Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (4 page)

The place of communal prayer at night in the
Rule of St. Benedict
is well known.
⁴⁷
The Nocturnal Office offered the opportunity to encounter the Lord at night, but it was also understood as a form of communal defense against its dangers.
⁴⁸
Medieval writers in the Benedictine tradition found no opportunities to use the night as a metaphor for approaching the Divine. For example, the writings of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) abound with images of divine light, but he never uses any language of apophatic darkness or envisions the dark night as a path to God, in contrast with ancient and early modern theologies of darkness.

In recent years several scholars have sought to assess the night in the high and late Middle Ages. Writing in the context of studies of other aspects of medieval culture, including collections on the monstrous and on space and place in the Middle Ages, Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris have focused on “the metaphorical and literal uses of the night in medieval society,” while the Bulgarian medievalist Tzotcho Boiadjiev has examined the night in the practical texts of medieval sermons and exempla of the tenth through fifteenth centuries. Both of these studies describe a night of external threats, natural and supernatural. Using a long series of sermons and exempla Boiadjiev shows how the night transformed ambivalent places such as the road, the bridge, or the churchyard, which in other contexts might serve as symbols of progress or strength, into sites of diabolical danger and violence. For Youngs and Harris, the clerical writers of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries constructed a “dark ‘other’” in their efforts to “fix what it meant to be in the light of God and part of the Christian community.”
⁴⁹
While they explore the wide range of negative associations with the night in the high and late Middle Ages, both of these studies go beyond the clichés of unrelenting nocturnal fear to examine the burgeoning illicit night life seen in cities beginning around the twelfth century.
⁵⁰

In the period from the sixth through fourteenth centuries, Christian writers in the West seldom drew on the few positive associations the night had acquired during the first five centuries of their tradition. The wide influence of Denys in the West issued from his writings on celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy; his use of darkness in paradoxes to describe the Divine, whose “transcendent darkness remains
hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge” found little resonance. By the fourteenth century, however, the growth of mystical theology had renewed the use of the night in the apophatic sense first expressed by Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. Apophatic images of darkness and the night can be seen in the works of Meister Eckhart (d. 1328), in the fourteenth-century
Cloud of Unknowing
(unknown English author), in the writings of Denis the Carthusian (1402–71), and most systematically in the
De docta ignorantia
(1440) of Nicolas of Cusa (1401–64).
⁵¹
With the Dionysian corpus established and reworked by Nicolas of Cusa and other fifteenth-century mystics, early modern Christians could cite venerable authorities when using the imagery of the night to inspire or exalt, creating a counterpoint to the more widespread and traditional association of darkness and the night with evil.
How
early modern Christians drew on the theologies of darkness in their tradition has been little studied, and is the focus of
chapters 2
and
3
of this book.

The night is emerging as a focus of scholarship in early modern Europe, creating enormous opportunities to explore the period in relation to this ubiquitous aspect of culture and daily life. How best can scholars connect the night with the salient themes and issues of the early modern centuries? To bring the history of the night into dialogue with the history of the early modern day, so to speak, we can see the night as part of a broader form of analysis, rather than as a self-contained topic. In this study I use daily life as a category of historical analysis to understand the reciprocal relationship between night and society. I show how early modern men and women mapped the contrast between darkness and light – a fundamental distinction of daily life – onto early modern culture, and how this culture in turn helped structure the distinction between night and day.
⁵²
This approach also broadens and reorients the history of daily life itself by focusing on the imprint of everyday distinctions on complex bodies of thought and expression.
⁵³
By moving beyond considering daily life simply as an object of study, and using it instead as a category of
analysis, we can illuminate aspects of culture and society far beyond the quotidian, such as Lutheran mysticism or changing beliefs about ghosts and spirits. This approach creates new and valuable perspectives by examining the reciprocal relationships between the night and witchcraft persecutions, confessional formation, absolutism and court culture, the civilizing process, social discipline, gender and the public sphere, and colonization, race, and the early Enlightenment.

In medieval Europe, spiritual and political authorities forced the individuals and groups they excluded into the night, “physically in their movements, and metaphorically by being linked to the evil abroad in the darkness.”
⁵⁴
This process intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as demonologists tied the crime of witchcraft to the nocturnal witches’ sabbath (a connection never made, for example, in the fifteenth-century
Malleus maleficarum
). But as I show in
chapter 2
, discourses of witchcraft in this period focused on the night in another, more interior way, as the time of diabolical temptation. In the narratives of witchcraft performed on stage or extracted though the courts, the act of succumbing to this shadowy temptation and joining the Devil’s nocturnal anti-society became the true crime of witchcraft. The power of this somber fiction is seen in the tens of thousands of executions for witchcraft in this age.

Early modern Europeans used the night to think profoundly about God
and
the Devil, underscoring the significance of the night to early modern culture. In
chapter 3
I show how the formation of rival confessional churches led Christians to seek the Lord in the night, literally and figuratively: the widely persecuted Anabaptists provide the most concentrated example of a much broader experience. I also examine men like John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme, persecuted
within
their own churches, who brought forth an intense nocturnalization of mysticism and theology, epitomizing the wider nocturnalization of Christian piety and imagery across confessions. Like the diabolical associations of the early modern night, these mystics saw the divine night as a time of isolation in powerfully interior terms.

