Read Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) Online
Authors: Craig Koslofsky
Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (2 page)
While writing this book I have received all sorts of assistance and support, intellectual and material, and many people deserve my thanks. My colleagues at the University of Illinois work every day to keep our history department an exciting, rewarding place to research, write, and teach. My thanks especially to the participants in our History Workshop, and to the stalwart members of the early modern reading group at Illinois, who discussed every chapter of this book in one form or another. Discussions in the Illinois German Colloquium also helped this book along; special thanks to Harry Liebersohn, Peter Fritzsche, and their graduate students. Illinois colleagues Nancy Abelmann, John Randolph, Adam Sutcliffe, Antoinette Burton, Mara Wade, Clare Crowston, David Price, and Mark Micale all read chapters and gave advice at key moments.
Some of the earliest encouragement to tackle the history of the night came from Diane Owen Hughes and Susan Karant-Nunn. Tom Tentler has been there since the beginning, of course. In Göttingen Hans Medick, Alf Lüdtke, and Jürgen Schlumbohm gave advice and inspiration. Scholars came together in Kansas City, Ithaca, Chicago, New Haven, Los Angeles, Evanston, Salt Lake City, Providence, Münster, and Seoul to share enthusiasm, healthy skepticism, and a wealth of precise details and keen observations essential to the history of everyday life. My thanks to them all.
To the undergraduate students who have taken my course on “The History of Night, Medieval to Modern” at Illinois I offer heartfelt thanks. Their rambunctious search for the night in early modern diaries, journals, and travel accounts was often more effective than my own. Likewise, over the years several graduate students have
assisted my research. Some, like Sace Elder, are by now established scholars in their own right. Others, like Melissa Salrin, Amanda Eisemann, and Jacob Baum, have great careers ahead of them. They have all enriched this book with their efforts and insights. Before, during, and since her stint as my research assistant my friend and colleague Pascale Rihouet brought an amazing range of skills and insights to bear on the research and writing process. From French teacher in Tübingen to colleague in Providence, she has always been a vital force. Merci!
Along the way I have benefitted from the generosity and insights of many other scholars: Ed Muir, Mary Lindemann, and Erik Midelfort; Otto Ulbricht, Jon Mathieu, Dieter Wunder, Bjørn Westerbeek Dahl, A. Roger Ekirch, Steven Pincus, Kenneth Marcus, Isaac Land, Jacob Melish, Charles Zika, Gary Waite, Ellen McClure, Jen Hill, and Alan Stager. The comments of the anonymous reviewers of my article for the
Journal of Modern History
were exceptionally helpful, as were those of Lyndal Roper on the finished manuscript. Most recently, Alain Cabantous and Catherine Denys have proven themselves generous and gracious colleagues. Librarians and archivists from Los Angeles to Berlin have gone beyond the call of duty, especially Michael Matthaeus (Frankfurt), Klaus Dettmer (Berlin), Christoph Eggenberger (Zurich), Michel Sarter (Lille), Joe Springer (Goshen, IN), and the staff at the William Andrews Clark Library (Los Angeles) and at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA).
The scholars and staff at the Newberry Library deserve a special thanks. They made it possible to finish this book in a superb working environment, providing everything from rare books to fresh perspectives. The participants in the 2009–10 fellows’ seminar at the Newberry formed an outstanding scholarly community for the final writing process; I especially want to thank Carla Zecher, Diane Dillon, and Jim Grossman. At Cambridge University Press Michael Watson and Chloe Howell have been patient, and a pleasure to work with.
During the slow construction of this book Dana Rabin intervened at all the right moments: asking where the rural night fit in, wondering about darkness and Christianity, raising questions for every
chapter – reading them all and listening to most of them as well. Imaginative and pragmatic, fearless and thoughtful, she has been the ideal intellectual travel partner for this journey into the night.
