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 most 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.

45. As quoted in Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1973), pp. 146–47.

46. Chris Fitter, “The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre,” Early Modern Literary Studies 3, 2 (1997): 2.1–61. Online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/03–2/fittnoct.html.

47. Mary W. Helms, “Before the Dawn: Monks and the Night in Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Europe,” Anthropos 99 (2004): 177–91, and Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, pp. 208–15.

48. Helms, “Before the Dawn,” pp. 179, 181, 185. See below, ch. 3, n. 59.

49. Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris, “Demonizing the Night in Medieval Europe: A Temporal Monstrosity?” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 134–54; Tzotcho Boiadjiev, “Loca nocturna – Orte der Nacht,” in Raum und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 25 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997): 439–51.

50. Their conclusions agree with the overview provided by the French medievalist Jean Verdon in his Night in the Middle Ages, p. 3.

51. Josef Koch, “Über die Lichtsymbolik im Berich der Philosophie und der Mystik des Mittelaters,” Studium Generale 13, 11 (1960): 653–70. Nicolas of Cusa moved decisively from the dominant light–dark opposition to a sense of the complementarity and inseparability of light and darkness. This renewed sense of the value of darkness appears in the two central principles of his theology: his emphasis on the infinite distance between human knowledge and the Divine (which can therefore only be approached through a “docta ignorantia”), and his fundamental understanding of God as the “coincidentia oppositorum” in which all contradictions become one.

52. I see the expansion of “daily life” from the subject of research to a category of historical analysis as analogous to the development from women as the subject of “women’s history” to gender as a “useful category of historical analysis” – drawing on the landmark article of Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, 5 (1986): 1053–75.

53. Recent surveys suggest that Alltagsgeschichte focuses more on everyday agency in response to complex ideologies, and less on the role of the everyday in the intellectual and cultural constitution of those ideologies. See Paul Steege, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett, “The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter,” Journal of Modern History 80, 2 (2008): 358–78, esp. “Agency,” pp. 368–73; and Alf Lüdtke, “Alltagsgeschichte – ein Bericht von unterwegs,” Historische Anthropologie11, 2 (2003): 278–95.

54. Youngs and Harris, “Demonizing the Night,” p. 150.

55. Giovanni Paolo Marana, Lettre d’un Sicilien à un de ses amis, ed. Valentin Dufour, Anciennes descriptions de Paris 9 (Paris: A. Quantin, 1883), pp. 50–51. See Yvonne Bellenger, “La description de Paris dans la ‘Lettre d’un Sicilien’ datée de 1692,” in La découverte de la France au XVIIe siècle, ed. Centre méridional de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1980), pp. 119–32.

56. See Gillian Bennett, “Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, ed. Brian P. Levack, vol. III, Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 259–70.

2 Darkness and the Devil, 1450–1650

1. Thinking with the night about the secular world, ranging from romantic love to astronomy, is an immense aspect of this topic which must be left for discussion in a later project. Important work on the secular night in early modern Europe has been done by Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et la nuit, Seuils de la modernité 10 (Geneva: Droz, 2005).

2. Hans Sachs, Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall, ed. Gerald H. Seufert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), p. 17: “Durch auß und auß die lange nacht / Und synd auch aller erst erwacht / So die Nachtigall so hell synget / Und des tages gelentz her dringet.”

3. Ibid., p. 19: “Wer die lieplich nachtigall sey / Die uns den liechten tag auß schrey / Ist Doctor Martinus Luther / Zu Wittenberg Augustiner /Der uns auffwecket von der nacht.”

4. Ibid., p. 27, vv. 326–29: “Hond uns den glauben nye erklert / In Christo der uns sälig macht / Diser mangel bedeüt die nacht / Darinn wir alle irr seind gangen.”

5. Exsurge Domine, from www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo10/l10exdom.htm.

6. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–), XVIII: 551–787 (see section 3 of De servo arbitrio).

7. Thomas More, The Dialogue Concerning Tyndale by Sir Thomas More, Reproduced in Black Letter Facsimile from the Collected Edition (1557) of More’s English Works, ed. W.E. Campbell and A.W. Reed (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1927), p. 23.

8. Sachs, Wittenbergisch Nachtigall, p. 18.

9. More, Dialogue Concerning Tyndale, p. 240.

10. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus. Literary and Educational Writings, ed. Craig Ringwalt Thompson, Jesse Kelley Sowards, Anthony Levi, Elaine Fantham, Erika Rummel, and Jozef Ijsewijn (University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. xix–xx.

11. Ibid., pp. 175–76.

12. “Schleitheim Articles/Brotherly Union (1527),” trans. Cornelius J. Dyck et al., in Confessions of Faith in the Anabaptist Tradition, 1527–1660, ed. with an Introduction by Karl Koop, Classics of the Radical Reformation 11 (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press,2006), p. 28.

13. “Wismar Articles (1554),” ibid., p. 103.

14. C. Arnold Snyder, ed., Biblical Concordance of the Swiss Brethren, 1540, trans. Gilbert Fast and Galen Peters; Introduction by Joe Springer, Anabaptist Texts in Translation 2 (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2001), pp. 48–49 on “light”.

15. “Good things of the day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” Macbeth 3.2.52–53.

16. “La nuit des fantômes volans / Claquetans leurs becs violans / En sifflant mon âme espovantent,” cited in Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 1500–1640. An Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. R.E. Hallmark (New York: Holmes & Meier,1976), p. 56.

17. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen. Books Three and Four, ed. Dorothy Stephens (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006), p. 87 (book 3, canto 4).

18. “Schrecken und Stille und dunkeles Grausen, finstere Kälte bedecket das Land, / Izt schläft, was Arbeit und Schmerzen ermüdet, diß sind der traurgien Einsamkeit Stunden.” Andreas Gryphius, “Mitternacht,” in Lyrische Gedichte von Andreas Gryphius, ed. Julius Tittmann (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1880), p. 25.

19. Simon Dach, Werke, ed. Hermann Oesterley (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1977), pp. 151–52:

Ich trage grauen für der nacht

Und habe gantz mich außgewacht,

Mein schlaff ist pein und sorgen,

Ich sehne mich

So sehr, als sich

Kein wächter, nach dem morgen.

20. See A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), pp. 7–30; Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); and Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles): Une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), esp. pp. 87–97, “La peur de la nuit.”

21. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions, in Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 141–75, p. 175.

22. Ibid., p. 146.

23. Ibid., pp. 146–48.

24. Ann Pasternak Slater, “Macbeth and the Terrors of the Night,” Essays in Criticism 28 (1978): 112–28.

25. See Jean-Marie Maguin, La nuit dans le théâtre de Shakespeare et de ses prédécesseurs (Lille: Service de reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III, 1980), pp. 742–96, 931–42, and the essays by Abiteboul, Costa de Beauregard, and Mailhol in Simone Kadi, ed., La nuit dans les oeuvres de Shakespeare et de ses contemporains, l’invisible présence. Recherches valenciennoises 5 (Presses universitaires de Valenciennes, 2000).

26. Pasternak Slater, “Macbeth,” pp. 114, 125–27. See Ludwig Lavater (1527–86), Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, 1572, ed. with an Introduction and Appendix by J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford University Press, 1929). The 1572 edition is titled Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes and sundry forewarnynges, whiche commonly happen before the death of menne, great slaughters, & alterations of kyngdomes. One booke, written by Lewes Lauaterus of Tigurine. And translated into Englyshe by R.H. [i.e., Robert Harrison]. Thomas Nashe seems to have read the book; Shakespeare may have been familiar with the second English edition of 1596.

27. Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites, p. 98. Thomas Browne denounces ghosts in similar terms in his Religio medici: “those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils.” [A true and full copy of that which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously printed before vnder the name of] Religio medici ([London]: Printed for Andrew Crook, 1643), pp. 85–86.

28. Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites, p. 90. The author sometimes presents the night as an active deceiver: “for the night beguileth mens eyes. And therefore none ought to maruell, if trauellers towardes night or at midnight, mistake stones, trees, stubbes, or such like to be sprites or elues” (p. 20).

29. Pasternak Slater, “Macbeth,” pp. 127–28, makes this comparison.

30. Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites, p. 173.

31. Jean-Claude Mailhol, “Les créatures des ténèbres dans la tragédie domestique élisabéthaine et jacobéenne,” in La nuit dans les oeuvres de Shakespeare, ed. Kadi, pp. 231–76, and Anthony Harris, Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 50.

32. Faustus “beschwuer also den Teuffel inn der Nacht zwischen Neun unnd zehen Uhr,” H.G. Haile, ed., Das Faustbuch nach der Wolfenbüttler Handschrift (Berlin: E. Schmidt Verlag, 1963), p. 33; “Das Dritte Colloquium Doctor Faustii mit dem Gaist und seiner gethonen Promission,” p. 38.

33. David Wootton, ed., Doctor Faustus with The English Faust Book (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005), pp. 67–154 (the text of the English Faust Book); here pp. 69–75.

34. David Scott Kastan, ed., Doctor Faustus: A Two-Text Edition (A-text, 1604; B-text, 1616) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 63.

35. See Richard Halpern, “Marlowe’s Theater of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital,” English Literary History 71, 2 (2004): 455–95; here 473–82.

36. Kastan, ed., Doctor Faustus, 1.3 (emphasis mine), p. 63. In Marlowe’s text the pact that begins at midnight also ends at midnight, twenty-four years later, as Roy T. Eriksen has noted in his “‘What resting place is this?’ Aspects of Time and Place in Doctor Faustus (1616),” Renaissance Drama n.s. 16 (1985): 49–74.

37. Recent surveys are provided by Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–8, and Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender, and Society in Early Modern Germany, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 124 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), Introduction and pp. 243–54. See the recent debate between Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “Wege aus dem Dschungel: Betrachtungen zur Hexenforschung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29, 2 (2003): 316–47 and Gerd Schwerhoff, “Esoterik statt Ethnologie? Mit Monika Neugebauer-Wölk unterwegs im Dschungel der Hexenforschung,” online at www.historicum.net/themen/hexenforschung/thementexte/forschungsdebatten/ (text dated August 1, 2007).

38. See Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking Press, 1996), p. 328.

39. See also William Monter, “Witch Trials in Continental Europe 1560–1660,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 1–52. Scholars regard England as a variation within the patterns of European witch beliefs, but not as an exception to the discourses and practices that drove witchcraft persecutions. See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) on the integration of English, Scottish, and Continental evidence.

40. Including Briggs, Witches of Lorraine; Elisabeth Biesel, Hexenjustiz, Volksmagie und soziale Konflikte im lothringischen Raum, Trierer Hexenprozesse 3 (Trier: Spee, 1997); Jean-Claude Diedler, Démons et sorcières en Lorraine. Le bien et le mal dans les communautés rurales de 1550 à 1660 (Paris: Messene, 1996); Eva Labouvie, Zauberei und Hexenwerk. Ländlicher Hexenglaube in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991); and Walter Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte sponheimischer und kurtrierischer Hexenprozesse 1574–1664 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991).

41. Franz Irsigler, “Einführung,” in Methoden und Konzepte der historischen Hexenforschung, ed. Herbert Eiden, Rita Voltmer, Gunther Franz, and Franz Irsigler, Trierer Hexenprozesse 4 (Trier: Spee, 1998), p. 10, and Walter Rummel, “Vom Umgang mit Hexen und Hexerei. Das Wirken des Alltags in Hexenprozessen und die alltägliche Bedeutung des Hexenthemas,” ibid., p. 102.

42. Labouvie, Zauberei und Hexenwerk, pp. 14–154.

43. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, V. Knoblauch-Matthias, and Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1932), similar material in Paul Sébillot, Le folk-Lore de France, vol. I, Le Ciel et la Terre (Paris: Librairie orientale & américaine, 1904), pp. 134–64, “La Nuit”.

44. Manfred Wilde, Die Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse in Kursachsen (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 253–65.

45. Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H.C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 36.

46. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 1–16, and Behringer, Shaman, pp. 91–104.

47. Richard Bernard, A guide to grand-iury men diuided into two bookes: in the first, is the authors best aduice to them what to doe, before they bring in a billa vera in cases of witchcraft … In the second, is a treatise touching witches good and bad, how they may be knowne, euicted, condemned, with many particulars (London: Printed by Felix Kingston, 1627), p. 115.

48. Ginzburg, Night Battles, chs. 3–4, and Behringer, Shaman, pp. 89–118.

49. See Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 457–88, and the literature cited there.

50. George Gifford, A dialogue concerning [H]witches and witchcrafts (London: Printed by Iohn Windet for Tobie Cooke and Mihil Hart, 1593), fo. G(1). See Alan Macfarlane, “A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 140–55, and Scott McGinnis, “‘Subtiltie’ Exposed: Pastoral Perspectives on Witch Belief in the Thought of George Gifford,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, 3 (2002): 665–86.

51. Malcolm Gaskill, “Witches and Witnesses in Old and New England,” in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed. Stuart Clark (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 55–80, and Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen, pp. 284ff.

52. Bernard, Guide to grand-iury men, pp. 235–36.

53. Eva Labouvie, “Hexenspuk und Hexenabwehr: Volksmagie und volkstümlicher Hexenglaube,” in Hexenwelten: Magie und Imagination vom 16.–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1987), pp. 49–93.

54. See the complete original text, ibid., p. 84. Labouvie describes the trial in Zauberei und Hexenwerk, pp. 161–65.

55. Like the demonological works they sometimes illustrated, images of the witches and the sabbath reflected both popular and learned views of the relationship between witchcraft, the Devil, and the night. Representations of individual witches encountering the Devil or practicing maleficia were less often set at night; images of the witches’ dance or sabbath either indicate no time of day or are clearly nocturnal. Space does not permit a full review of the rich scholarship on the visual side of early modern witchcraft; see Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), and the literature cited there.

56. See Virginia Krause, “Confessional Fictions and Demonology in Renaissance France,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, 2 (2005): 327–48.

57. Heinrich von Schultheis, Eine Außführliche Instruction Wie in Inquisition Sachen des grewlichen Lasters der Zauberey gegen Die Zaubere der Göttlichen Majestät und der Christenheit Feinde ohn gefahr der Unschuldigen zu procediren … In Form eines freundlichen Gesprächs gestelt (Cologne: bey Hinrich Berchem, 1634).

58. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender, and Society, p. 258. Several of the eighty-four items in this Eichstätt interrogatory focus on the connection between sex and the night, for example “On what occasion did she come to know her spouse …? Whether they did not meet together at night and confer with each other alone [before marriage]?” (pp. 256–57, 259).

59. Richard van Dülmen, “Imaginationen des Teuflischen,” in Hexenwelten, ed. van Dülmen, pp. 94–130; here p. 102.

60. The confession is published with Jürgen Macha, Deutsche Kanzleisprache in Hexenverhörprotokollen der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005) on the enclosed CD-ROM, under “St. Maximin 1587.” For a nearly identical confession from Barbara Erbin of the Alpine village of Oberstdorf (home of Chonrad Stoeckhlin) in 1587, see Behringer, Shaman, pp. 107–08.

61. Elisabeth Biesel, “‘Die Pfeifer seint alle uff den baumen gesessen’: Hexensabbat in der Vorstellungswelt einer ländlichen Bevölkerung,” in Methoden und Konzepte der historischen Hexenforschung, ed. Eiden et al., pp. 298–302.

62. “Hat also gebondenn gestanden, vnndt bekendt, eß sei ein Schwartzer man hinder seinem hauß vur Zwolff Jahrn, Zwischent tag vnnd nachtt Zu Ime Kommenn, alß er Seiner hausfrauwen Langwirriger Krankheit halben beschwerdtt, vnnd bekummertt geweßen, derselb hab gesagt, solt nit so Zaghafftt sein, Die Sachenn wurden Zum besten Kommen, derselb hab Ime Zugemuutet, er soll gott Verlaugnenn, vnnd seiner Motter, vnnd Ime Zustendig sein, er habs aber nit gethann.” Macha, Hexenverhörprotokollen, enclosed CD-ROM, under “Trier 1591”.

63. John Linwood Pitts, Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands (Guernsey: Guille-Allès Library, 1886), pp. 33–51.

64. Macha, Hexenverhörprotokollen, enclosed CD-ROM, under “St. Maximin 1587.”

65. Pitts, Witchcraft, p. 22.

66. As Dülmen has in his “Imaginationen des Teuflischen.” See also Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre and Maxime Préaud, eds., Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe (XVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1993).

67. Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge University Press, 2006), II: 63. Daniel Ménager has observed that the Malleus “does not establish a relationship between the Sabbath and the night,” La renaissance et la nuit, p. 153, n. 5., challenging Jean Delumeau’s association of the witches’ sabbath with the night before the second half of the sixteenth century.

68. Institoris and Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Mackay, II: 45.

69. See Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 101–21.

70. Institoris and Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. and trans. Mackay, II: 248, 73–111. Even in this discussion of incubi and succubi, the traditional theme of nocturnal assault predominates over the sense of seduction in the night.

71. 2 Henry VI, 1.4.19–23. Fitter, “Poetic Nocturne,” refers to this same passage to illustrate a more general point about darkness and evil in early modern literature.

72. Current scholarship estimates that between 40,000 and 60,000 persons were executed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Merry E. Wiesner, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 1.

73. Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. Randy A. Scott with an Introduction by Jonathan L. Pearl, Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation 7 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), pp. 114–17.

74. Henry Boguet, Discours exécrable des sorciers: ensemble leur procez, faits depuis deux ans en ça, en divers endroicts de la France … Seconde édition (Paris: D. Binet, 1603), p. 168.

75. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1618), p. 243.

76. Behringer, Shaman, pp. 23–34.

77. Boguet, Discours exécrable des sorciers, p. 47.

78. Peter Binsfeld, Tractat von Bekanntnuss der Zauberer unnd Hexen, ed. Hiram Kümper (Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag, Schächter, 2004), p. 218.

79. Martin Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 269.

80. Nicolas Remy, Demonolatry, ed. Montague Summers, trans. E.A. Ashwin (London: J. Rodker, 1930), pp. 54–55.

81. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons: où il est amplement traité des sorciers et de la sorcellerie, ed. Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre (Paris: Aubier, 1982), p. 96.

82. Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 11–105. This logic was especially coherent for Protestants, who had largely eliminated regular night-time worship from their traditions. Christians forced by persecution to meet at night used their lived experience to refigure the association of nocturnal gatherings with evil; see below, chapter 3.

83. Bernard, Guide to grand-iury men, p. 263.

84. Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 134–35.

85. Pierre Le Loyer, Discours et histoires des spectres, visions et apparitions des esprits, anges, démons et ames, se monstrans visibles aux hommes: divisez en huict livres … par Pierre Le Loyer (Paris: Chez Nicolas Buon, 1605), p. 356: “La nuict & les tenebres sont par eux desirees & cherchees, & Satan leur Prince pour tiltres d’honneur s’appelle Prince des tenebres. C’est le temps où les hommes & leurs corps bien nourris dorment & reposent subjects aux embusches des Diables, enclins à leurs tentations, & faciles à esmouvoir aux sensualitez & defits de la chair.”

86. John Norden, A pensiue mans practise Very profitable for all personnes (London: Printed by Hugh Singleton, 1584), fo. 13.

87. Pierre Le Loyer, IIII. livres des spectres, ou apparitions et visions d’esprits, anges et démons se monstrans sensiblement aux hommes (Angers: G. Nepueu, 1586), p. 515.

88. The article by Lyndal Roper, “Witchcraft and the Western Imagination,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006): 117–41, opens with Ziarnko’s sabbath image and De Lancre’s treatise (pp. 117–19).

89. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauuais anges et démons, ou il est amplement traicté des sorciers & de la sorcellerie (Paris: Chez Iean Berjon, 1612), engraving by Jan Ziarnko facing title page, legend “A”. The accused sometimes tried to avoid naming other suspects by claiming it was too dark at the sabbath to recognize anyone else: see van Dülmen, “Imaginationen des Teuflischen,” pp. 114–15.

90. See Labouvie, “Hexenspuk und Hexenabwehr,” p. 87, on printed and popular representations of the sabbath.

91. Teresa of Avila, The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus, 3 vols., trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972–75), I: 215–16.

92. Nashe, Terrors of the Night, p. 146.

93. Jean-Pierre Camus, A Draught of Eternity, trans. Miles Carr (Douai: By the widowe of Marke Wyon, at the signe of the Phnix, 1632), pp. 100–01.

94. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005), pp. 10, 192; I.61–63, VI.380.

95. Kastan, ed., Doctor Faustus, p. 17; 1.3.76–80 (A-text).

3 Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530–1650

1. Maria Rzepinska, “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Background,” Artibus et Historiae 13, 7 (1986): 91–112. See also Paulette Choné, L’Atelier des nuits. Histoire et signification du nocturne dans l’art d’Occident (Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1992), and Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, “Braunlicht und Seelenfunke – Das Nachtstück zur Zeit der Gegenreformation,” in Die Nacht, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster, Christoph Vitali, and Ilse von Zur Mühlen (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1998), pp. 83–94.

2. Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” p. 92.

3. Chris Fitter, “The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre,” Early Modern Literary Studies 3, 2 (1997): paragraphs 1, 62. Online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/03–2/fittnoct.html.

4. Edward Reynolds, An explication of the hundreth and tenth Psalme … Being the substance of severall sermons preached at Lincolns Inne (London: Imprinted by Felix Kyngston for Robert Bostocke, 1632), p. 371 (original emphasis).

5. Carl Krause, Euricius Cordus: Eine biographische Skizze aus der Reformationszeit (Hanau: König, 1863), p. 92; Ulman Weiss, “Nicodemus Martyr – ein unbekanntes Pseudonym Sebastian Francks?” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 85 (1994): 163–79, 167; Frederik Casparus Wieder, De Schriftuurlijke liedekens, de liederen der Nederlandsche hervormden tot op het jaar 1566 (’s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1900), pp. 53–54.

6. Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 75, 102–20; D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–), XLVII: 1–28.

7. See Stefania Tutino, “Between Nicodemism and ‘Honest’ Dissimulation: The Society of Jesus in England,” Historical Research 79, 206 (2006): 534–53; Nikki Shepardson, “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Anti-Nicodemite Discourses in France, 1550–1570,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme 27, 3 (2003): 37–61; John S. Oyer, “Nicodemites among Württemberg Anabaptists,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 71, 4 (1997): 487–514, and the literature cited there.

8. The name “Huguenot” itself, in use by about 1552, was associated with worship at night. Beza reported that “At Tours there was a superstitious belief that the ghost of Hugh Capet roamed through the city at night. As the Protestants held their meetings in the night, they were derisively called Huguenots, as if they were the troop of King Hugh.” George Park Fisher, The Reformation (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1906), p. 227. See also Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 143.

9. See Charles L. Kuhn, “The Mairhauser Epitaph: An Example of Late Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Iconography,” Art Bulletin 58, 4 (1976): 542–46.

10. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 21.

11. John Foxe, Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church … from the primitiue age to these latter tymes of ours, with the bloudy times, horrible troubles, and great persecutions agaynst the true martyrs of Christ, sought and wrought as well by heathen emperours, as nowe lately practised by Romish prelates, especially in this realme of England and Scotland. Newly reuised and recognised, partly also augmented, and now the fourth time agayne published, 2 vols. (London: Imprinted by Iohn Daye, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate beneath S. Martins, 1583), pp. 2075–76. See J.W. Martin, “The Protestant Underground Congregations of Mary’s Reign,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, 4 (1984): 522–23.

12. Théodore de Bèze, Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées au royaume de France, ed. G. Baum and Eduard Cunitz (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1883), I: 345. For evidence of Reformed services at night in Paris in 1557, see Barbara Diefendorf, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009), pp. 48–56. On the massacre as nocturnal state violence, see Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 148.

13. John Strype (1643–1737), The Life and Acts of John Whitgift … Digested, Compiled, and Attested from Records, Registers, Original Letters and Other Authentic Mss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), I: 165–66.

14. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 372–80; for more examples, see Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher, eds., Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St. Edmunds, 1582–1590, Church of England Record Society 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), p. 218.

15. Thomas Jackson (1579–1640), The humiliation of the Sonne of God by his becomming the Son of man, by taking the forme of a servant, and by his sufferings under Pontius Pilat … by Thomas Jackson Dr. in Divinitie, chaplaine to his Majestie in ordinarie, and president of Corpus Christi Colledge in Oxford (London: Printed by M. Flesher for John Clark, 1635), p. 355.

16. On the most recent scholarship, see R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Radicals,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. David M. Whitford (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 103–10.

17. Anabaptists first settled in Moravia in the 1530s. By 1545 there were thirty-one Hutterite communities on noble estates there. After decades of pressure from Habsburg supporters of the Catholic Reformation, the last Anabaptists were driven out of Moravia in 1622; most resettled in Hungary. See Claus Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 211–13.

18. For an example of Anabaptists arrested at an afternoon gathering (“nachmittage umb iii slege”) in 1535, see Paul Wappler, Die Täuferbewegung in Thüringen von 1526–1584 (Jena: Fischer, 1913), p. 128.

19. A survey of published primary sources reveals thirty-four specific documented gatherings by night in the period before 1618, as well as references to other specific meetings and to regular meetings at night. These must represent only a fraction of the total number of Anabaptists’ nocturnal gatherings.

20. Stephen F. Nelson and Jean Rott, “Strasbourg: The Anabaptist City in the Sixteenth Century,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 58 (1984): 230–40.

21. See the list in Jean Rott and Marc Lienhard, “La communauté de ‘frères suisses’ de Strasbourg de 1557 à 1660,” Saisons d’Alsace 76 (1981): 30.

22. Ibid., p. 32.

23. Elsa Bernhofer-Pippert, Täuferische Denkweisen und Lebensformen im Spiegel oberdeutscher Täuferverhöre, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 96 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1967), pp. 90–92.

24. Günther Franz, ed., Wiedertäuferakten, 1527–1626, Urkundliche Quellen zur hessischen Reformationsgeschichte 4 (Marburg: Elwert, 1951), p. 178.

25. The sermon on Revelation 11 might have stressed the measuring of the temple of God and its altar (Rev. 11:1) or the prophets identified as “two candlesticks [or torches] standing before the God of the earth” (Rev. 11:4).

26. On this theme see Bernhofer-Pippert, Täuferische Denkweisen, pp. 38, 56, 98.

27. Abraham Hulshof, Gescheidenis van de Doopsgezinden te Straatsburg van 1525 tot 1557 (Amsterdam: Clausen, 1905); for the Steinle account see pp. 208–11 (my emphasis).

28. In 1600 the church council of the Palatinate noted the mocking tone of Anabaptist Niclaus Weitzel in a report on the growth of the movement in the principality: “When they [the Anabaptists] are told to go to church, they say they have a vast church; it has a great roof, and that is where they go.” Acknowledging this reference to the outdoor, typically nocturnal gatherings of the Anabaptists, the council remarked with resignation that “they too have their nocturnal assemblies in the area around Erpolzheim.” Manfred Krebs, ed., Baden und Pfalz, Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer 4 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1951), p. 233.

29. In his “Dialog on Drunkenness” (1551) the Colmar poet Jörg Wickram explained that “the custom of Anabaptists is to meet in dark forests in old abandoned shacks.” See Jörg Wickram, Sämtliche Werke, vol. X, Kleine Spiele, ed. Hans-Gert Roloff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), p. 285.

30. Gary K. Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525–1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 67.

31. The title of the Dutch edition of 1576; printed as “Reply to False Accusations,” in Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, trans. Leonard Verduin, ed. John C. Wenger, with a bibliography by Harold S. Bender (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956), pp. 541–77; here pp. 566–67.

32. Ibid.

33. Despite the rifts between Dutch–North German Mennonites and Swiss Anabaptism, shared persecution led to similar arguments, seen for example in a Swiss confession of 1588, the “Einfache Bekenntnis” of an unknown representative of the rural Zurich Anabaptist community. The confession explained that “we do our best [to gather] with thanks and praise in the forests, in stables or other places, wherever God gives us space and place.” When “the clear and pure truth … is neither heard nor accepted, but persecuted instead” then the “pious servants of Christ … shall preserve themselves from the persecutors and their enemies with caution and humility.” Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger, Die Zürcher Täufer 1525–1700 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich,2007), Appendix, p. 381: “sonder werden sich nach maß und bescheidenheit vor den vervolgeren und iren fynden hütten.”

34. Hessian authorities discovered to their dismay that both Swiss Brethren and Moravians were meeting secretly at night in Hesse; Nolte attended a gathering of the Swiss Brethren. See Theodor Sippel, “The Confession of the Swiss Brethren in Hesse, 1578,”Mennonite Quarterly Review 23 (1949): 22–34.

35. Ibid., p. 23, and Franz, ed., Wiedertaüferakten, p. 400. See David Mayes, “Heretics or Nonconformists? State Policies toward Anabaptists in Sixteenth-Century Hesse,” Sixteenth Century Journal 32, 4 (2001): 1003–26.

36. See Heinold Fast, “Die Aushebung einer nächtlichen Täuferversammlung 1574,” Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 31 (1974): 103–06.

37. The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren (Das große Geschichtbuch der Hutterischen Brüder) (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House, 1987), I: 223–24. The entries discussed here were written between 1542 and c. 1580 by Hans Kräl and Hauprecht Zapf (p. xv).

38. Ibid., I: 398–401.

39. Ibid., I: 373.

40. “Schleitheim Articles/Brotherly Union (1527),” trans. Cornelius J. Dyck et al., in Confessions of Faith in the Anabaptist Tradition, 1527–1660, ed. with an Introduction by Karl Koop, Classics of the Radical Reformation 11 (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2006), p. 28.

41. John D. Derksen sees 1540 as a turning point in nonconformist and Anabaptist culture in the Strasbourg region, citing “a more ‘survivalist’ world view among “settled nonconformists.” Their nocturnal meetings arose as “the radicals’ physical circumstances … affected their worldview.” “After 1535, with defeat, dislocation, numerical decrease and socioeconomic decline, the dissidents’ goal became more to survive than to change the world.” This corresponds to the shift from a stark “light against darkness” view to a more nuanced appreciation of the night. John D. Derksen, From Radicals to Survivors: Strasbourg’s Religious Nonconformists over Two Generations, Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica 61 (’t Goy-Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2002), pp. 255–57.

42. For a detailed account of John’s escape see Crisógono de Jesús, The Life of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kathleen Pond (London: Longmans, 1958), pp. 108–13.

43. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1964), p. 413 (book 2, ch. 13).

44. See Alois M. Haas, “‘Die dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes.’ Mystische Leiderfahrung nach Johannes vom Kreuz,” in Die dunkle Nacht der Sinne: Leiderfahrung und christliche Mystik, ed. Alois M Haas (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1989), pp. 108–25, here p. 109, and the extensive literature cited there.

45. Such as Ruud Welten, “The Night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry,” Studies in Spirituality 13 (2003), pp. 213–16.

46. Michel Florisoone, Esthétique et mystique d’après Sainte Thérèse d’Avila et Saint Jean de la Croix: suivi d’une note sur Saint Jean de la Croix et le Greco et d’une liste commentée des oeuvres de Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1956), pp. 24–30.

47. John of the Cross, Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, pp. 425–26: “I entered in – I knew not where – / And, there remaining, knew no more, / Transcending far all human lore.”

48. See Haas, “‘Dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes’,” p. 113; George H. Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation in St. John of the Cross (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), pp. 76–79; Laura Calvert, “Images of Darkness and Light in Osuna’s Spiritual Alphabet Books,” Studia Mystica 8, 2 (1985) 38–44; and Giovanna Della Croce, “Johannes vom Kreuz und die deutsch-niederländische Mystik,” Jahrbuch für mystische Theologie 6 (1960): 21–30.

49. Kieran Kavanaugh, “Introduction,” in John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 33.

50. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, p. 325.

51. Ibid., pp. 325–26.

52. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, pp. 20–21.

53. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, pp. 349–61.

54. Ibid., pp. 349, 376–96.

55. Haas, “‘Dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes’,” pp. 113–24.

56. Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique, second edn. (Paris: Alcan, 1931), p. 300.

57. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 43–68; on Clark’s discussion of witchcraft see above, chapter 2. See Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation, pp. 76–78.

58. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, pp. 58–60, and Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation, pp. 64–68, 75–92.

