were an eighteenth century innovation. Made out of cardboard some were highly coloured, and the alphabets were typically illustrated too, one woodblock picture for a word illustrating each letter. This site gives a good range of examples
Looking around the net for images, it turns out this is a blogging hotspot. I like the way the net gets used like this to map and share enthusiasms. I can’t quite think what the antecedent might be. There is no obvious equivalent, that would facilitate this kind of display of the objects and the commentary. Except of course a book, which would have been much more expensive to produce and would once have put this kind of exercise out of most people’s hands. I can remember from my A Level course on Tudor and Elizabethan history, when we did a paper on Elizabethan architecture, that style books containing ideas for design motifs were widely circulated, and influenced what and how people chose to decorate their buildings. Did they also represent a different kind of demarcation line between professional and amateur knowledge? Maybe that is part of what is in flux: changes in technologies provide different possibilities for knowledge exchange, diffusion and appropriation.
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