As the sovereigns of the seventeenth century embraced the night for their displays of power and provision of pleasure at court, they also articulated the supplemented process of nocturnalization – in two different ways. First, princes moved their spectacles and celebrations into the night during a century of unprecedented challenges to the very principle of royal authority. Forced by these challenges to claim that “Ecclipse and suff’rings burnish Majesty,” and that “we best read the lustre in the shade,”6 these princes and their panegyrists evoked the darkness to claim victory over it. Writing in praise of Louis XIV in 1665, André Félibien repeated a now-familiar theme: “his majesty has destroyed the grim clouds [of rebellion] which have darkened this entire kingdom for so many years, and illuminated it with rays of joyful light.”7 Figuratively and literally, the darkened backdrop enhanced the luster of would-be sun kings. Second, from Machiavelli on, the principles of statecraft emphasized the ruler’s need to conceal and dissemble, and nocturnal spectacles and pleasures also served to divert both the common people and the political nation, leaving them blinded by the light of their radiant monarch.
The dark side of the colonization of the urban night can be seen in its exclusions, as the new urban nights of respectable sociability were carved out of the youthful, undisciplined, violent night life known in European cities since the high Middle Ages. The blithe comments in the Tatler about the movement of urban sociability into the night are shadowed by the fates of the individuals and alternate publics excluded from the nocturnal “public sphere as a ‘polite zone’.”8 This new respectable night life required the discipline of even elite young men, and fostered sites with very little access for women, such as the club or coffeehouse, as well as the salon, theater, or evening ball, open only to well-born ladies. The contrast with the traditional order of the night in the countryside underscored the fashionable distinction of this urbane night.
In the taverns, coffeehouses, and clandestine printing workshops of the urban night, a respectable public discussed claims to dispel the darkness of ignorance and superstition. Despite its insistent rhetoric of light and clarity, darkness and the night were key to the early Enlightenment. Arguments that threatened established political or spiritual authority had to be expressed carefully, and many relied on the darkness of anonymity or the shadows of discretion. Enlightenment authors like Fontenelle proposed a hierarchy of perception, with troubling truths hidden from the benighted masses. And these early Enlightenment works supplemented their claims that physical darkness was a nonentity by stressing differences of region and race, sometimes marked by contrasting “white, black, tawny, and olive complexions.”9 Nocturnalization marked Enlightenment claims to dispel darkness while actually deploying it elsewhere as a deficiency that could not be corrected through the light of reason.
The early modern expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night described in this book created new centers of power and new margins of exclusion. This supplemented process always combined the elimination of darkness with its deliberate evocation or manipulation. As Europeans consolidated the expansion of respectable daily activity into the night in the eighteenth century, they identified their intellectual and political achievements with the light of reason and the torch of civilization. As Pope’s “Epitaph. Intended for Sir Isaac Newton” (1730) exclaimed: “Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night / God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.” The Enlightenment’s rhetoric of illumination adapted the received Christian theology of light without much appreciation for its corresponding theology of darkness. In 1796 the first Christian missionaries to the islands of the South Pacific set sail from England. Reports of the “mental ignorance and moral depravity” of the Polynesians had impressed upon the missionaries “the obligation we lay under to endeavour to call them from darkness into marvelous light.”10 To go into the night and dispel its darkness was foundational to nocturnalization. But for the peoples of this vast region between Hawai’i, Tahiti, and New Zealand, the night itself was sacred, a reflection of the creation of the world and its gods. Darkness represented a sacral connection between creation, death, and the ancestors of the living. In contrast, the light of day was profane and ordinary.11 Ill-equipped to grasp the exalted place of darkness in Polynesian cosmology, these first missionaries could only report on the “dreadful … darkness that envelopes the minds of those poor heathens.”12 Success was limited, and seventy-five years later another English missionary to the Polynesians encountered the same cosmology while visiting an island near Samoa:
As evening deepened into night, the heathen became quite friendly and chatty … When pressed to embrace Christianity, they affectingly said, “We know that your God is stronger than ours; but we love darkness. To us darkness is good, light is bad.”
This Polynesian exaltation of the night evoked the other side of European nocturnalization – the discourses and practices that embrace or manipulate darkness. But in response, the missionaries turned to the dominant associations of light and darkness in their tradition:
We thought of the inspired declaration, “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved” (John 3:19–20).13
Always two-sided, the nocturnalization examined here fostered a culture ever more identified with diurnal reason, power, and authority, generating its dark others in encounters at home and around the globe.
