The homotopy groups of CW complexes and of the mapping spaces between them are notoriously difficult to compute. However, if one disregards torsion, rational homotopy theory becomes very effective and can easily solve such problems. Moreover, it produces efficient invariants of homotopy classes of maps, called Maurer-Cartan elements, which encode the rational type of path components. I will give a couple of examples and then explain how this extends to embedding spaces.