Work on this book was supported by a fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a grant from the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Newberry Library. Research support at the University of Illinois has been generous, including a released-time grant from the Department of History, funds for research assistants and leave from the Campus Research Board, and a Mellon fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The new Scholarly Commons project provided essential technical support just when I needed it most.
Beyond the intellectual exchange and research support every scholar needs, there is the faith, encouragement, and humor of family and friends. In this regard I have been truly fortunate. Our children, Jonah and Eve, have put up with this project for most of their lives and have always helped keep it in perspective. They radiate excitement into their environment, and that is a wonderful thing indeed. Any expression of thanks would fall short of the warmth, love, and understanding of my brothers and sisters-in-law, my nieces and nephews, and my Rabin in-laws. Our friends in Urbana-Champaign, Lexington, Lancaster, and Bethesda/Five Islands have shared our joys and lifted our spirits.
But the gratitude I can hardly begin to express goes to Dana Rabin, who has made with me a life so rich and fulfilling that no project seems too big, no task too daunting. She is truly the one who made this book possible, and so I dedicate it to her.
An early modern revolution
Alone with Lady Macbeth after his disturbing encounter with Banquo’s ghost (3.4.126), Macbeth asks, “What is the night?” The question is both a common way of asking the time in early modern England, and the inquiry which shapes this book. In the lives of early modern men and women, what was the night? In 1785 the Parisian writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) confidently stated in an essay on “The Pillow” that “the night is the common benefactress of every thing that breathes.”
1
A century earlier the barber-surgeon Johann Dietz (1665–1738), riding out of Hamburg late at night, unexpectedly came upon three hanged men on a gallows. “Filled with horror,” he reminded himself in his memoir that “the night is no man’s friend.”
2
The ubiquity and ambiguity of the night evoked by the comments of Dietz and Mercier make the night impossible for the historian to pin down, but they also make these hours an extraordinarily revealing vantage point.
For the people of early modern Europe, the night imposed fundamental limits on daily life, at the same time serving as a many-faceted and evocative natural symbol. By connecting the quotidian with the symbolic, I examine the night at the intersection of the history of daily life and cultural history. Bringing empirical evidence from early modern daily life, drawn from diaries, letters, and legal sources, together with the immense trove of representations of the night in early modern religion, literature, and art, this study opens up a new and surprisingly consistent image of Northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With overlapping and sometimes conflicting goals poets, princes, courtiers, burghers, and common people “nocturnalized” spiritual and political expression, public
space, and their use of daily time.
3
My study is focused on this
nocturnalization
, defined as the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night.
Nocturnalization touched all aspects of early modern culture. In the early modern centuries spiritual authors from John of the Cross to John Milton used the night to express contrariety, self-denial, and the ineffable nature of the Divine. At royal courts and in cities, nocturnalization unfolded (and is most visible to scholars) in the years after 1650, when mealtimes, the closing schedules of city gates, the beginning of theatrical performances and balls, and closing times of taverns all moved several hours later.
4
In the same years the nonalcoholic beverages chocolate, coffee, and tea surged in popularity – and coffeehouses, notorious for their late hours, appeared in all European cities by 1700.
5
Of all these developments, the swift rise of public street lighting is the most salient: in 1660, no European city had permanently illuminated its streets, but by 1700 consistent and reliable street lighting had been established in Amsterdam, Paris, Turin, London, and Copenhagen, and across the Holy Roman Empire from Hamburg to Vienna. Fear of the night was now mingled with improved conditions for labor and leisure as the emerging modern night began to show its characteristic ambivalence. Devotional writers such as the Anglican minister Anthony Horneck (1641–97) praised the hours after sunset: “Now is the soul nimbler, subtler, quicker, fitter to behold things sublime and great … Midnight prayers strangely incline God’s favour.”
6
Early eighteenth-century moralists like the urbane
Tatler
editor Richard Steele (1672–1729) and the German Pietist Phillip Balthasar Sinold (1657–1742) described
as new
the regular “night life” of citizens and courtiers. Across Northern Europe in the seventeenth century we see the increased scope and legitimacy of the use of the night in spiritual and political imagery, and in everyday life.