59. High medieval authors did not use the imagery of darkness and the night to express spiritual truth. For example, Anselm of Canterbury grappled with the sense of Divine withdrawal described by John as “the dark night of the soul.” But Anselm had no sense of a purgative or beneficial Divine absence or night. For Anselm, images of darkness help to convey the problem (“Still thou art hidden, O Lord, from my soul in thy light and thy blessedness; and therefore my soul still walks in its darkness and wretchedness”) but not the solution, which Anselm describes as the soul’s return to the light of God. As a contemporary Benedictine scholar explains, “the seeming separation that constitutes that state [i.e., the ‘dark night’] cannot be instigated by perfect God, only by fallible humanity.” See Paschal Baumstein, “Anselm on the Dark Night and Truth,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 35, 2 (2000): 239–49; here 244.

60. On the reception of John Baconthorpe, John Tauler, and Jan van Ruysbroeck by John of the Cross, see Alois Winkelhofer, “Johannes vom Kreuz und die Surius-Übersetzung der Werke Taulers,” in Theologie in Geschichte und Gegenwart; Michael Schmaus zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Johann Auer and Hermann Volk (Munich: K. Zink, 1957), pp. 317–48; here pp. 317–23.

61. Elizabeth Wilhelmsen, Knowledge and Symbolization in Saint John of the Cross (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993), pp. 15–34; Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation, p. 77.

62. Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation, pp. 76–79.

63. 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: Frommann, 1955–61). References are by volume and page of the facsimile edition and by book, chapter, and section of the 1730 edition. Böhme, Christosophia, oder Der Weg zu Christo, IV: 167, book 6 (“Von Göttlicher Beschaulichkeit” [“On the visibility of God”]), ch. 1, §8: “Kein Ding ohne Wiederwärtigkeit mag ihme selber offenbar werden …”

64. Böhme, Mysterium Magnum, VII: 45, ch. 8, §27. See also Mysterium Magnum, VII: 25, ch. 5, §7: “Die Finsterniß ist die gröste Feindschaft des Lichts, und ist doch die Ursach, daß das Licht offenbar werde. Denn so kein Schwartzes wäre, so möchte ihme das Weisse nicht offenbar seyn; und wenn kein Leid wäre, so wäre ihr die Freude auch nicht offenbar.”

65. Böhme, Mysterium Magnum, VII: 45, ch. 8, §27 and VII: 66, ch. 10, §62: “in der Finsterniß wird das Licht erkant, sonst wäre es ihme nicht offenbar,” and “das Böseste muß das Beste Ursache seyn.”

66. Bernhard Pünjer, Geschichte der christlichen Religions-philosophie seit der Reformation (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke, 1880), p. 195; Peter Sterry, The commings [sic] forth of Christ in the power of his death. Opened in a sermon preached before the High Court of Parliament, on Thursday the first of Novem. 1649 (London: Printed by Charles Sumptner, for Thomas Brewster and Gregory Moule, 1650 [i.e., 1649]), fo. aa1r.

67. Böhme, Quaestiones Theosophicae, oder Betrachtung Göttlicher Offenbarung, IX: 6–7, “Die 3. Frage,” §§2–3.

68. Ibid., §3.

69. Ernst-Heinz Lemper, “Voraussetzungen zur Beurteilung des Erfahrungs- und Schaffensumfelds Jakob Böhmes,” in Gott, Natur und Mensch in der Sicht Jacob Böhmes und seiner Rezeption, ed. Jan Garewicz and Alois M. Haas, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 24 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), pp. 41–69; here pp. 57–61.

70. Christoph Geissmar, “The Geometrical Order of the World: Otto van Veen’s Physicae et theologicae conclusiones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 168–82, here 180–81: “Setze den Grimm zur Lincken, und das Licht zur Rechten …; dann anderst kann mans nicht mahlen; aber es ist eine Kugel.” See Böhme, Viertzig Fragen von der Seelen, III: 31, Frage 1, §105.

71. For those who preceded and influenced Böhme on the themes of light, darkness, immanence, and contrariety, see Andrew Weeks, Boehme. An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991); Lemper, “Voraussetzungen,” in Gott, Natur und Mensch, ed. Garewicz and Haas; Günther Bonheim, “ward Jch dero wegen Gantz Melancolisch. Jacob Böhmes Heidnische gedancken bei Betrachtung des Himmels und die Astronomie seiner Zeit,” Euphorion 91 (1997): 99–132; Sibylle Rusterholz, “Jacob Böhmes Deutung des Bösen im Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Innovation,” in Contemplata aliis tradere. Studien zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Spiritualität, ed. Claudia Brinker (Berne: Lang,1995), pp. 225–40; Livia Datteri Rasmussen, “Jacob Böhme: doch ein Beispiel für den ‘heliozentrischen Chok’? Zur Interaktion von Naturwissenschaft, Theologie, Mystik und Literatur in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Morgen-Glantz: Zeitschrift der Christian Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft 3 (1993): 189–205; Russell Hvolbek, “Being and Knowing: Spiritualist Epistemology and Anthropology from Schwenckfeld to Böhme,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 97–110; Herbert Deinert, “Die Entfaltung des Bösen in BöhmesMysterium Magnum,” PMLA 79, 4 (1964): 401–10; and Kurt Goldammer, “Lichtsymbolik in philosophischer Weltanschauung, Mystik und Theosophie vom 15. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert,” Studium Generale 13 (1960): 670–82, and Josef Koch, “Über die Lichtsymbolik im Bereich der Philosophie und der Mystik des Mittelalters,” Studium Generale 13 (1960): 653–70.

72. Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröthe im Aufgang, I: 376–77, ch. 25, §61; Weeks, Boehme, p. 54.

73. Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröthe im Aufgang, I: 265, ch. 19, §§4–5.

74. See Sibylle Rusterholz, “Jakob Böhmes spirituelle Erfahrung als ‘Grund’ seiner schriftstellerischen Existenz,” in Die Morgenröte bricht an: Jakob Böhme, naturnaher Mystiker und Theosoph, Herrenalber Forum 24 (Karlsruhe: Evangelische Akademie Baden,1999), pp. 100–20, and Bonheim, “Böhmes Heidnische gedancken,” pp. 99–132.

75. The legacy of Giordano Bruno’s De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584) also figured in these concerns.

76. Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröthe im Aufgang, I: 266, ch. 19, §§8–9.

77. John Donne, “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World,” in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Donald R. Dickson, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 125–26.

78. See Andreas Mahler, “Jahrhundertwende, Epochenschwelle, epistemischer Bruch? England um 1600 und das Problem überkommener Epochenbegriffe,” in Europäische Barock-Rezeption, ed. Klaus Garber, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 20 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), II: 1008.

79. Böhme, Aurora oder Morgenröthe im Aufgang, I: 266–67, ch. 19 (“Von dem erschaffenen Himmel und der Gestalt der Erden und des Wassers, sowol von dem Lichte und der Finsterniß”), §§10–14.

80. Genesis 32:35: “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”

81. See Rusterholz, “Jacob Böhmes Deutung des Bösen,” in Contemplata aliis tradere, ed. Brinker, pp. 236–27, on darkness as an eternal aspect of the Divine.

82. Weeks, Boehme, pp. 93–98.

83. Ibid., p. 97.

84. Böhme, Mysterium Magnum, VIII: 745, ch. 68, §6: “As at this very day titulary Christendom is full of such magi as have no natural understanding, either of God or of nature more among them, but only an empty babbling of a supernatural magic ground … that indeed titulary Christendom’s idols which it maketh to itself might, through nature, be made manifest and known, that man might know in nature the outspoken or expressed formed Word of God, as also the new regeneration, and also the fall and perdition.”

85. Ibid. On Böhme’s critique of the “Belly-Servants of the Antichrist,” which he saw in all churches of his age, see Weeks, Boehme, pp. 97–98, and G. Haensch, “Gesellschaftskritik und Reformationsidee in der Philosophie Jakob Böhmes,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36, 1 (1988): 66–72.

86. Böhme, Mysterium Magnum, VIII: 746, ch. 68, §7.

87. Jacob Böhme, Signatura rerum, or, The signature of all things shewing the sign and signification of the severall forms and shapes in the creation, and what the beginning, ruin, and cure of every thing is, trans. John Ellistone (London: Printed by John Macock for Gyles Calvert, 1651), p. 53, and Böhme, De Signatura Rerum, VI: 67, ch. 7, §43.

88. Donne was the first to use “nocturnal” as a noun to refer to a poem about the night in his “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” See Fitter, “Poetic Nocturne,” paragraphs 24–28, and Clarence H. Miller, “Donne’s ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’ and the Nocturns of Matins,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, 1 [The English Renaissance] (1966): 77–86.

89. Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” p. 93. Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1995) focuses on this period as marked by the formation and decline of mystics as a discourse. His survey of mysticism from Teresa of Avila to Angelus Silesius opens and closes with authors who used darkness and the night to describe their path to the divine. See pp. 16–26, 75–150.

90. Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 77. See also Michael Kapeller, Auch Finsternis finstert dir nicht: ein Versuch über die Nacht des Glaubens und die Reflexion dieser Erfahrung in der Dogmatik, Theologie der Spiritualität 7 (Münster: Lit, 2004), pp. 94–95.

91. Maximilianus Sandaeus, Pro theologia mystica clavis: elucidarium onomasticon vocabulorum et loquutionum obscurarum (Louvain: Éditions de la Bibliotheque S.J., 1963; facsimile of Cologne: Officina Gualteriana, 1640), pp. 288–89.

92. “Nox. Multa apud Mysticos indicari possunt metaphora Noctis, qua frequentissimè utitur Iohannes à Cruce, excellens nostri temporis Mysticus, cuius sunt Libri de Asensu Montis Carmeli.” Ibid., “Index Vocabulorum.”

93. Richard Crashaw, The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 45.

94. Mary W. Helms, “Before the Dawn: Monks and the Night in Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Europe,” Anthropos 99 (2004): 177–91.

95. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of S. Ignatius of Loyola. Founder of the Society of Jesus (Saint-Omers: Printed by Nicolas Joseph Le Febvre, 1736), p. 22. The deliberate use of darkness was integral to Jesuit culture in this period. See below,chapter 4, section 4.2, “Darkness and the perspective stage.”

96. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, in The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus, ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972), II: 210, 218; Joseph Chorpenning, “The Image of Darkness and Spiritual Development in the Castillo interior,”Studia Mystica 8, 2 (1985): 45–58.

97. John Donne, “A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany” (1619), in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Dickson, pp. 154–55. See Jeffrey Johnson, “Gold in the Washes: Donne’s Last Going into Germany,” Renascence 46, 3 (1994): 199–207. For similar comments by Luther and Calvin, see Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et la nuit, Seuils de la modernité 10 (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 164–65, although these sixteenth-century Protestants describe the spiritual night in more passive terms, in contrast with Catholic baroque references to actively seeking or creating darkness and the night for spiritual benefit.

98. Note that the sermon was preached “in the evening.” John Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 629.

99. Ibid., p. 585.

100. Francis Quarles, Emblemes by Fra. Quarles (London: Printed by G[eorge] M[iller] and sold at Iohn Marriots shope, 1635), p. 131.

101. Paul Gerhardt, “Abend-Lied,” in Gedichte des Barock, ed. Ulrich Maché and Volker Meid (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), pp. 174–75:

Nun ruhen alle Wälder /

Vieh / Menschen / Städt und Felder /

Es schläfft die gantze Welt:Ihr aber meine Sinnen /

Auf / auf ihr solt beginnen

Was eurem Schöppfer wol gefällt.

See Martha Mayo Hinman, “The Night Motif in German Baroque Poetry,” Germanic Review 42, 3 (1967): 83–95.

102. Gerhardt, “Abend-Lied,” p. 175. Almost as an afterthought, Gerhard offers in the penultimate stanza a more traditional prayer for protection from “Satan.”

103. See Stuart McClintock, The Iconography and Iconology of Georges De La Tour’s Religious Paintings, 1624–1650, Studies in Art and Religious Interpretation 31 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), and Paulette Choné, ed., L’âge d’or du nocturne(Paris: Gallimard, 2001).

104. Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, c. 1638–40. Painting, oil on canvas, 46 1/16 × 36 1/8 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

105. See Choné, L’Atelier des nuits, and her articles on “La lanterne et le flambeau,” in Georges de La Tour, ou, La nuit traversée, ed. Anne Reinbold (Metz: Éditions Serpenoise, 1994), pp. 145–58, and on “Exégèse de la ténèbre et luminisme nocturne: les ‘nuits’ lorraines et leur contexte spirituel,” in Les signes de Dieu aux XVIe et XVII siècles, ed. Geneviève Demerson and Bernard Dompnier (Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1993), pp. 89–99.

106. Dorothy L. Latz, ed., Glow-Worm Light: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 92: 21 (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989), p. 70.

107. Donne’s maternal grandfather John Heywood died a recusant in Flanders in 1578.

108. Latz, ed., Glow-Worm Light, p. 142.

109. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), p. 225. In this passage Pascal balanced darkness with the traditional value of light: “if there were no illumination, man would not hope for a remedy.”

110. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, p. 69.

111. Ibid., p. 92.

112. George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 191. The poem was composed before 1633.

113. Claude Hopil, Les divins eslancemens d’amour exprimez en cent cantiques saints en l’honneur de la Tres-saincte Trinité (Paris: S. Hure, 1629). For an introduction to Hopil, see François Bouchet, “Claude Hopil ou l’éclat des ténèbres,” Conférence 1 (1995): 155–91.

114. Translated from the modern edition: Claude Hopil, Les divins élancements d’amour, ed. F. Bouchet (Grenoble: Millon, 2001), canticle 41, 4. See Werner Indermühle, Essai sur l’oeuvre de Claude Hopil (Zurich: Juris-Verlag, 1970), pp. 21–31.

115. Hopil, Divins élancements, canticle 74, 1:

Mon Esprit s’eslevant aux cachots magnifiques

Dans le rayon divin des tenebres mistiques,

Tout confus & ravy,

Je vy ce qu’on ne peut penser ny moins escrire,

Ainsi je vous du tout en ne pouvant rien dire:De tout ce que je vy.

116. Ibid., canticle 31, 10.

117. Ibid., canticle 96, 3.

118. Ibid., canticle 54, 8. Hopil describes prayer at night in canticles 49, 54, 72, 74, 75, 89, and 91.

119. Dorothy S. Packer, “Collections of Chaste Chansons for the Devout Home (1613–1633),” Acta Musicologica 16, 2 (1989): 175–216, here 178. In contrast with John of the Cross, Hopil scarcely mentions the ascetic night. The painful passages through the darkness of the senses and spirit central to John’s encounter with the night seem to play no role in Hopil’s mysticism.

120. Andreas Gryphius, “Über die Geburt Jesu,” in Gedichte des Barock, ed. Maché and Meid, p. 113:

Nacht / mehr denn lichte Nacht! Nacht / lichter als der Tag /

Nacht / heller als die Sonn’ / in der das Licht geboren.

…

O Nacht, die alle Nächt’ und Tage trotzen mag!

See Vereni Fässler, Hell-Dunkel in der barocken Dichtung. Studien zum Hell-Dunkel bei Johann Klaj, Andreas Gryphius und Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. Europäische Hochschulschriften 44 (Berne: Lang, 1971), pp. 47–68.

121. Latz, ed., Glow-Worm Light, p. 81.

122. Blaise de Vigenère, A discovery of fire and salt discovering many secret mysteries, as well philosophicall, as theologicall, trans. Edward Stephens (London: Printed by Richard Cotes, and are to be sold by Andrew Crooke, 1649), p. 24. First edn. (posthumous), Paris, 1618.

123. Blaise de Vigenère, Traicté du feu et du sel (Paris: Chez la veufue A. l’Angelier, 1618), p. 38.

124. Graeme J. Watson makes a similar point in his “The Temple in ‘The Night’: Henry Vaughan and the Collapse of the Established Church,” Modern Philology 84, 2 (1986): 144–61, in reference to the Cudamore illustration.

125. Daniel Cudmore, Euchodia. Or, A prayer-song; being sacred poems on the history of the birth and passion of our blessed Saviour, and several other choice texts of Scripture (London: Printed by J.C. for William Ley in Paul’s Chain, 1655). Note that the reference to “Iohn 20. 5” in the frontispiece corresponds to John 19:5 (“Behold the man”) in modern editions of the text.

126. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), p. 50; II.263–68.

127. William Flesch, “The Majesty of Darkness,” in John Milton, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 293–311.

128. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Kastan and Hughes, p. 94; III.375–80.

129. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in Complete Works, trans. and ed. Peers, p. 396.