Given the significance of the night in Western culture and its ubiquity in daily life, perhaps it is not surprising that the night intersects so many themes and developments in early modern Europe. In contrast with the attempts of some scholars to find a coherent theme in the night’s history, I have approached it as part of a fundamental distinction within early modern daily life. The contrariety between daylight and darkness has served, like gender, as a category of analysis. With no claim to completeness, I have shown how this contrast between night and day was used to order and express key aspects of early modern culture, and, reciprocally, how this culture structured the multiple meanings of night and day. The night is heuristic: it provides unexpected perspectives on diurnal discourses, authorities, and institutions, whether as a view from the margins, or as those authorities and institutions seek to enter the night itself, literally or figuratively. To follow on the conclusion of Bryan Palmer in his Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (2000): “The night can be grasped historically as both a figment of power’s imaginative fears … and as an actual place and space in which the ubiquitous contestations of everyday life were fought out.”14 Understanding the content of those fears, and the outcomes of those struggles provides an incisive and encompassing perspective on early modern Europe and on the origins of modernity.
Notes
1 An early modern revolution
1. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit (Neuchatel: De l’Imprimerie de la Société Typographique, 1785), II: 7. Mercier’s observation was noted by A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 185.
2. Johann Dietz, Mein Lebenslauf, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kosel, 1966), pp. 156–57.
3. In 1989 Corinne Walker noted that “L’histoire de la vie nocturne sous l’Ancien Régime reste à écrire,” in her “Du plaisir à la nécessité. L’apparition de la lumière dans les rues de Genève à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Vivre et imaginer la ville XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, ed. François Walter (Geneva: Éditions Zoé, 1988), pp. 97–124, p. 99, but in the last twenty years scholars have begun to conceptualize and explore the topic, foremost Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009); Ekirch, Day’s Close; Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et la nuit, Seuils de la modernité 10 (Geneva: Droz, 2005); Norbert Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Nacht in der frühen Neuzeit,
” in Widerspenstige Leute: Studien zur Volkskultur in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), pp. 215–57, Paulette Choné, L’Atelier des nuits. Histoire et signification du nocturne dans l’art d’Occident (Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1992), and Mario Sbriccoli, ed., La Notte: Ordine, sicurezza e disciplinamento in eta moderna (Florence: Ponte alle grazie, 1991).
4. See Roman Sandgruber, “Zeit der Mahlzeit. Veränderung in Tagesablauf und Mahlzeiteinteilung in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Wandel der Volkskultur in Europa. Festschrift für Günter Wiegelmann, ed. Nils-Arvid Bringéus and Günter Wiegelmann (Münster: Coppenrath, 1988), pp. 459–72, and Peter Reinhart Gleichmann, “Nacht und Zivilisation,” in Soziologie: Entdeckungen im Alltäglichen. Festschrift für Hans Paul Bahrdt, ed. Martin Baethge and Wolfgang Essbach (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1983), pp. 174–94.
5. See the article on coffee, tea, and chocolate by Simon Varey, “Three Necessary Drugs,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4 (1998): 3–51, and the literature cited there. See also Peter Albrecht, “Coffee-Drinking as a Symbol of Social Change in Continental Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1989): 91–103.
6. Anthony Horneck, The Happy Ascetick: or, The Best Exercise, To Which Is Added, A Letter to a Person of Quality, Concerning the Holy Lives of the Primitive Christians. By Anthony Horneck, Preacher at the Savoy ([London]: Printed by T[homas]. N[ewcomb]. for Henry Mortlock at the Phaenix in St. Paul’s Church-yard, and Mark Pardoe at the Black Raven over against Bedford-House in the Strand, 1681), p. 397; the work appeared in five editions through 1724.
7. In his discussion of European night life Wolfgang Schivelbusch refers to the simultaneous rise of the “lighting of order” (i.e., street lighting) and the “lighting of festivity” and suggests that “the baroque culture of the night spawned modern night life.” See his pioneering Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 137–39.
8. The crisis of authority which began with the Reformations of the sixteenth century created the key cultural and political conditions for nocturnalization. This study focuses on the polities which struggled, through civil war, to define and represent political power and authority in relation to Christian legitimacy in the period from 1540 to 1660: the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederation, France and the Low Countries, and the British Isles.
9. Georg Joachim Rhäticus, Narratio Prima, trans. Edward Rosen, in Three Copernican Treatises, ed. Edward Rosen (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 148. The Narratio Prima was first published in Danzig (1540) and Basle (1541).
10. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, trans. Charles Glen Wallis, ed. Stephen Hawking (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2004), p. 60 (introduction to book 2).
11. John Milton, Il Penseroso, 69–70, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 55.
12. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 111: “nowhere in medieval literature have I found any suggestion that, if we could enter the translunary world, we should find ourselves in an abyss of darkness.”