7
This study seeks to understand the origins, development, and effects of nocturnalization in early modern Northern Europe.
8
An early modern revolution
Rooted in early modern daily life, nocturnalization was a revolution. The turn to the night changed how the people of early modern Europe
ate, drank, slept, and worked, restructuring their daily lives and their mental worlds. Through nocturnalization early modern men and women found new paths to the Divine, created baroque opera and theater, formed a new kind of public sphere, and challenged the existence of an “Invisible World” of nocturnal ghosts and witches. And the imprint of nocturnalization on the early Enlightenment helped reconfigure European views of human difference and the place of humankind in the universe.
The early modern centuries began with an entirely new conception of the night. In 1540, the earliest published description of the heliocentric model of the solar system explained its implications for understanding the physical cause of the night:
The earth, like a ball on a lathe, rotates from west to east, as God’s will ordains; and … by this motion, the terrestrial globe produces day and night and the changing appearances of the heavens, accordingly as it is turned toward the sun.
9
This text, the
Narratio prima
(1540–41) of Georg Rhäticus, was the first publication to explain the night as an effect of the earth’s rotation. Rhäticus was a student of Copernicus, whose
De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex
(“Six books on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres”) of 1543 described “the best-known movement of all, the revolution of day and night … as belonging wholly and immediately to the terrestrial globe.”
10
The new astronomy explained that the rotation of the earth on its axis produces day and night, but it also implied another kind of night: the endless darkness of space, through which the earth moved around the sun “Like one that hath been led astray / Through the Heav’ns wide pathless way.”
11
Our deep-seated awareness of the darkness of space was unknown to the medieval world. As C.S. Lewis has observed, in the geocentric medieval view the space between the earth and the distant circle of fixed stars was illuminated: night was “merely the conical shadow cast by our Earth.”
12
Solar and divine light filled the space above the earth, and the darkness of night was local, limited to the hemisphere of the earth not illuminated as the sun rotated around it. In this geocentric view, “when we look up at the night sky we are looking
through
darkness but not
at
darkness.”
13
So Dante imagined the universe. But for
the German shoemaker and theosopher Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), whose influential understanding of darkness and the night we will examine in
chapter 3
, the transition from the medieval universe to the new astronomy was deeply unsettling: “Before this [his acceptance of the heliocentric view] … I myself held that the true Heaven formed a round circle,
quite sky-blue
, high above the stars.”
14
Led to “pagan thoughts” by his acceptance of the heliocentric view, Böhme was not the only pensive soul thrown into crisis by the thought of a polycentric and infinite universe of darkness: Pascal cried out that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”
15
Early modern Europeans slowly realized that the new astronomy revealed an infinite universe of endless night. As we will see in
chapter 8
, leading figures of the early Enlightenment, such as Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), embraced this understanding of darkness and the night as a new basis for European cultural superiority.
This identification of the night with the earth’s immanent motion signals the history of the night in early modern Europe: dynamic and revolutionary, yet tied to age-old rhythms and continuities. And like the new heliocentric understanding of the physical cause of night on earth, the nocturnalization examined in this book spread gradually from its distinct origins to widespread cultural impact. The claims made by Copernicus and elaborated by Rhäticus were understood by few and accepted by fewer still in their lifetimes. But like the new attitudes toward the night seen in nocturnalization, these revolutionary reorientations in space and time were far-reaching.
To understand nocturnalization in the early modern period we must examine the long-standing continuities of the night stretching from the ancient world to the Industrial Revolution. Compared with the effects of industrialization on the human relationship with the night, any developments within the pre-industrial period might seem trivial: the hearth, the oil-lamp, and the candle remained the only sources of artificial light before the nineteenth century. All early modern Europeans experienced the night as a natural force, with little or no way to escape its constraints. A synchronic history of the night shows how consistently the night was experienced across the pre-industrial world, from village to palace, from shepherd to
sovereign.