130. Ibid., pp. 419–20.

131. In the seventeenth-century English translation: Dorothy L. Latz, ed., The Building of Divine Love, As Translated by Agnes More, Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 92: 17 (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1992), pp. 48, 81.

132. For example, John’s works were used extensively by the influential Francisan spritual writer Juan de Los Angeles (d. 1609). See Irene Behn, Spanische Mystik: Darstellung und Deutung (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1957), pp. 160–68.

133. Johann Arndt, Vier Bücher von wahrem Christenthumb: die erste Gesamtausgabe (1610), ed. Johann Anselm Steiger, Johann Arndt-Archiv 2 (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2007), book 3, pp. 48–49.

134. Hopil, Divins élancements, canticles 74, 1 and 75, 1.

135. Ibid., canticles 66, 11 and 86, 1.

136. Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” pp. 97–100.

137. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), pp. 71–72.

138. On subjectivity see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 3–5, 47–59, Gen Doy, Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture(London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 35–62, Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–36.

139. Daniel Drovin, Les Vengeances divines, de la transgression des sainctes ordonnances de Dieu (Paris: J. Mettayer, 1595), fos. 108v–109r (= 189v–190r), as quoted in Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 137, and Louis LeRoy, Of the interchangeable course, or variety of things in the whole world and the concurrence of armes and learning … Written in French by Loys le Roy called Regius: and translated into English by R.A. (London: Printed by Charles Yetsweirt, 1594), as quoted in Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 55.

140. Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, seigneur (1544–90), La Semaine (1578); complete English translation by Joshua Sylvester, Devine Weekes and Workes (1605), here from the 1621 edition (London: Printed by Humphray Lownes, 1621), p. 12. See Michel Braspart, ed., Du Bartas, poète chrétien (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1947), p. 86.

141. Rainer Decker, “Der Brillen-Traktat des Michael Stappert,” Introduction to Hermann Löher, Hochnötige Unterthanige WEMÜTIGE KLAGE der Frommen Unschültigen (Amsterdam, 1676), ed. Thomas P. Becker, online at http://extern.historicum.net/loeher.

142. Lambert Daneau, The wonderfull woorkmanship of the world wherin is conteined an excellent discourse of Christian naturall philosophie, trans. Thomas Twyne (London: for Andrew Maunsell, in Paules Church-yard, 1578).

143. Daniel Czepko, “Jedes durchs andere,” in Geistliche Schriften, ed. Werner Milch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), p. 224. See Hinman, “Night Motif in German Baroque Poetry,” p. 87.

144. Henry Vaughan, “The Night,” in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L.C. Martin, second edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 522–23. On Vaughan’s sense of persecution in the Commonwealth era, see Watson, “Henry Vaughan and the Collapse of the Established Church,” pp. 144–61, and Geoffrey Hill, “A Pharisee to Pharisees: Reflections on Vaughan’s ‘The Night’,” English 38 (1989): 97–113. As Hill notes, Vaughan refers to “these times of persecution and trial” in The Mount of Olives (1652), and in his 1654Flores Solitudinis the poet explains that “there are bright stars under the most palpable clouds, and light is never so beautiful as in the presence of darkness.”

145. Rzepinska, “Tenebrism,” p. 93. Historians of art and philosophy have described this development in painting, astronomy, and optics, and in hermetic and alchemical thought. Goldammer’s “Lichtsymbolik in philosophischer Weltanschauung” describes especially clearly the wholly negative view of darkness in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century thinkers from Ficino and Paracelsus to Valentin Weigel.

146. Catholics also developed popular forms of nocturnal piety in this period, most prominently the Devotion of the Forty Hours, which spread from its origins in Milan through Italy and France, and the evening Good Friday processions of southern Germany and the Rhineland. See below, chapter 7, for further discussion of these literal incursions into the night, urban and rural. On the importance of darkness and the night to these practices, see Mark S. Weil, “The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman Baroque Illusions,”Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): pp. 218–48; Bernard Dompnier, “Un Aspect de la dévotion Eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les Prières des Quarante-Heures,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 67 (1981): 5–31; and Fred G. Rausch, “Karfreitagsprozessionen in Bayern,” in Hört, sehet, weint und liebt: Passionsspiele im alpenländischen Raum, ed. Michael Henker, Eberhard Dünninger, and Evamaria Brockhoff, Veröffentlichungen zur bayerischen Geschichte und Kultur 20 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1990), pp. 87–93, and the literature cited there.

4 Princes of darkness: The night at court, 1600–1750

1. Norris’s first publication was a crude anti-Whig burlesque, A Murnival of Knaves, published in June 1683. See George R. Wasserman, “A Critical Edition of the Collected Poems of John Norris of Bemerton”, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1957, pp. 1–27.

2. John Norris of Bemerton, “Hymn to Darkness,” in A Collection of Miscellanies (Oxford: J. Crosley, 1687), pp. 37–38.

3. Chris Fitter, “The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre,” Early Modern Literary Studies 3, 2 (1997): 2.1–61. Online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/03–2/fittnoct.html. Fitter outlines the development of the poetic nocturne through Milton, distinguishing between “Cavalier” and “sacred” approaches within the genre, but he does not go on to examine its political inflection by Norris.

4. Here Norris echoed a poem by John Walton of 1678: “So the first Light himself has for his Throne / Blackness, and Darkness his Pavilion.” I. W. [i.e., John Walton], “To my worthy friend, Mr. Henry Vaughan the Silurist” (1678), in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L.C. Martin, second edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 620. The use of darkness to emphasize majesty contrasts clearly with an earlier emphasis on darkness as concealing authority and hierarchy – seen for example when Shakespeare’s Henry V walks unrecognized among his troops the night before battle of Agincourt (act 4, scene 1). See Raymond Gardette, “Ténèbres lumineuses: quelques repères shakespeariens,” in Penser la nuit: XVe–XVIIe siècles, ed. Dominique Bertrand, Colloques, Congrès et Conférences sur la Renaissance 35 (Paris: H. Champion, 2003), pp. 343–65.

5. Norris, “Hymn to Darkness,” in Collection, p. 38.

6. Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman, “Guide to the programs on ‘Culture and Authority in the Baroque’” held at the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, UCLA, 2000–01.

7. Ibid. See Maria Goloubeva’s overview of the scholarship on the baroque as style and culture in The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle, and Text, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 184 (Mainz: von Zabern,2000), pp. 15–21, and the literature cited there.

8. Jesuit culture played an important role in the use of darkness to intensify Christian imagery and devotion. The application of Ignatian spirituality to baroque theater was promoted by seventeenth-century Jesuits such as Emanuele Tesauro of Turin: see Sebastian Neumeister, “Tante belle inuentioni di Feste, Giostre, Balletti e Mascherate: Emmanule Tesauro und die barocke Festkultur,” in Theatrum Europaeum: Festschrift für Elida Maria Szarota, ed. Richard Brinkmann et al. (Munich: W. Fink, 1982), pp. 153–68.

9. On the Ballet de la Nuit see Marie-Claude Canova-Green, “Le Ballet de cour en France,” in Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580–1750), ed. Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 31 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), pp. 485–512; Dominik Keller, “Unter dem Zeichen der Sonne,” in Die schöne Kunst der Verschwendung, ed. Georg Kohler and Alice Villon-Lechner (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1988), pp. 57–58, and Kathryn A. Hoffmann,Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power during the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 13–40.

10. See Marianne Closson, “Scénographiques nocturnes du baroque: l’exemple du ballet français (1580–1650),” in Penser la nuit, ed. Bertrand, pp. 425–47; Ian Dunlop, Louis XIV (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), p. 31; and Isaac de Benserade, Ballets pour Louis XIV, ed. Marie-Claude Canova-Green (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 1997), I: 7–35, 91–160.

11. Benserade, Ballets pour Louis XIV, ed. Canova-Green, I: 94.

12. See Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, “From ‘Société de plaisir’ to ‘Schönes Neben-Werck’ – The Changing Purpose of Court Festivals,” German Life and Letters 45, 3 (1992): 216–19.

13. This is discussed most clearly in Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984), p. 4, and Karl Möseneder, Zeremoniell und monumentale Poesie: die “Entrée solennelle” Ludwigs XIV. 1660 in Paris(Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1983), pp. 34–43.

14. “Cette société de plaisirs, qui donne aux personnes de la cour une honnête familiarité avec nous, les touche et les charme plus qu’on peut dire. Les peuples, d’un autre côté, se plaisent au spectacle,” as quoted in Hoffmann, Society of Pleasures, pp. 13, 30, 173–74.

15. Möseneder, Zeremoniell, p. 36.

16. From a contemporary English translation: Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, trans. William Jones (London: Richard Field, 1594), pp. 68–70.

17. Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Garnier, 1962), pp. 275f. See also the comments of Gabriel Naudé (1639) on “seduction and deception by appearances,” as cited in Möseneder, Zeremoniell, p. 36.

18. Michel de Puré (1634–80), Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris, 1668, repr. Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1972), pp. 161–318, and Claude-François Ménestrier (1631–1705), Traité des tournois, joustes, carrousels et autres spectacles publics(Lyon,1669; repr. New York: Garland, 1979).

19. See the valuable study by Milo Vec, Zeremonialwissenschaft im Fürstenstaat. Studien zur juristischen und politischen Theorie absolutistischer Herrschaftsrepräsentation, Studien zur Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 106 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998).

20. Julius Bernhard von Rohr (1688–1742), Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Grossen Herren, ed. with a commentary by Monika Schlechte (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990; reprint of the second edn., Berlin, 1733), pp. 732–880.

21. Ibid., pp. 733f., as cited in Möseneder, Zeremoniell, p. 39.

22. Rohr discusses (1) processions, (2) tourneys and chivalric sport, (3) Carrousels, Ringrennen, and equestrian ballet, (4) carnivals and masquerades, (5) concerts, dances, balls and ballets, (6) operas and comedies, (7) costume feasts and “peasant weddings”, (8) sleigh rides, (9) illuminations, (10) fireworks, (11) target shooting, and finally (12) hunting. Ibid., “Verzeichniß der Capitel” and pp. 732–875.

23. See Jean-Louis Sponsel, Der Zwinger, die Hoffeste und die Schloßbaupläne zu Dresden (Dresden: Stengel, 1924), pp. 73–98, and Beatrix Bastl, “Feuerwerk und Schlittenfahrt: Ordnungen zwischen Ritual und Zeremoniell,” Wiener Geschichtsblätter 51 (1996): 197–229.

24. Richard Alewyn and Karl Sälzle, Das große Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste in Dokument und Deutung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), pp. 30–31. See Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Hellmut Lorenz, “Barocke Festkultur und Repräsentation im Schloß zu Dresden,” Dresdner Hefte 12, 38 (1994): 48–56.

25. Innovative organizations of space and time often develop together: consider the communal monastery and the daily schedule of Benedict’s Rule or the work of Jacques LeGoff on medieval cities and “merchants’ time.” The “spatial turn” in recent scholarship calls to our attention the range of baroque innovations in the measurement, structuring, and management of time, in all its divisions.

26. Richard Alewyn, Das große Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste, second edn. (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp. 37–39.

27. Alewyn sees “the transition from Renaissance to baroque” as “the decisive phase” in the nocturnalization of court festivals: ibid., p. 37.

28. Jean Cordey, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Preface by Pierre de Nolhac (Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1924), and Peter-Eckhard Knabe, “Der Hof als Zentrum der Festkultur. Vaux-le-Vicomte, 17. August 1661,” in Geselligkeit und Gesellschaft im Barockzeitalter, ed. Wolfgang Adam, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 28 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997) II: 859–70.

29. Knabe, “Der Hof als Zentrum,” p. 861.

30. See Alewyn and Sälzle, Welttheater, pp. 98–102, and E. Magne, Les Fêtes en Europe au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Martin-Dupuis, 1930).

31. The account of Antoine Caraccioli, bishop of Troyes, is published in H. Noel Williams, Henri II: His Court and Times (London: Methuen, 1910), pp. 341–43. On the time of day of the accident see also Lucien Romier, Les origines politiques des guerres de religion, 2 vols. (Paris: Perrin, 1913–14), II: 379–80.

32. See Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance, Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, Leiden: General Series 6 (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977), pp. 74–136; Strong, Art and Power, pp. 16–19; Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, trans. George Holoch (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), pp. 127–34.

33. Strong, Art and Power, p. 18.

34. As Strong notes, daytime spectacles such as royal entries and tournaments were replaced by court entertainments under the first two Stuarts (ibid., pp. 153–70, p. 154).

35. Alewyn and Sälze, Welttheater, pp. 91–97. In sixteenth-century Germany town and village dances, including those of the elites of German cities such as Augsburg and Nuremberg, were held on Sunday afternoon. See Wolfgang Brunner, “Städtisches Tanzen und das Tanzhaus im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Alltag im 16. Jahrhundert. Studien zu Lebensformen in mitteleuropäischen Städten, ed. Alfred Kohler and Heinrich Lutz (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1987), pp. 45–64, 52.

36. See Sponsel, Der Zwinger, pp. 32–42, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 30–34, 130–65, and Horst Richter, Johann Oswald Harms. Ein deutscher Theaterdekorateur des Barock (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1963), pp. 28–52. See also the Dresdner Hefte 11, 33 (1993), special volume on “Johann Georg II und sein Hof.” The Festival of the Planets is described in Gabriel Tzschimmer, Die Durchlauchtigste Zusammenkunft, oder: Historische Erzehlung, was der durchlauchtigste furst und herr, Herr Johann George der Ander, herzog zu Sachsen (Nuremberg: J. Hoffmann, 1680), which specifies the time of each day’s events.

37. See Sponsel, Der Zwinger; Georg Kohler, “Die Rituale der fürstlichen Potestas. Dresden und die deutsche Feuerwerkstradition,” in Die schöne Kunst der Verschwendung, ed. Kohler and Villon-Lechner (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1988), pp. 101–34; and Katrin Keller, “La Magnificence des deux Augustes: Zur Spezifik hÖfischer Kultur im Dresden des Augusteischen Zeitalters (1694–1763),” Cahiers d’études germaniques 28 (1995): 55–66.

38. See Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden, pp. 193–237, and Karlheinz Blaschke, “Die kursächsische Politik und Leipzig im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Leipzig: Aufklärung und Bürgerlichkeit, ed. Wolfgang Martens (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1990), pp. 23–38.

39. On fireworks, see Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997), Kohler and Villon-Lechner, eds., Die schöne Kunst der Verschwendung, and Eberhard Fähler, Feuerwerke des Barock: Studien zur öffentlichen Fest und seiner literarischen Deutung vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974).

40. As an “absolutist” ruler whose displays of power always exceeded his real political impact, Augustus the Strong noted this irony at an intimate fête with thirteen of his courtiers and his mistress in July 1711. At the meal each person was asked to write a phrase or motto in the guestbook. Without comment, Augustus wrote “la feuse tierre (et) ies ne Reste que la feusme,” i.e. “the rocket climbs high, and nothing remains but smoke” – a realistic appraisal of the politics of spectacle from a monarch to his courtiers? See Paul Haake, August der Starke im Urteil der Gegenwart (Berlin: Curtius, 1929), pp. 121–23.

41. Johann Neiner, Brachium Dexterae Excelsi, Oder die … Sieghaften Entsetzung Barcellone … und nächtlicher Illumination der gantzen Stadt Wienn (Vienna: Christian Barthlmae Pruckner, 1706), 4v: “Ihr treu-gesinnte Vasallen aber / die Ihr heut eure Häuser und Palläste / mit neuen Freuden-Feuern beleuchtet.”

42. See the contemporary survey from Christian Schoettgen, Historische Nachricht von denen Illuminationen, wie solche zu alten und neuen Zeiten … in Gebrauch gewesen (Dresden: Hekel, 1736), p. 29. Schoettgen notes that the illumination of Magdeburg in 1701 was the first in the city’s history, for example.

43. See Herbert Schwarzwälder, “Oberstleutnant Johann Georg von Bendeleben und sein großes Feuerwerk in Bremen zur Erinnerung an den Frieden von Habenhausen am 20. Oktober 1668,” Bremisches Jahrbuch 58 (1980): 9–22, and Thomas Lediard, Eine Collection curieuser Vorstellungen in Illuminationen und Feier-Wercken … bey Gelegenheit einiger publiquen Festins und Rejouissances, in Hamburg (Hamburg: Stromer, 1730).

44. Its designer Inigo Jones thought it “generally approved of, especially by all strangers.” Strong, Art and Power, pp. 169–70. See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 209–74.

