Chapter One
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
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.”15Early 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?