13. Ibid., p. 112, my emphasis.
14. Jacob Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröthe im Aufgang, I: 265; ch. 19, §4, italics mine. Böhme’s works are cited from the 1730 edition as published in facsimile: Jacob Böhme, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. August Faust and Will-Erich Peuckert (Stuttgart: Fromman, 1955–61). References are by volume and page of the facsimile edition and by book, chapter, and section of the 1730 edition.
15. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), p. 64 (Pensées S233/L201).
16. See Ekirch, Day’s Close, pp. xxviii–xxix.
17. A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” American Historical Review 106, 2 (2001): 343–86.
18. Ibid., p. 364.
19. Ekirch provides more evidence in Day’s Close, pp. 261–323. Ekirch’s discovery of segmented or biphasic sleep raises further questions. The varying length of the night at northern European latitudes would seem to leave little time for two intervals of sleep in a summer night lasting only eight or nine hours.
20. In Hamburg, for example, the daily “early sermon” was given at 6 a.m. Wolfgang Nahrstedt, Die Entstehung der Freizeit. Dargestellt am Beispiel Hamburgs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), pp. 103–04, 116–18. Those who worked entirely outdoors were still tied to the start of the natural day. In all cities and some villages, public clocks struck the hours around the clock, thus making it possible to rise before dawn at a relatively consistent time.
21. Ibid., pp. 114–41.
22. On labor at night see Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England 1750–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). This sort of night work reflects the growth of domestic consumption and production proposed by Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 125–30.
23. Ekirch, Day’s Close, pp. 155–85; Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, pp. 53–68.
24. Steven Laurence Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 227–28.
25. Ekirch, Day’s Close, pp. 163–64.
26. Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, p. 54.
27. On cards see Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 55–61, and Gary S. Cross, A Social History of Leisure since 1600 (State College, PA: Venture Publishing, 1990).
28. Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, p. 305.
29. Ibid., pp. 140–84.
30. Marc-René de Voyer d’Argenson, Notes de René d’Argenson, lieutenant général de police, intéressantes pour l’histoire des moeurs et de la police de Paris à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Imprimerie Emile Voitelain et cie, 1866), p. 51.
31. Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, p. 179; on London see Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Gender and Petty Violence in London: 1680–1720 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), pp. 165–66.
32. Quotations from the Christian Bible are taken from the 1611 King James Bible unless otherwise noted.
33. Jean-Marie Auwers, “La nuit de Nicodème (Jean 3, 2; 19, 39) ou l’ombre du langage,” Revue biblique 97, 4 (1990): 481–503, and J.M. Bassler, “Mixed Signals: Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 635–46.
34. Wolfgang Speyer, “Mittag und Mitternacht als heilige Zeiten in Antike und Christentum,” in Vivarium: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum, Erganzungsband 11 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1984), pp. 314–26. Speyer goes on to examine the history of noon as a liminal and dangerous time in early Christian culture and the medieval denial of noontime demons.
35. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed, ed. Michael P. Foley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006), p. 299.
36. Augustine, Concerning the Nature of the Good, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1886–90), IV: 354 (ch. 16) on God as the “perfect framer of all things, [who] fittingly make[s] privations of things.” See Augustine, De natura boni, in Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1892), XXV, ii: 861.
37. Augustine, Concerning the Nature of the Good, ch. 15.
38. Alongside the Neoplatonic influences, renewed insistence on the Nicene doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo encouraged the growth of negative or apophatic theology, first expressed in terms of darkness in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394). These two streams – Neoplatonic and Nicene – merged m
ost influentially in the writings of Denys the Areopagite. See the discussions in Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
39. Denys the Areopagite, “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid; foreword and notes by Paul Rorem, Classics of Western Spirituality 54 (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 138.
40. Denys the Areopagite, “Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius, p. 139.
41. Ibid., p. 135.
42. See Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, trans. George Holoch (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 212. Denys continued to influence political thought on spectacle and the display of majesty through the seventeenth century.
43. Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 20.
44. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze and J.M. Lappenberg (Hanover: Hahn, 1889), p. 9 (book 1, §12), cited in Ekirch, Day’s Close, p. 18. See Theodore Andersson, “The Discovery of Darkness in Northern Literature,” in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (University of Toronto Press, 1974), pp. 1–14, and Alois Niederstätter, “Notizen zu einer Rechts- und Kulturgeschichte der Nacht,” in Das Recht im kulturgeschichtlichen Wandel: Festschrift für Karl Heinz Burmeister zur Emeritierung, ed. Bernd Marquardt and Alois Niederstätter (Konstanz: UVK, 2002), pp. 173–90.
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