45. Monika Schlechte, “Barocke Festkultur in Dresden. Quellenforschung zu einem kulturgeschichtlichen Phänomen,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Technischen Universität Dresden (Separatreihe 1 “Gesellschaftswissenschaften”) 39, 6 (1990): 7–11.

46. Even the parsimonious soldier-king Frederick William I of Prussia, 1713–40, is only a partial exception. Recent studies have noted that Frederick William I, though legendary for his thrift and reduction of court life, also displayed the expected luxury and ceremony when receiving foreign ambassadors or princes. For a state visit of Augustus II in 1728, the Prussian king prepared a nocturnal shooting competition at the Charlottenburg illuminated by 8,000 lanterns. See Sponsel, Zwinger, p. 135, and Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger, “Höfische Öffentlichkeit. Zur zeremoniellen Selbstdarstellungen des brandenburgischen Hofes vor dem europäischen Publikum,” Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preussischen Geschichte n.s. 7, 2 (1997): 145–76. On the nocturnal “Tabakskollegium” of Frederick I and Frederick William I, see Franziska Windt, Preußen 1701 – eine europäische Geschichte: Katalog (Berlin: Henschel, 2001), pp. 181–82.

47. Stephen Orgel, ed., “Introduction,” Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 3. See Russell West, “Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque,” Seventeenth Century 18, 1 (2003): 25–43.

48. For permanent, purpose-built baroque stages the English would have to wait until the Restoration: the Theatre Royal opened in Drury Lane in 1663, and the more elaborate Dorset Gardens Theater in Blackfriars opened in 1671. See Edward J. Dent,Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England during the Seventeenth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), pp. 137–40.

49. Strong, Art and Power, pp. 119–22, and Gösta M. Bergmann, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977), pp. 117–19.

50. Hilliard T. Goldfarb, “Richelieu and Contemporary Art: ‘Raison d’état’ and Personal Taste,” in Hilliard T. Goldfarb, ed., Richelieu: Art and Power (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), p. 240.

51. See ibid., pp. 240–42, illustration 107.

52. Madeleine Laurain-Portemer, “Mazarin, militant de l’art baroque au temps de Richelieu (1634–1642),” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français (1975): 65–100, here 72–74, 95, citing a letter of Benedetti to Mazarin dated March 7, 1640. See also Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1609–94), Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s visit to France, ed. with an Introduction by Anthony Blunt, annotated by George C. Bauer, trans. Margery Corbett (Princeton University Press, 1985), Appendix B, “Bernini and the Theatre,” pp. 339–41.

53. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly has underscored Werner Braun’s point that it is difficult to generalize about the state of opera in the Empire before 1660. See Werner Braun, “Opera in the Empire,” and Sara Smart, “Ballet in the Empire,” in Spectaculum Europaeum, ed. Béhar and Watanabe-O’Kelly, pp. 437–64, 547–70; Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden, pp. 166–92; and H.A. Frenzel, “The Introduction of the Perspective Stage in the German Court and Castle Theatres,” Theatre Research 3 (1961): 88–100.

54. Jörg Jochen Berns, Frank Druffner, Ulrich Schütte, and Brigitte Walbe, eds., Erdengötter: Fürst und Hofstaat in der Frühen Neuzeit im Spiegel von Marburger Bibliotheks- und Archivbeständen. Ein Katalog (Marburg Universitätsbibliothek, 1997), p. 489.

55. Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I, pp. 23–25, 45–81.

56. Markus Paul, Reichsstadt und Schauspiel: Theatrale Kunst im Nürnberg des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), pp. 292–325.

57. Ibid., p. 323:

Nicht eine Sonn hier steht: Viel Sonnen stehen stille /

In diesen engen Raum: Du Sonnen-Prinz! Erfülle /

Was unser Wünschen wünscht! Laß deine Gnadenstrahlen /

Die unverdiente Gnad an unsrer Statt bezahlen.

58. Tobias Beutel, Chur-Fürstlicher Sächsicher stets grünender hoher Cedern-Wald (Dresden: Bergen, 1671), fo. R4. See also Moritz Fürstenau, Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am Hofe zu Dresden (Dresden, 1861–62; repr. edn., Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1979), pp. 217–33, and Irmgard Becker-Glauch, Die Bedeutung der Musik für die Dresdener Hoffeste bis in die Zeit Augusts des Starken (Kassel and Basle: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1951), pp. 30–79.

59. John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall … 1665–1676, ed. with Introduction by Donald Crawford, Publications of the Scottish History Society 36 (Edinburgh: Printed at the University Press by T. and A. Constable for the Scottish History Society, 1900), pp. 3–5.

60. Claude-François Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et moderns selon les règles du théâtre (Paris: R. Guignard, 1682), cited in Jan Clarke, “Illuminating the Guénégaud Stage: Some Seventeenth-Century Lighting Effects,” French Studies 53, 1 (1999): 3–15, here 7.

61. See the rich and detailed study by R.B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

62. Quoted in Dent, Foundations of English Opera, pp. 139–40.

63. See Strong, Art and Power, pp. 5–6, 126–52; Bergmann, Lighting, pp. 44–88. Of course, the other northern Italian courts shared in the development of these theater techniques.

64. Strong, Art and Power, p. 140.

65. Leone di Somi, “Dialogues,” in Allardyce Nicoll, ed., The Development of the Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 275.

66. Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, Mannhafter Kunstspiegel, in The Renaissance Stage: Documents of Serlio, Sabbattini and Furttenbach, trans. Allardyce Nicoll, John H. McDowell, and George R. Kernodle, ed. Barnard Hewitt (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1958), p. 206 (emphasis mine).

67. Strong, Art and Power, p. 140. On Madrid see Margaret Rich Greer, The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca (Princeton University Press, 1991), and the literature cited there.

68. See the model funeral sermon (based on the funeral sermon for Agnes von Dohrstadt) in Balthasar Kindermann’s Der Deutsche Redner, first edn. (Wittenberg: Fincelius, 1660), p. 275. On Mazarin see Johann Michael von Loen, Gesammelte kleine Schriften, ed. Johann Caspar Schneider (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Zu finden bey Philipp Heinrich Huttern, 1750), §3, p. 45.

69. Thomas Kirchner, “Der Theaterbegriff des Barocks,” Maske und Kothurn 31 (1985): 131–41. Jonathan Dewald also emphasizes theater as the image of political life in his study of Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 37–38.

70. Everyday lighting at court was especially conspicuous consumption. Scholars are just beginning to assess its place among the material expenses of court life. See William Ritchey Newton, Derrière la façade: vivre au château de Versailles au XVIIIe siècle(Paris: Perrin, 2008), pp. 131–73, Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 63–89, and Hanns Leo Mikoletzky, “Der Haushalt des kaiserlichen Hofes zu Wien (vornehmlich im 18. Jahrhundert),” Carinthia 146 (1956): 658–83.

71. “At court – in hell”: see Helmuth Kiesel, “Bei Hof, bei Höll”. Untersuchungen zur literarischen Hofkritik von Sebastian Brant bis Friedrich Schiller (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979).

72. Rohr, Grossen Herren, pp. 18–19, and Théophraste Renaudot, ed., Quatriesme centurie des questions traitées aux conférences du Bureau d’Adresse, depuis le 24e Ianvier 1639, jusques au 10e Iuin 1641 (Paris: Bureau d’adresse, 1641), p. 416: “en la vie des courtizans de l’un et l’autre sexe qui font de la nuit jour et du jour la nuit.”

73. Casimir Freschot (1640?–1720), Mémoires de la cour de Vienne, ou Remarques faites par un voyageur curieux sur l’état présent de cette cour (Cologne: Chez Guillaume Etienne [actually The Hague], 1705), p. 91. German translation as Relation von dem kayserlichen Hofe zu Wien (Cologne: bey W. Stephan [actually Amsterdam or Leipzig], 1705), pp. 51–52. On Freschot see Erich Zöllner, “Das barocke Wien in der Sicht französischer Zeitgenossen,” in Probleme und Aufgaben der österreichischen Geschichtsforschung: ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Heide Dienst and Gernot Heiss (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1984), pp. 383–94.

74. The author of several devotional tracts and a Pietist utopia, Sinold also published an manual of advice, Die Wissenschaft zu leben … und … ein tüchtiges Mitglied der menschlichen Gesellschaft zu seyn (Frankfurt and Leipzig: “in den Buchläden zu finden,”1739), p. 212. On Sinold von Schütz, see Hans Wagener, “Faramonds Glukseligste (sic) Insel: Eine pietistische Sozialutopie,” Symposium 26 (1972): 78–89, and the literature cited there.

75. See for example the 1640 oil painting of a nocturnal banquet at court by Wolfgang Heimbach (1615–78), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

76. Julius von Pflugk-Harttung, Im Morgenrot der Reformation, fourth edn. (Basle: A. Rohde, 1922), pp. 182f.

77. On the shift from two to three meals per day, 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.

78. Jacqueline Boucher, “La nuit dans l’imagination et le mode de vie de la cour des derniers Valois,” in Penser la Nuit, ed. Bertrand, pp. 413–24, p. 418; see the overview in Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, pp. 150–60.

79. Arthur Kern, ed., Deutsche Hofordnungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905–07), II: 49, 71, 79.

80. Kurt Treusch von Buttlar, “Das tägliche Leben an den deutschen Fürstenhöfen des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 4 (1899): 15–19.

81. The eldest son, John George II, inherited the bulk of the territory, the electoral dignity, and the Dresden court; the three younger sons (Augustus, Christian, and Maurice) founded the cadet lines of Saxony-Weißenfels, Saxony-Merseburg, and Saxony-Zeitz, with their courts at Halle, Merseburg, and Zeitz, respectively. Typically the three younger brothers sent their court diaries to John George II in Dresden, who in turn sent reports of the comings and goings at his court to Halle, Merseburg, and Zeitz. See Gabriele Henkel, “Die Hoftagebücher Herzog Augusts von Sachsen-Weißenfels,” Wolfenbüttler Barock-Nachrichten 18, 2 (1991): 75–114, and Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden, pp. 30–34.

82. Eberhard Schmidt, Der Gottesdienst am Kurfürstlichen Hofe zu Dresden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961), pp. 32–34.

83. Henkel, “Hoftagebücher,” pp. 106–14.

84. Ibid., pp. 111–12: “Der Liebe großer Irrgarten und darauff das Poßenspiel: Die 2 betrogene Ehemänner gennant, agiert.”

85. In 1680 the court moved from Halle to Weißenfels on the accession of Duke John Adolph, and in 1685 a small Komödiensaal was opened in the Weißenfels palace. See Klaus-Peter Koch, “Das Jahr 1704 und die Weißenfelser Hofoper,” in Weißenfels als Ort literarischer und künstlerischer Kultur im Barockzeitalter, ed. Roswitha Jacobsen (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 75–95.

86. See Fähler, Feuerwerke des Barock, p. 125.

87. Sponsel, Der Zwinger, p. 43.

88. In Dresden and in other Lutheran cities such as Berlin, court nobles and urban elites began to stage torch-lit nocturnal funeral processions in the 1680s. They were quickly imitated by citizens and townspeople, despite the vehement resistance of the clergy, and by 1700 nocturnal funerals were the norm in Lutheran cities. See Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 133–59.

89. So for example the evening ball attended by John George IV on Tuesday, January 10, 1693: “Hat Abends Herr Ober-Jägermeister von Erdtmannsdorff in seinem Hause den Ball gegeben, wobey Ihr Churfürstl. Durchl. zu Sachsen unser gnädigster Herr auch erschienen.” Sächsisches Haupstaatsarchiv Dresden, OHMA, O IV, Nr. 69, Hofdiarium, 1693.

90. Two aspects of court life relatively unaffected by nocturnalization were the hunt and the schedule of Christian worship services.

91. Matthaeus Daniel Pöppelmann, Vorstellung und beschreibung des … Zwinger Gartens Gebdäuden oder Der königl. Orangerie zu Dresden (Dresden: Pöppelmann, 1729), cited in Peter Lahnstein, Das Leben im Barock: Zeugnisse und Berichte 1640–1740(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1974), p. 110.

92. Freschot, Relation von dem Kayserlichen Hofe zu Wien, p. 51.

93. Klingensmith, Utility of Splendor, p. 171.

94. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, by the Duke of Saint-Simon, trans. Bayle St. John (Washington, D.C.: M.W. Dunne, 1901), I: 34, and Mémoires de M. le duc de Saint-Simon, 42 vols., ed. A. de Boislisle and Léon Lecestre (Paris: [Montpensier], 1975–; reprint of the 1879–1930 Hachette edn.): I: 70–71. For a similar description of the appartements from Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine and duchess of Orléans, see her letter to Wilhemine Ernestine of the Palatinate, sent from Versailles, December 6, 1682, as reproduced in Letters from Liselotte, ed. and trans. Maria Kroll (New York: McCall, 1971), p. 40.

95. Maria Fürstenwald, “Liselotte von der Pfalz und der französische Hof,” in Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, ed. August Buck et al., Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 8–10 (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), III: 468.

96. See Boucher, “La cour des derniers Valois,” and Émile Magne, La Vie quotidienne au temps de Louis XIII (Paris: Hachette, 1942), pp. 50–90.

97. Renaudot, ed., Quatriesme centurie des questions, p. 413.

98. Klingensmith, Utility of Splendor, pp. 155–59, 171. On appartements at the court of Charles XII (1697–1718) of Sweden, see Fabian Persson, Servants of Fortune: The Swedish Court between 1598 and 1721 (Lund: Wallin & Dalholm, 1999), p. 53.

99. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67), I: 288, to Lady Rich, December 1, 1716. On cosmetics see Melissa Hyde, “The Make-Up of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at her Toilette” Art Bulletin 82, 3 (2000): 453–75, and the literature cited there. See also Piero Camporesi on “the revenge of the night,” in Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12–19.

100. Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit, p. 179.

101. Night clocks were first designed in Rome, reportedly at the request of Pope Alexander VII (Chigi, 1655–67). On an early eighteenth-century Florentine night clock (case and mosaics by Giovanni Battista Foggini; woodwork by Leonard van der Vinne) in the Getty Museum collection, see Peter Fusco, “Curator’s Report: Proposed Purchase, Night Clock,” May 6, 1997, J. Paul Getty Museum, Permanent Collection, Object File, Acc. No. 97.DB.37, pp. 1–5. See also Alessandra Mazzonis, “Un orologio del XVII secolo al Museo Correale di Sorrento: il notturno di Pietro T. Campani,” Kermes 14, 44 (2001): 17–26, 69, for a survey of European night clocks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

102. Rohr, Grossen Herren, pp. 18–19.

103. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat Personen, ed. with a commentary by Gotthart Frühsorge (Berlin, 1728; repr. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990), pp. 467–68.

104. Ibid., p. 468.

105. William Byrd, The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 76.

106. Sinold, Die Wissenschaft zu leben, p. 337.

107. Ibid., pp. 337–38.

108. Loen, Kleine Schriften, §3, pp. 62–66. On Loen, see Christiane Buchel, “Johann Michael von Loen im Wandel der Zeiten: Eine kleine Forschungsgeschichte,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts 16, 1 (1992): 13–37.

109. Loen, Kleine Schriften, §3, p. 66.

110. Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz, Nouveaux Mémoires du Baron de Pollnitz, contenant l’histoire de sa vie, new edn. (Frankfurt: “Aux Dépens de la Compagnie,” 1738), II: 151–52.

111. Samuel Pordage, “A Panegyrick on his Majesties Entrance Into London,” in Poems upon several occasions by S.P. (London: Printed by W.G. for Henry Marsh, and Peter Dring, 1660).

112. Thomas Pecke, To the Most High and Mighty Monarch, Charles the II, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, defender of the faith (London: Printed by James Cottrel, 1660), p. 2.

113. Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Herbert’s Poems to the Queen of Bohemia: A Rediscovered Text and a New Edition” [with text], ELR 9, 1 (1979): 108–20; see also George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 196–97. In his letters to Elizabeth, Henry Wotton regularly addressed her as “Most resplendent Queen, even in the darkness of Fortune,” and in 1629 spoke of “beholding how her virtues overshine the darkness of her fortune.” Henry Wotton, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II: 293, 325.

114. I. W. [i.e., John Walton], “To my worthy friend, Mr. Henry Vaughan the Silurist” (1678), in Works of Henry Vaughan, p. 620.

115. John Cleveland, “The King’s Disguise,” in The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. John M. Berdan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), p. 164.