16
But within this enduring pre-industrial night, the early modern period reveals a dynamic relationship between daily life and cultural expression that drove nocturnalization forward. This relationship gave us the modern night illuminated for labor and leisure by gas and electricity. How have scholars examined the continuity and change in this relationship between early modern Europeans and the night that surrounded them?
Taking stock
Individual and social responses to the division of the day into daylight and darkness are fundamental to every culture, but scholars have just begun to examine systematically the social experience of the night in early modern Europe. References to nocturnal activity and the symbolic associations of the night in early modern Europe are scattered in research on topics ranging from Caravaggio and the history of street lighting to witch persecutions, astronomy, and coffeehouses. This research offers a fascinating but contradictory picture: we see a diabolical night, nocturnal devotion, honest labor at night, and a night of drunken excess and indiscipline. This study explores these extraordinary tensions in the early modern night, a night balanced between pre-industrial societies and the modern world, a night both devilish and divine, restful and restive, disciplined and ungovernable.
The work of scholars such as Norbert Schindler, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, A. Roger Ekirch, Daniel Ménager, and Alain Cabantous has begun to orient us to this jumbled terrain, placing the early modern night in three important contexts: in the history of sleep, as a site for every sort of quotidian activity, and as a symbol of great force in popular and learned culture. These scholars have approached nocturnal activities in early modern Europe in terms of necessity and leisure, and order and disorder. To understand the night as a symbol, these scholars have assessed its positive and negative connotations in the classical and Christian traditions. This scholarship, which has focused primarily on the night in the
longue durée
, provides an essential overview of what we already know about the quotidian and symbolic aspects of the early modern night.
Sleep is the first necessity of the night. Its history in pre-industrial times has been examined in the innovative work of A. Roger Ekirch.
17
Contrary to assumptions that pre-modern people “fled to their beds soon after sunset” and generally stayed there until sunrise, Ekirch has uncovered an age-old pattern of segmented sleep, arguing that “until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced
two major intervals of sleep
bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”
18
Ekirch describes a first sleep starting after sunset and lasting several hours, followed by a short waking interval and then a second sleep until dawn. The division of the night into a “first” and “second” sleep is supported by a vast range of sources, from diaries and depositions to poetry and prose literature, and the experience of segmented sleep seems to have been familiar to all medieval and early modern Europeans.
19
The implications of segmented sleep are many. The interval of wakefulness provided time for prayer, reflection, conversation, intimacy, or activities ranging from housework to petty theft: a demarcated period of nocturnal activity in the middle of long nights. And if the feeling of well-being some described during their wakeful interval was widespread, then the baleful accounts of night’s terrors must be qualified.
The second necessity of the night was work, and early modern people worked at night in countless ways. In large cities, work rhythms were uncoupled from sunrise by the end of the Middle Ages. Evidence from sixteenth-century England and France and from a detailed study of Hamburg shows that activity began around 6 a.m. regardless of the hour of sunrise. This pattern applied to merchants, clerks, masters, apprentices, and domestic servants – all rose around 5.30 a.m., often in the dark, to breakfast and begin work, perhaps attending an early church service first.
20
By the end of the seventeenth century, merchants and officials had left this common schedule by moving the start of their workday at least two hours later.
21
The urban workday included several long breaks and ended between 7 and 10 p.m.: extending the day’s work after sunset by candlelight was always a possibility. Many references to late-night labor come from craftsmen and artisans working to fill an order or finish a specific job that had to done by a certain time.
22
In contrast to the intensive
night work of urban artisans, those in the countryside often filled the “extra” time on long winter evenings with less skilled tasks or those that required less light, such as carding wool or spinning. Village spinning bees were an extraordinarily important part of sociability in the rural night, discussed below in
chapter 7
.