The visual and emotional power of imagining the night and its darkness as attributes of God quickly generated parallel political expressions. Sovereigns and courtiers mapped the contrast between
darkness and light onto the political culture of the seventeenth century, representing power and authority through fireworks, illuminations, and lavish nocturnal festivities. In
chapter 4
I show how darkness and the night were essential to baroque attempts to articulate and transcend confessional sources of authority. Nocturnal darkness intensified the light that represented God or king in spectacles of what Jürgen Habermas called “representative publicness.” At the same time, the active use of darkness by princes to bedazzle, conceal, and deceive expressed the fundamental political insights of the age. The use of the night to create and represent authority reveals fundamental connections between court culture, the baroque stage, and seventeenth-century political thought.

In
chapters 4
and
5
I show how spectacular new uses of the night slowly began to reorder everyday routines at court and in cities as princes, courtiers, and respectable townspeople regularly extended the legitimate social part of the day long past sunset, and often past midnight. In the second half of the seventeenth century, parallel to the new uses of the night at court, the rulers of the leading cities of Northern Europe began to establish public street lighting. Most research on street lighting has focused on the gas and electric lighting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the first European street lighting – candles or oil-lamps in glass-paned lanterns – was an innovation of the seventeenth century, both reflecting and promoting new attitudes toward the night and urban space.
Chapter 5
shows how the night and its illumination thus link the representational needs of baroque rulers with the practical expansion of urban public time and space.

Contemporaries recognized street lighting as a “modern” security innovation. A 1692 description of Paris remarked that “the most distant peoples should come and see … the invention of lighting Paris during the night with an infinity of lights,” explaining that the street lighting was something “the Greeks and the Romans had never considered for the policing of their republics.”
⁵⁵
In
chapter 6
I argue that this policing was part of a distinctive colonization of the urban night. It met with immediate resistance from the urban night’s traditional inhabitants: young people – nobles, servants, apprentices,
and students – as well as tavern visitors, prostitutes, and those of all estates who sought occasional anonymity. In the ensuing struggle to colonize the urban night authorities deployed estate, age, and gender to mark the shifting lines between prohibited and respectable night life. The colonization of the urban night created a “bourgeois public sphere” whose location in daily
time
, in the evening and at night, was at least as important as its physical sites in coffeehouses or clubs. I place the arguments of Jürgen Habermas and Joan Landes on gender and the public sphere in the new context of daily time and examine how meeting at night limited respectable women’s access to the emerging urban public.

The same legal-disciplinary policing underlay authorities’ engagement with the night in the countryside as in the city. As with the colonization of the urban night, youth, gender, and sexuality were the key issues. But as I show in
chapter 7
, the encounter of church and state with the rural night was shaped by different cultural and social forces and led to outcomes distinctly different from the colonization of the night in the cities of Northern Europe. Attempts to colonize the rural night focused on social discipline and were less tied to commerce and consumption than at court or in major cities. Like their cousins in towns and cities, young people in the countryside resisted incursions into a time that had traditionally been theirs. Because neither church nor state could intervene in rural daily life as effectively as they could in cities, villagers young (and old) successfully defended their traditional night life. By 1700 the difference between the successful colonization of the urban night and the failed colonization of the rural night appeared as a real shift in patterns of daily time seen, for example, in the transformation of the age-old pattern of segmented sleep described above. References to segmented sleep are absent from the diaries of elite men like Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and the duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) because their daily life was shaped by the rise of street lighting, better domestic lighting, and the spread of coffee and tea as alternatives to beer and wine. The nights of townspeople, compressed into a single sleep of seven or eight hours, began to diverge from the traditional pattern of segmented sleep reflected, for example, in rural diaries.

How did Europeans understand darkness and the night, real and symbolic, as their everyday rhythms shifted? In
chapter 8
I examine the imprint of nocturnalization on the early Enlightenment through controversies over ghosts, witches, and Hell – three intertwined aspects of medieval and early modern culture deeply associated with darkness and the night.
⁵⁶
For some Europeans, these manifestations of nocturnal fear were coming unmoored from their basis in everyday experience: the night and its spirits were becoming less frightening. But this seemingly straightforward connection between lighting and the Enlightenment becomes more complex and revealing as I examine the parallel unevenness of nocturnalization
and
of the universalisms of the early Enlightenment. Claims to dispel darkness, literal or figurative, lead us to darkness relocated or recreated elsewhere. Popular authors of the early Enlightenment such as Fontenelle and Balthasar Bekker (1634–98) depicted themselves as dispellers of benighted superstition, but in their works we see the displacement of darkness characteristic of nocturnalization. They created hierarchies of perception, understanding, and enlightenment that shifted the darkness of ignorance onto new differences of region and race. To recast discussions of the early Enlightenment and its radicals, I consider the tension between the universalism of light and the selective use of darkness and the night in late seventeenth-century writings on ghosts, witches, and Hell.

To trace a history of the night through these issues and developments, this book examines it as a symbol (
chapters 2
,
3
, and
8
) and in the distinct social spaces of the court, the city, and the countryside (
chapters 4
–
7
). In the early modern period the experiences, norms, and rhythms of the night at royal courts, in cities, and in the countryside – previously held in sync by sunrise and sunset – first began to diverge. By 1700 the uses of the night and its symbolic associations varied sharply across these social spaces, marking a revolution in early modern daily life. The discovery that the origins, progress, and effects of nocturnalization unfolded quite differently at courts, in cities, and in villages structures this book.