116. Vaughan, “The King Disguis’d,” in Works of Henry Vaughan, p. 626.

117. Benserade, Ballets pour Louis XIV, ed. Canova-Green, I: 91–160; here p. 135 (note the reference to Psalm 119: 105, “Your word [is] a lamp to my feet / And a light to my path”). As Charles Silin has noted, there are “at least five allusions to the successful issue of the recent difficulties” in the Ballet de la Nuit: Charles I. Silin, Benserade and His Ballets de Cour (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), p. 219.

118. Could this evocation of the darkness of rebellion to underscore the importance of the monarch at some point deconstruct itself, emphasizing instead the dark origins of the Sun King? See Aurélia Gaillard, “Le Soleil à son coucher: la nuit réversible de la mythologie solaire sous Louis XIV,” in Penser la nuit, ed. Bertrand, pp. 449–64, and Hélène Merlin, “Nuit de l’État et Roi-Soleil,” in La Nuit, ed. François Angelier and Nicole Jacques-Chaquin (Grenoble: Millon, 1995), pp. 203–18.

119. As cited in Vec, Zeremonialwissenschaft, p. 139: “Die Hoheit und Macht der Potentaten und Fürsten der Welt / leuchtet zwar sonderlich in dero Landen hervor … Aber es gläntzet dieselbiger noch heller wann andere Mächtige selbst dieselbe considerieren.”

120. Habermas described this specific relationship between representation, authority, and audience as “representative publicness” (repräsentive Öffentlichkeit), “the display of inherent spiritual power or dignity before an audience,” though he did not consider daily time or the night in its development. See The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. xv, 5–13. As we will see below in chapter 6, the night was equally vital to the development of a bourgeois public sphere in early modern cities.

121. Saint-Simon, Memoirs, trans. St. John, III: 307–8, and Mémoires, XXXIX: 2–4.

122. Ibid. For the court, the illumination was followed by nocturnal entertainment: “Scarcely had I time to return home and sup after this fine illumination than I was obliged to go to the palace for the ball that the King had prepared there, and which lasted until past two in the morning.” Evidence suggests that the Spanish court also nocturnalized its spectacles, theater, and daily routines during the seventeenth century. See for example Hannah E. Bergman, “A Court Entertainment of 1638,” Hispanic Review 42, 1 (1974): 67–81, in which a young woman at court complains that her mother expects her to go to sleep by midnight (p. 70).

123. Norris, “Hymn to Darkness,” in Collection, pp. 37–38.

124. See Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. 33–40. This corresponds with the understanding of the baroque presented by José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Theory and History of Literature 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

125. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 18, in Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), p. 55.

126. In a contemporary English translation – see Ludwig Krapf and Christian Wagenknecht, eds., Stuttgarter Hoffeste: Texte und Materialen zur höfischen Repräsentation im frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979).

127. From the contemporary English translation: Nicholas Faret (1596–1646), The Honest Man or the Art to Please at Court, trans. Edward Grimstone (London: Thomas Harper, 1632), as quoted in Margaret Lucille Kekewich, ed., Princes and Peoples: France and British Isles, 1620–1714 (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 29–30.

128. Salatino, Incendiary Art, p. 19. La Fontaine’s response is discussed by Gaillard, “Le Soleil à son coucher”.

129. Rohr, Grossen Herren, p. 733, as cited in Möseneder, Zeremoniell, p. 39.

130. From Machiavelli on, realist discussions of the display of power and majesty were kept separate from actual presentations of a prince’s (simulated) greatness. Baroque political theory “revealed” and discussed the very mechanisms and techniques of power that it advised rulers to conceal. Michael Stolleis has discussed this paradox in his Arcana imperii und Ratio status: Bemerkungen zur politischen Theorie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980). Political theorists resolved the issue through their strategic contempt for the perceptions and awareness of the common people. The formation in the eighteenth century of a public sphere gradually challenged this contempt and the concomitant darkness and secrecy of absolutist political culture. See Jörg Jochen Berns, “Der nackte Monarch und die nackte Wahrheit – Auskünfte der deutschen Zeitungs- und Zeremoniellschriften des späten 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts zum Verhältnis von Hof und Öffentlichkeit,” Daphnis 11, 1–2 (1982): 315–50, Andreas Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 103 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 34–77, and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

131. The mystic writings of Denys the Areopagite also contributed to this understanding of spectacle in French political discourse in this period: see Yves Durand, “Mystique et politique au XVIIe siècle: l’influence du Pseudo-Denys,” XVIIe Siècle 173 (1991): 323–50, who argues for their direct influence on Louis XIV.

132. Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes, trans. Jones, pp. 68–70.

133. Nicola Sabbatini’s Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri (Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638) as translated in Hewitt, ed. Renaissance Stage, pp. 96–97.

134. For further examples in French political thought see Möseneder, Zeremoniell, pp. 38–39. Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon (Leipzig: Zedler, 1732–50) defined the masses (“Pöbel”) as “die gemeine Menge niederträchtiger und aller höhern Achtbarkeit geraubter Leute” (“the common crowd of base people deprived of all higher perception”), XXVIII: col. 948.

135. Rohr, Grossen Herren, p. 2.

136. See Christian Freiherr von Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von dem Gesellschafftlichen Leben der Menschen, und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen zu Beforderüng der Gluckseeligkeit des menschlichen Geschlechtes (Halle: Renger, 1721). Rohr opened hisIntroduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers with a long citation from Wolff’s Vernünfftige Gedancken.

137. See the overview provided by Jörg Jochen Berns, “Die Festkultur der deutschen Höfe zwischen 1580 und 1730,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift n.s. 34, 3 (1984): 295–311.

138. See Stollberg-Rillinger, “Höfische Öffentlichkeit,” pp. 147–50, and the concise remarks of Ulrich Schütte, “Das Fürstenschloß als ‘Pracht-Gebäude’,” in Die Künste und das Schloss in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Lutz Unbehaun with the assistance of Andreas Beyer and Ulrich Schütte, Rudolstädter Forschungen zur Residenzkultur 1 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1998), pp. 15–29.

139. The scarcity of any direct discussion of the role of the night in the contemporary theorists of baroque court spectacle (such as Ménestrier or Rohr) is not surprising. Discussion of the night in the literature of spectacles was analogous (on the level of daily life) to the discussions of deception, illusion, and “image” in baroque political theory discussed above. Thus a tract could recommend the use of illusions of majesty and power, confident that the common people would see only the illusions – never the political advice behind them. Proclamations of a monarch’s greatness and advice on the importance of burnishing this image existed side by side, but never in the same text. Analogously, on the technical level references to the utility of darkness to create illusion, spectacle, and wonder are frequent; on the theoretical level we see a keen sense of the power of spectacle, but little explicit discussion of the need for darkness itself. On the gaze, landscape, and power, see Dianne S. Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Introduction,” in Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), pp. 23–29.

140. From a 1668 lecture on Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well (1648) given by the painter Philippe de Champaigne at the French royal academy of painting and sculpture, as quoted in John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 295–96.

5 “An entirely new contrivance”: The rise of street lighting, 1660–1700

1. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), pp. 984–88.

2. See Camille Couderc, “Economies proposées par B. Franklin et Mercier de Saint-Léger pour l’éclairage et la chauffage à Paris,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 43 (1916): 93–101. Franklin promoted the establishment of Philadelphia’s street lighting, the first in North America, in 1757.

3. Cristoforo Muzani (1724–1813), cited in Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12–19, 14–15.

4. Friedrich Justin Bertuch, “Moden in Gebrauche und Eintheilung des Tages und der Nacht zu Verschiedenen Zeiten, und bey verschiedenen Völkern,” Journal der Moden [after 1786 Journal des Luxus und der Moden] 1 (May 1786): 199–201. See Gerhard Wagner, Von der Galanten zur Eleganten Welt. Das Weimarer “Journal des Luxus und der Modern” (1786–1827) (Hamburg: Bockel, 1994).

5. Cf. the comment of Johann Beckmann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen (Leipzig: P.G. Kummer, 1782), I: 62: “Gemeiniglich hält man die Erleuchtung der Straßen für eine ganz neue Einrichtung” (“The illumination of the streets is generally considered an entirely new contrivance”).

6. “eine ganz neue Ordnung der Dinge eingeführt,” Bertuch, “Moden,” p. 200.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 201.

9. J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 172. On coffeehouses, see below, chapter 6.

10. On modern street lighting see Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Journal of Urban History 14, 1 (1987): 7–37, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

11. There is no comparative work on early modern street lighting as an international and interurban development. Schivelbusch and Bouman offer comparative analyses of modern street lighting; Schivelbusch begins with a discussion of early modern street lighting in Paris. With an analysis indebted to Foucault, he emphasizes its relationship to absolutist surveillance and policing, but he does not consider the practical developments in Amsterdam detailed by Lettie S. Multhauf, “The Light of Lamp-Lanterns: Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 236–52. Eighteenth-century comparative discussions of street lighting include Paul Jacob Marperger, Abermahliger Versuch zur Abhandlung einer nützlichen Policey-Materia, nehmlich von denen Gassen Laternen, Strand- und Wacht-Feuern, und andern nächtlichen Illuminationibus oder Erleuchtungen der Gassen und Strassen (Dresden and Leipzig: “Verlegung des Authoris,” 1722), and P. Patte, De la manière la plus avantageuse d’èclairer les rues d’une ville pendant la nuit (Amsterdam: s.n., 1766).

12. My comparison is indebted to Schivelbusch, who refers to the parallel rise of the “lighting of order” (street lighting) and the “lighting of festivity” in the seventeenth century. See Disenchanted Night, pp. 137–43.

13. The beginnings of public street lighting are documented for Paris by Auguste Philippe Herlaut, “L’éclairage des rues de Paris à la fin du XVIIe siècle et au XVIIIe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 43 (1916): 130–240, and for Amsterdam by Multhauf, “Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam.” On Turin see Davide Bertolotti, Descrizione di Torino (Turin, 1840; repr. Bologna: A. Forni, 1976), p. 63 (my thanks to Geoffrey Symcox for this reference); on London see Malcolm Falkus, “Lighting in the Dark Ages of English Economic History: Town Streets before the Industrial Revolution,” in Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England. Essays presented to F. J. Fisher, ed. D.C. Coleman and A.H. John (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 187–211; for Copenhagen see Johann Georg Krünitz, Ökonomisch-Technologische Encyklopädie, vol. LXV (Berlin: Pauli, 1794), and Stadtarchiv Leipzig [hereafter SdAL], Urkunden, 97, 8II, fos. 124–32 (manuscript copy of the 1683 Copenhagen street-lighting ordinance).

14. See W. Leybold, “Hamburgs öffentliche Gassenbeleuchtung. Von den Anfängen bis zur Franzosenzeit, 1673–1816,” Nordalbingia 5 (1926): 455–75, and Wolfgang Nahrstedt, Die Entstehung der Freizeit. Dargestellt am Beispiel Hamburgs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), pp. 88–95; on Vienna see Ludwig Böck, “Zur Geschichte der öffentlichen Beleuchtung Wiens,” Wiener Neujahrs-Almanach 4 (1898): 1–27, and Margit Altfahrt and Karl Fischer, “‘Illuminations-Anfang der Stadt Wien’ (Zur Einführung der Straßenbeleuchtung in Wien im Jahre 1687),” Wiener Geschichtsblätter 42 (1987): 167–70; on Berlin see Herbert Liman, Mehr Licht: Geschichte der Berliner Straßenbeleuchtung (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 2000); on Hanover, see Siegfried Müller,Leben in der Residenzstadt Hannover: Adel und Bürgertum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Hanover: Schlüter, 1988), pp. 42, 102.

15. See Falkus, “Lighting in the Dark Ages,” pp. 251–53, and Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 82.

16. Thomas DeLaune, Angliæ Metropolis: or, The Present State of London … First written by … Tho. Delaune, gent. and continued to this present year by a careful hand (London: Printed by G.L. for J. Harris and T. Howkins, 1690), pp. 365–66. On perceptions of eighteenth-century street lighting, see Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 95–96.

17. Johannes Neiner, Vienna Curiosa & Gratiosa, Oder Das anjetzo Lebende Wienn (Vienna: Joann. Baptistae Schilgen, 1720), pp. 17–18.

18. See for example the Berlin/Cölln ordinance of 1636 in Christian Otto Mylius, ed., Corpus Constitutionum Marchicarum (Berlin and Halle: Buchladen des Waisenhauses, 1737–55), part 5, section 2, cols. 633–34; and Falkus, “Lighting in the Dark Ages,” pp. 249–51.

19. See Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollstandiges Universal-Lexikon, vol. XVI (Halle and Leipzig: Verlegts Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1737), article on “Laterne” and the description of the “Diebeslaterne” (thieves’ lantern).

20. A Leipzig city ordinance of 1544 set the curfew bell at 9 p.m. in the summer and 8 p.m. in the winter. P.G. Müller, “Die Entwicklung der künstlichen Straßenbeleuchtung in den sächsischen Städten,” Neues Archiv für Sächsische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 30 (1909): 144–45.

21. On England, see the work of Paul Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England,” Seventeenth Century 13, 2 (1998): 212–38, and Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

22. For example, the general Leipzig curfew described above was simply not renewed after the establishment of street lighting in 1701; instead the city council focused on the regulation of youth at night.

23. Johann Valentin Andreä, Reipublicae christianopolitanae description (Strasbourg: Zetzner, 1619), dedicated to the Lutheran devotional theologian Johann Arndt. See the excellent English edition: J.V. Andreae, Christianopolis, ed. with an Introduction by Edward H. Thompson, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 162 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 143–45.

24. Andreae, Christianopolis, ed. Thompson, pp. 185–86. An earlier Rosicrucian work by Andreä, the Chymische Hochzeit of 1616, also carefully described outdoor lighting along a pathway within the grounds of a castle. See The hermetick romance, or, The chymical wedding written in High Dutch by Christian Rosencreutz, trans. E. Foxcroft (London: Printed by A. Sowle, 1690), p. 28.

25. Friedrich Lucae, Der Chronist Friedrich Lucae: ein Zeit- und Sittenbild aus der zweiten Hälfte des siebenzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Friedrich Lucae II (Frankfurt: Brönner, 1854), p. 99. Lucae visited Amsterdam in 1665 or 1666 and again in 1667, observing the street lighting before it was completed in 1669.

26. Multhauf, “Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” pp. 249–50; M.G. Niessen, “Straatverlichting,” Ons Amsterdam 18 (1966), pp. 82–85; Patrick Meehan, “Early Dublin Public Lighting,” Dublin Historical Record 5 (1943): 130–36.

27. On royal cities see Leon Bernard, The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of Louis XIV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970) and John P. Spielman, The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600–1740 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993).

28. Marperger’s 1722 treatise on street lighting presents nine different schemes to pay for the lighting. (Marperger, Von denen Gassen Laternen, pp. 22–7.) On the English approach see William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1912; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), III: 52–60, as placed in the context of urban development by Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 102–04. On Dublin and Lübeck see Meehan, “Dublin Public Lighting,” pp. 130–36, and W. Brehmer, “Beiträge zu einer Baugeschichte Lübecks. 3. Die Straßen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde5, 2 (1887): 254–58.

29. Bernard, Paris, pp. 53–54, and Herlaut, “L’éclairage,” pp. 137–48. Louis XIV sold a major exemption from the taxe des boues et lanternes in 1704.

30. Bernard, Paris, pp. 162–66, and Herlaut, “L’éclairage,” p. 163.

31. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, I. HA, Rep. 21, Nr. 24b1, Fasc. 5, September 23, 1680. Greater Berlin was originally divided by the Spree river into the separate towns of Berlin and Cölln. Confusion between Cölln on the Spree and Köln/Cologne on the Rhine has led some scholars to mistakenly claim that street lighting was also established in Cologne in 1682. In fact, Cologne had no municipal street lighting until the early nineteenth century. See F. Joly, Die Beleuchtung und Wasserversorgung der Stadt Köln (Cologne: J.P. Bachem, 1895).

32. See 300 Jahre Strassenbeleuchtung in Berlin (Berlin: Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1979), pp. 8–14.

33. Böck, “Beleuchtung Wiens,” p. 14. By the early eighteenth century there were about 1,650 street lanterns in the city. Conrad Richter, “Die erste öffentliche Beleuchtung der Stadt Wien,” Alt-Wien 6 (1897): 9–11.

34. Archives Municipales de Lille [hereafter AM Lille], Affaires Générales 1256, dossier 9, fo. 3.

35. See Régine Martin, “Les débuts de l’éclairage des rues de Dijon,” Annales de Bourgogne 25, 4 (1953): 253–55, and Joseph Thomas, L’éclairage des rues d’Amiens à travers les âges (Cayeux-sur-Mer: P. Ollivier, 1908), pp. 12–14.

36. Catherine Denys, Police et sécurité au XVIIIe siècle dans les villes de la frontière franco-belge (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), pp. 276–77.

37. Ibid., pp. 192–200.

38. Archives Départmentales du Nord [hereafter ADN], C w.305/2899, ordinance of August 31, 1667.

39. ADN, C 2899, ordinance of July 23, 1668.

40. AM Lille, Affaires Générales 1256, dossier 1, fos. 1–3.

41. ADN, C 2899, ordinance of January 17, 1668.

42. AM Lille, Affaires Générales 1256, dossier 1, fo. 3. With 600–700 lanterns for a population of about 55,000 in 1667, Lille compares favorably with Rouen (population 60,000 and 800 lanterns in 1700), but less so with Leipzig (21,000 residents and 700 lanterns in 1701).

43. ADN, C 2899, ordinance of September 23, 1667 regarding innkeepers; ordinance of October 27, 1667 on closing time for “Tavernes & Cabarets”; see also Philippe Jessu, Louis XIV en Flandre: Exposition historique … à Lille, 28 octobre 1967–30 avril 1968(Société des amis des musées de Lille, 1967), p. 93. All these ordinances issued from the Magistrat; in some cases the initiative of the French governor or intendant is apparent, as for example the announcement on September 22, 1667 of a reward for the denunciation of those guilty of assaulting a French officer. ADN, C 2899.

44. Denys, Police et sécurité, pp. 193–95.

45. Albert Croquez, Histoire politique et administrative d’une province française, la Flandre, vol. II, Louis XIV en Flandres (Paris: Champion, 1920), pp. 50–58.

46. Laurence Echard, Flanders, or the Spanish Netherlands, most accurately described shewing the several provinces (London: Printed for Tho. Salusbury, 1691), pp. 17–18.

47. Louis Trénard, Histoire de Lille: De Charles Quint à la conquête française (1500–1715), Histoire de Lille 2 (Toulouse: Privat, 1981), p. 407.

48. Croquez, Louis XIV en Flandres, p. 56, and Alain Lottin, Vie et mentalité d’un Lillois sous Louis XIV (Lille: É. Raoust & cie, 1968), p. 356. The victim was probably the young man Weimel mentioned in the journal of the silk weaver Pierre Ignace Chavatte on August 24, 1668 (“Weimel fut descoutrez tout nud”). The journal of Chavatte covers the years 1657–93 and has been published in Gerhard Ernst and Barbara Wolf, eds., “Pierre Ignace Chavatte: Chronique memorial (1657–1693),” in Textes français privés des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 310, CD 1–3 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005).

49. Croquez, Louis XIV en Flandres, p. 56, and Lottin, Vie et mentalité, p. 356.

50. Lottin, Vie et mentalité, p. 356.

51. Ibid.

52. In the same period Le Peletier reported on three soliders hanged for plundering a house near their barracks late one night. Croquez, Louis XIV en Flandres, p. 55.

53. On the relationship between the French and the Lille Magistrat, see Victoria Sanger, “Military Town Planning under Louis XIV: Vauban’s Practice and Methods, 1668–1707,” PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2000, pp. 64–68; Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–25; here p. 21; and Albert Croquez, La Flandre wallonne et les pays de l’intendance de Lille sous Louis XIV (Paris: H. Champion, 1912), pp. 80–81.

54. Trénard, Histoire de Lille, pp. 287–92, and Lottin, Vie et mentalité, pp. 171–88.

55. “Un homme tuè dune centinel au marchè,” Ernst and Wolf, ed., “Chavatte: Chronique memorial,” in Textes français privés, July 23, 1672. Spelling and punctuation as original.

56. Ibid., October 16, 1673, “La guerre declarè contre la france.” The following year the French completed the Saint-Sauveur bastion overlooking the workers’ quarter of the city – a reminder of their distrust of Lillois artisans like Chavatte. See Sanger, “Military Town Planning under Louis XIV,” pp. 46–47.

57. Ernst and Wolf, ed., “Chavatte: Chronique memorial,” in Textes français privés, February 7, 1675, “Un debat a la bourse d’or des bourgeois avec des officiers francois.”

58. Trénard, Histoire de Lille, p. 290; see also Croquez, Louis XIV en Flandres, pp. 50–58.

59. A. Crapet, “La vie à Lille de 1667 à 1789,” Revue du Nord 6 (1920): 126–54, 198–221; and 7 (1921): 266–322, here 135; Denys, Police et sécurité, pp. 199, 277; and Catherine Denys, “La sécurité en ville: les débuts de l’éclairage public à Lille au XVIIIe siècle,” Les Cahiers de la sécurité 61, 1 (2006): 143–50.

60. Catherine Denys, “Le bris de lanternes dans les villes du Nord au XVIIIe siècle: quelques réflexions sur la signification d’un délit ordinaire,” in La petite délinquance du moyen âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Benoît Garnot and Rosine Fry, Publications de l’Université de Bourgogne 90 (Dijon: EUD, 1998), pp. 309–19; here p. 311.

61. Lottin, Vie et mentalité, p. 356.

62. Denys, “Le bris de lanternes,” p. 314.

63. Lottin, Vie et mentalité, p. 356, and Denys, “Le bris de lanternes,” p. 316, citing the Magistrat in 1710.

64. SdAL, Urkundensammlung, 97, 1–7, “Laternen. 1701–1702,” fo. 1. Augustus also oversaw the introduction of street lighting in Dresden in 1705. See Müller, “Die Entwicklung der künstlichen Straßenbeleuchtung,” pp. 144–51; cf. P.G. Hilscher, Chronik der Königlich Sächsischen Residenzstadt Dresden (Dresden: In Commission der Ch. F. Grimmer’schen Buchhandlung, 1837), pp. 313–14. No other Saxon cities established any regular street lighting until the late eighteenth century.

65. SdAL, Sekt. K 252, Bl. 1–16., here fo. 6.

66. Rudolf Reuss, ed., Aus dem Leben eines strassburger Kaufmanns des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts: “Reiss-Journal und Glücks- und Unglücksfälle,” Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkeskunde von Elsass-Lotharingen und den angrenzenden Gebieten 43 (Strasbourg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1913), p. 14.

67. Why was Zetzner out to mail a letter so late at night? No doubt he was following the schedule of a post-coach. The coaches came and went at fixed times according to published schedules, picking up post and passengers at all hours of the day and night. They connected the insular time of individual cities with regional schedules and movement, and their regular travel brought a new kind of legitimate nocturnal activity to cities. See Wolfgang Behringer, “Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Kommunikation. Eine Sammelrezension zum Postjubiläum,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 21, 1 (1994): 92–112, and the literature cited there. On students and the night, see below, chapter 6.

68. “Also hat man auch nunmehr allhier zu Leipzig die düstere Nacht und Finsternüß in Licht und hellen Schein zu verwandeln resolviert.” Aufgefangene Brieffe, welche Zwischen etzlichen curieusen Personen über den ietzigen Zustand der Staats und gelehrten Welt gewechselt worden (Wahrenberg: J.G. Freymunden [actually Leipzig: Groschuff], 1701), p. 890.

69. The title of a verse pamphlet, Das bey der Nacht Hervorleuchtende Leipzig (Leipzig: Immanuel Tietze, 1701), held in the SdAL, Tit. XXVI, Nr. 3, fos. 21r–22v.

70. See Jean-Louis Sponsel, Der Zwinger, die Hoffeste und die Schloßbaupläne zu Dresden (Dresden: Stengel, 1924); Georg Kohler, “Die Rituale der fürstlichen Potestas. Dresden und die deutsche Feuerwerkstradition,” in Die schöne Kunst der Verschwendung, ed. Georg Kohler and Alice Villon-Lechner (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1988), pp. 101–34; and Katrin Keller, “La Magnificence des deux Augustes: Zur Spezifik hÖfischer Kultur im Dresden des Augusteischen Zeitalters (1694–1763),” Cahiers d’études germaniques 28 (1995): 55–66.

71. See Karlheinz Blaschke, “Die kursächsische Politik und Leipzig im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Leipzig: Aufklärung und Bürgerlichkeit, ed. Wolfgang Martens (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1990), pp. 23–38.

72. Dresden, sixty miles to the southeast of Leipzig, had been the primary residence of the Saxon electors since the mid sixteenth century. Leipzig, with its three annual trade fairs, was the commercial center of the territory (and indeed of Central Europe as a whole) and the Saxon princes, including Augustus, usually visited Leipzig during the trade fairs. Augustus preferred to rent one of the city’s luxurious baroque palaces, the Appel’schen Haus on the market square, rather than stay in his own official residence in the city, the medieval Moritz castle on the city wall, which he considered too old-fashioned. See Karl Czok, Am Hofe Augusts des Starken (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990), pp. 135–39. The court moved with Augustus when he came to Leipzig, renting the finest merchants’ houses on the market square, and court life was superimposed on the places and spaces of the city’s merchant elites: the opera house, the coffeehouses and merchants’ courtyards, and the city’s main churches.

73. Nikolaus Pevsner, Leipziger Barock: Die Baukunst der Barockzeit in Leipzig (Dresden: W. Jess, 1928). After a series of court intrigues still not clearly understood, Franz Conrad Romanus was accused of embezzlement, removed from office, and arrested in 1705. Unable to regain the favor of Augustus, Romanus was imprisioned at the Königsstein fortress and held there until his death in 1746. See Gustav Wustmann, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte Leipzigs (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1889–95) II: 263–352.

74. Ibid., II: 264–67.

75. Ibid., II: 267: “ins Meer der Vergessenheit geworfen sein möchte.”

76. SdAL, “Acten, die Einrichtung der orthen Straßenbeleuchtung betr. 1701,” fo. 2.

77. Ibid., fo. 5.

78. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 269.

79. SdAL, Das bey der Nacht Hervorleuchtende Leipzig. The street lighting of Paris was celebrated in very similar terms in 1667: “Il fera comme en plein midi / Clair la nuit dedans chaque rue.” (“The night will be lit up as bright as day, in every street.”) Gazette de Robinet, October 29, 1667, cited in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 90.

80. Quoted in Böck, “Beleuchtung Wiens,” pp. 10–12.

81. See Verena Kriese, “Die Vorstädte Leipzigs im 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 16, 2 (1989): 110–25. The suburbs were not illuminated: until the late eighteenth century. The early modern street lighting was limited to the area within the city walls.

82. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 269–70. In comparison, in 1701 the Leipzig city council contributed 6,000 florins toward the construction of a major new public building, the poorhouse, orphanage, asylum, and workhouse of St. George. See Tanya Kevorkian, “The Rise of the Poor, Weak, and Wicked: Poor Care, Punishment, Religion and Patriarchy in Leipzig, 1700–1730,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (2000): 163–81.

83. Aufgefangene Brieffe, pp. 890–91.

84. Ibid. For an example of this temporary festive street lighting in Hanover in 1665, see Siegfried Müller, Leben im alten Hannover: Kulturbilder einer deutschen Stadt (Hanover: Schlüter, 1986), pp. 22, 146, and the examples above in chapter 4.

85. Aufgefangene Brieffe, pp. 890–91. The article is titled “Von der Illuminations-Pracht und Mißbrauch / und hingegen von nützlichen und nöthigen Gebrauch der See-Lichter und Nacht-Laternen auch nunmehr zu Leipzig aufgesteckt worden.”

86. Ibid., p. 888.

87. Ibid.

88. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 93–96.

89. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271, quoting from the Ratspatente of 1701–02. Richard Steele describes a similar fashion in London coffeehouses: “the students … come in their night-gowns to Saunter away their time … One would think these young Virtuoso’s take a gay Cap and Slippers, with a scarf and party-colour’d Gown, to be the Ensigns of Dignity.” “Hominem pagina nostra sapit,” Spectator 49 (April 26, 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I: 209. See Ariane Fennetaux, “Men in Gowns: Nightgowns and the Construction of Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Immediations: Research Journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art 1, 1 (2004): 77–89.

90. The Leipzig ordinances regulating “night life” were all directed at heads of households and refer to nocturnal youthful disorder. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271. Young people in the urban night are examined in chapter 6.

91. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271.

92. Of course, the success of these attempts to police a city’s night life is another matter, as the following chapter will show.

93. “Es wird manch Huren-Packt die Lichter müssen scheuen / Manch Dieb zu Bette gehen / der in die Nacht gelaurt.” Das bey der Nacht Hervorleuchtende Leipzig, SdAL, Tit. XXVI, Nr. 3, fo. 22v.

94. Ibid.: “Wenn sie bey Sicherheit / sich Freund und Feind zu kennen / Die Strassen auff und ab zu handeln können gehn.”

95. See the Vienna petition noted above and Gerhard Tanzer, Spectacle müssen seyn: die Freizeit der Wiener im 18. Jahrhundert, Kulturstudien 21 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1992), p. 58.

96. Ibid.

97. After all, the “citizens and artisans” of early modern cities had been, not long before, the “many apprentices, boys … and such unmarried folk … found idly in the streets … late in the evening,” as the 1697 and 1702 Leipzig ordinances described them.

98. Herlaut, “L’éclairage,” p. 166: “en mars, la saison et les affaires remplissent la ville et la Cour est à Paris.” The longer court schedule was adopted.

99. Irene Schrattenecker, ed., Eine deutsche Reise Anno 1708 (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1999), p. 131. The author is an unknown Venetian.

100. Ralph Thoresby, The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., Author of the Topography of Leeds: (1677–1724), ed. Joseph Hunter (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), II: 120 (June 15, 1712).

101. Léon Clerbois, “Histoire de l’éclairage public à Bruxelles,” Annales de la société royale d’archéologie de Bruxelles 24 (1910): 91–106. Public street lighting was re-established in Brussels in 1703.

102. Johann Georg Kohl, Alte und Neue Zeit. Episoden aus der Cultur-Geschichte der freien Reichs-Stadt Bremen (Bremen: Müller, 1871), pp. 22–25. See Staatsarchiv Bremen 2-D.20.b.1.e.2.a., Bd.1: “Rechnungsbuch der Beleuchtungsabgabe,” indicating that funds were collected for lanterns and oil starting in 1698.

103. On French provincial street lighting see Daniel Bontemps and Hubert Beylier, Lanternes d’éclairage public: XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction du Patrimoine, 1986), pp. 2–10, and Martin, “Les débuts de l’éclairage des rues de Dijon,” pp. 253–55. On Caen, see Gabriel Vanel, ed., Recueil de journaux caennais, 1661–1777: publiés d’après les manuscrits inédits (Rouen: A. Lestringant, 1904), pp. 43–44.

104. Thomas, L’éclairage des rues d’Amiens, pp. 11–15. On resistance to the street lighting in Tournai (annexed to France 1668–1713), see A. de la Grange, “Historire de l’éclairage public à Tournai (1275–1890),” Bulletins de la Société historique et archéologique de Tournai 25 (1894): 392–98.

105. Friedrich Lau, Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1921), I: 131. By 1701 the other leading princes of the Empire had established street lighting in their main cities (Berlin, Vienna, and Hanover, with Leipzig in the works) and the Wittelsbach elector John William of Pfalz-Neuberg sought to keep up with his peers.

106. Lau, Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf, I: 132; Hugo Weidenhaupt and Manfred Fey, Düsseldorf: Geschichte von den Ursprüngen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf: Schwann im Patmos-Verlag, 1988), II: 71.

107. Paul Sauer and Hansmartin Decker-Hauff, Geschichte der Stadt Stuttgart, vol. III, Vom Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Abschluss des Verfassungsvertrags fur das Konigreich Wurttemberg 1819 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), pp. 139–40: “der größere Teil der Einwohnerschaft hohen und niederen Standes erkenne, was für schlecten oder gar keinen Nutzen die … eingeführten Laternen dem Publikum gebracht, welch große Kosten sie dagegen verursacht hätten.”

108. The city agreed that the specific “lighting tax” would still be assessed, however, until 1744, suggesting that the objection to the street lighting went beyond its cost. Ibid.

109. The original verse:

Als unsre Stadt im Wohlstand sass,

Da war es finster auf der Strass,

Doch als das Unglück angefangen

Hat man Laternen aufgehangen,

Damit der arme Bürgersmann

Des Nachts zum Bettlen sehen kann.

Wir brauchen die Laternen nicht,

Wir sehn das Elend ohne Licht.

Hermann Ludwig, Strassburg vor hundert Jahren. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1888), p. 277.

110. See Christian Casanova, Nacht-Leben: Orte, Akteure und obrigkeitliche Disziplinierung in Zürich, 1523–1833 (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), pp. 11–206. In Zurich no public street lighting was established until the French occupation in 1799.

111. Tatler 263 (December 14, 1710).

6 Colonizing the urban night: Resistance, gender, and the public sphere

1. On the expansion of the night watch, see J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 169–207, Gerhard Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung in Paris: zur Entstehung und Durchsetzung von Normen im städtischen Alltag des Ancien Régime (1697–1715) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004), pp. 181–200, and Christian Casanova, Nacht-Leben: Orte, Akteure und obrigkeitliche Disziplinierung in Zürich, 1523–1833 (Zurich: Chronos,2007), pp. 141–206.

2. Eugène Defrance, Histoire de l’éclairage des rues de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904), p. 36: “le grand nombre de vagabonds et voleurs de nuit … et la quantité de vols et meutres qui s’y sont faits le soir et la nuit”; Lettie S. Multhauf, “The Light of Lamp-Lanterns: Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 239; Codex Austriacus, Supplementum Codicis Austriaci Sammlung Oesterreichischer Gesetze und Ordnungen … bis auf das Jahr 1720 (Leipzig: Eisfeld, 1748), III: 239: “zu Abwendung und Verhütung aller, nächtlicher weil eine Zeit her häufig in Schwang gegangen, und noch befürchtenden Mord und Diebereyen, wie auch Einführung einer allgemeinen Sicherheit.”

3. State-Poems; Continued from the Time of O. Cromwel, to this Present Year 1697 ([London]: s.n., 1697), pp. 243–46, 245.

4. I draw an analogy between the colonization of the night and the early modern understanding of the colonization of space and place, as seen for example in the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française: “Colonie. Peuple & habitans d’un païs qui se sont establis dans un autre.” (“Colony. People and inhabitants of one country who are established in another.”) For earlier references to “the colonization of the night” see Murray Melbin, Night As Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York: Free Press,1987), who accepts the image of the frontier as an unoccupied space; Norbert Schindler, “Nocturnal Disturbances: On the Social History of the Night in the Early Modern Period,” in Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 195: “Alongside the court aristocracy, the Counter-Reformation church … also sought to colonise the night and to extend into the evening its disciplinary grip on the everyday lives of subjects”; and Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171: “The colonization of the night was an essential part of the refashioned world of urban sociability.” On similar themes seen in the colonization of the night and in European colonization of Asia, America, and Africa, see below, n. 141, surveying the relevant scholarship on colonization and empire.

5. Friedrich Justin Bertuch, “Moden in Gebrauche und Eintheilung des Tages und der Nacht zu Verschiedenen Zeiten, und bey verschiedenen Völkern,” Journal der Moden[after 1786 Journal des Luxus und der Moden] 1 (May 1786): 200: “die Geschäfte des Tages allenthalben und immer desto später anfangen, jemehr sich die Societät verfeinert und der Luxus steigt.”

6. On “casual time” as resistance to structured public places and times, a “night that causes an ‘accident’,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 202–03.

7. Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 102, citing a Munich edict of 1630.

8. On apprentices, servants, and maids in London night life, see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 198–221. On nocturnal youthful disorder in smaller cities and towns see David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 79–84, 147–49; Frédérique Pitou, “Jeunesse et désordre social: les coureurs de nuit à Laval au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderene et contemporaine 47, 1 (2000): 69–92; and Norbert Schindler, “Guardians of Disorder: Rituals of Youthful Culture at the Dawn of the Modern Age,” in A History of Young People in the West, ed. Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), I: 240–82.

9. Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, pp. 414, 194. D’Argenson served as lieutenant-général de police of Paris from 1697 to 1715; he was preceded by the first lieutenant-général de police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie (served 1667–97).

10. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 413.

11. From a Strasbourg ordinance of 1651 forbidding “das nächtliche, unmänschliche graßieren, Jauchzen, Jählen und Schreien in Gassen und Häusern” quoted in Johannes Beinert, “Moscherosch im Dienste der Stadt Straßburg,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Sprache und Literatur Elsass-Lothringens 23 (1907): 138–46, here 144.

12. High-ranking imperial officials like Ludwig Wilhelm usually rented suitable accomodations in Vienna, as near the Hofburg as possible, but housing in the city was extraordinarily scarce. See John P. Spielman, The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600–1740 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 75–100.

13. As armed and liveried servants, lackeys were often singled out as especially violent and associated with night-time violence. As Scarron remarked:

Pages, laquais, voleurs de nuit;

Carosses, chevaux et grand bruit:

C’est là Paris. Que vous en semble?

See Léon Hilaire, “Pages et laquais,” L’Investigateur: Journal de l’Institut historique 52 (1881): 149–54, and Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2006).

14. “Printz Louis mit Einigen Handkranaten (Unter die tumultierenden werffend) frieden gemacht, wodurch Pferde und Menschen beschädiget, Und etliche schon gestorben sind.” Ludwig Baur, “Berichte des Hessen-Darmstädtischen Gesandten Justus Eberhard Passer an die Landgräfin Elisabeth Dorothea über die Vorgänge am kaiserlichen Hofe und in Wien von 1680 bis 1683,” Archiv für Österreichische Geschichte 37 (1867): 271–409, 331–32.

15. It is no coincidence that Ludwig Wilhelm gained some of his first miliary experience at the siege of Philippsburg in 1676.

16. Female Tatler 67 (December 9, 1709), [p. 2]. See Fidelis Morgan, The Female Tatler (London: Dent, 1992).

17. John Childs, ed., “Captain Henry Herbert’s Narrative of His Journey through France with his Regiment, 1671–3,” Camden Fourth Series 30 (1990): 271–369, here 304–05.

18. A view of Paris, and places adjoining … Written by a gentleman lately residing at the English Ambassador’s at Paris (London: Printed for John Nutt, near Stationers-Hall, 1701), p. 11.

19. Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris: c’est à dire, instructions fidèles, pour les voiageurs de condition, comment ils se doivent conduire, s’ils veulent faire un bon usage de leur tems & argent, durant leur Séjour à Paris (Leiden: J. Van Abcoude,1727), ed. Alfred Franklin as La vie de Paris sous la Régence (Paris: Éditions Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1897), p. 230.

20. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de M. le duc de Saint-Simon, 42 vols., ed. A. de Boislisle and Léon Lecestre (Paris: [Montpensier], 1975–; reprint of the 1879–1930 Hachette edn.), XVII: 396.

21. Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself, ed. Andrew Clark. Oxford Historical Society Publications 19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), III: 187, 423; entries for May 25, 1686 and May 23, 1693. See A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 228.

22. See above, chapter 5, section 5.4.

23. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 97–114.

24. Auguste Philippe Herlaut, “L’éclairage des rues de Paris à la fin du XVIIe siècle et au XVIIIe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 43 (1916): 130–240; here 226.

25. Christian Otto Mylius, ed. Corpus Constitutionum Marchicarum (Berlin and Halle: Buchladen des Waisenhauses, 1737–55), part 6, section 2, cols. 37–38, 73–74, 169, and part 1, section 1, cols. 171–72; Catherine Denys, “Le bris de lanternes dans les villes du Nord au XVIIIe siècle: quelques réflexions sur la signification d’un délit ordinaire,” in La petite délinquance du moyen âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Benoît Garnot and Rosine Fry, Publications de l’Université de Bourgogne 90 (Dijon: EUD, 1998), pp. 309–19; Achilles Augustus von Lersner and Georg August von Lersner, Achill. Augusti von Lersner nachgehohlte, vermehrte und continuirte Frankfurthische Chronica Zweyter Theil (Frankfurt: Johann Adam Recksroth, 1734), p. 27; Patrick Meehan, “Early Dublin Public Lighting,” Dublin Historical Record 5 (1943): 130–36.

26. Conrad Richter, “Die erste öffentliche Beleuchtung der Stadt Wien,” Alt-Wien 6 (1897): 10. In Clermont in 1698 lantern vandals were threatened with excommunication: André-Georges Manry, Histoire de Clermont-Ferrand (Clermont-Ferrand: Bouhdiba,1993), pp. 166–67.

27. Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, ed. Raymond Phineas Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), p. 25.

28. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden [hereafter SHAD], Loc. 1779, “Acta, das zu Conservation der Nachtlaternen …”, fo. 3: “aus Muthwillen boßhafter Leuthe gar leicht gekränket werden möchten.”

29. SHAD, Loc. 1779, fo. 5; Theodor Distel, “Miscellen 5,” Archiv für sächsische Geschichte n.s. 5, 1 (1878): 90–92.

30. Schivelbusch (Disenchanted Night, pp. 86, 98, 121) makes this point. The political symbolism and practical value of the street lighting help explain the initial distribution of the lighting evenly across a city. As symbols of the power and authority of the monarch and city government, and as a practical deterrent to crime, it could hardly have been otherwise. To be sure, politically or commercially important streets and squares were better lit, but leaving a street or section of the city dark would imply that it was somehow outside the power and authority of the lights, and it would certainly offer a place for those “shy of the light” to gather. On the density of street lighting in Paris and Rouen, see Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120, and Jean-Pierre Bardet, Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: les mutations d’un espace social, Regards sur l’histoire 50 (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1983), pp. 125–27 and tables 60–61.

31. Paul Jacob Marperger, Abermahliger Versuch zur Abhandlung einer nützlichen Policey-Materia, nehmlich von denen Gassen Laternen, Strand- und Wacht-Feuern, und andern nächtlichen Illuminationibus oder Erleuchtungen der Gassen und Strassen(Dresden and Leipzig: “Verlegung des Authoris,” 1722), pp. 27–8.

32. Ibid., p. 28.

33. Carl Eduard Vehse, Geschichte des Östereichischen Hofs und Adels und der östereichischen Diplomatie (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1851), VII: 66–67, citing the Lettres historiques. See Spielman, City and the Crown, pp. 123–36 on anti-Jewish violence in Vienna.

34. Charles Somerset, The Travel Diary (1611–1612) of an English Catholic, Sir Charles Somerset. Edited from the Manuscript in the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds, ed. Michael G. Brennan (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1993), p. 281.

35. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn. In Six Volumes, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), II: 472.

36. Andrew Balfour, Letters write [sic] to a friend by the learned and judicious Sir Andrew Balfour … containing excellent directions and advices for travelling thro’ France and Italy (Edinburgh: s.n., 1700), p. 230.

37. Petr Andreevich Tolstoi, The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi: A Muscovite in Early Modern Europe, trans. Max J. Okenfuss (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 102. Padua’s reputation extended into the early eighteenth century, when another English visitor noted that “The City is … well Fortified, but thinly Inhabited; which is occasion’d by the frequent Tumults and Quarrels of the Scholars, who usually walk the Streets arm’d in the Night-time, and even seek Occasions of doing Mischief.” Ellis Veryard, An account of divers choice remarks … taken in a journey through the Low-Countries, France, Italy, and part of Spain (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1701), p. 124.

38. Carl Heiler, “Der Herborner Student 1584–1817,” Nassauischen Annalen 55 (1935): 79–85.

39. Herbert Schwarzwälder, Sitten und Unsitten, Bräuche und Missbräuche im alten Bremen in den Proklamen eines hochedlen, hochweisen Rathes dieser Stadt (Bremen: Schünemann, 1984), p. 69.

40. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, “La violence des étudiants à Toulouse à la fin du XVe et au XVIe siècle (1460–1610),” Annales du Midi 94 (1982): 243–62, and Beinert, “Moscherosch,” p. 144.

41. As cited in John Lough, France Observed in the Seventeenth Century by British Travelers (Stocksfield, UK: Oriel Press, 1985), pp. 103–04.

42. Neil Brough and R.J. Kavanagh, “Kreuzgang’s Precursors: Some Notes on the Nachtwachen des Bonaventura,” German Life and Letters 39, 3 (1986): 173–92, here 185.

43. 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; here p. 182; Uta Tschernuth, “Studentisches Leben in den Bursen,” in Das alte Universitätsviertel in Wien 1385–1985, ed. Günther Hamann, Kurt Mühlberger, and Franz Skacel, Schriftenreihe des Universitätsarchivs 2 (Vienna: Universitätsverlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1985), pp. 153–62.

44. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005), p. 24; I.500–02

45. Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, p. 192.

46. Ibid., pp. 193–95.

47. Marc-René de Voyer d’Argenson, Notes de René d’Argenson, intéressantes pour l’histoire des moeurs et de la police de Paris: à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Imprimerie Émile Voitelain et cie, 1866), p. 36.

48. In the transition from Fremdzwang to Selbstzwang proposed by Elias in The Civilizing Process, this pressure on fathers to control sons could be seen as a key intermediate step. See further evidence in Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, pp. 410ff.

49. See Robert Shoemaker, “Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Social History 26, 2 (2001): 190–208, and Gustav Gugitz, “Mord und Totschlag in Alt-Wien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der öffentlichen Sicherheit und Kriminalität in Wien im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien 14 (1958): 141–55.

50. Gerd Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör: Kriminalität, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Bonn and Berlin: Bouvier, 1991), pp. 300–01.

51. Claude Fouret, “Douai au XVIe siècle: une sociabilité de l’agression,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 34 (1987): 3–29; Joachim Eibach, Frankfurter Verhöre: städtische Lebenswelten und Kriminalität im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schöningh,2003), pp. 222–24, and the studies cited there.

52. Sébastien Cabantous, “Crimes et délits nocturnes en pays tarnais au siècle des lumières,” Revue du Tarn, third series, 181 (2001): 107–31, and Julius R. Ruff, Crime, Justice, and Public Order in Old Regime France: The Sénéchaussées of Libourne and Bazas, 1696–1789 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 83–85.

53. Gugitz, “Mord und Totschlag in Alt-Wien”; cf. the Totenbeschauprotokolle (coroners’ reports) in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv.

54. The Proceedings on the King’s Commissions of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol Delivery for the City of London; and also Gaol Delivery for the County of Middlesex, held at Justice-Hall in the Old Bailey [hereafter OBSP], January 14, 1687: “J. W— and J. P— were Indicted for Killing one Peter Penrose Bell-man in the Parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields, on the 30th. day of November last.” On attitudes toward nightwatchmen, see Brough and Kavanagh, “Kreuzgang’s Precursors.”

55. Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, pp. 193–95, citing cases from 1696 and 1697.

56. See Catherine Denys, “The Development of Police Forces in Urban Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Urban History 36, 3 (2010): 332–44, and Catherine Denys, Brigitte Marin, and Vincent Milliot, eds., Réformer la police. Les mémoires policiers en Europe au XVIIIe siècle (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). On the end of the night watch see Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhoff and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 73–86.

57. d’Argenson, Notes, pp. 63–64.

58. Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, pp. 183–84.

59. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, pp. 167–97.

60. Anne Emily Garnier Newdigate-Newdegate, Cavalier and Puritan in the Days of the Stuarts; Compiled from the Private Papers and Diary of Sir Richard Newdigate, Second Baronet, with Extracts from Ms. News-Letters Addressed to Him between 1675 and 1689 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), pp. 234–38.

61. Evelyn, Diary, ed. de Beer, vol. V, Kalendarium, 1690–1706, p. 363.

62. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 18.

63. See Karin Sennefelt, “Citizenship and the Political Landscape of Libelling in Stockholm, c. 1720–70,” Social History 33, 2 (2008): 145–63, and the literature cited there. See also the essays by Hohendahl, Baker, Zaret, and Eley in Craig Calhoun, ed.,Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), and Kurt Imhof, “‘Öffentlichkeit’ als historische Kategorie und als Kategorie der Historie,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 46, 1 (1996): 3–25.

64. Habermas, Strukturwandel, pp. 58–69; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 5–14.

65. See the “Vorwort zur Neuauflage 1990” in Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, pp. 11–50; see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “The Theory of the Public Sphere Revisited,” in Sites of Discourse – Public and Private Spheres – Legal Culture, ed. Uwe Böker and Julie A. Hibbard (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 13–33, and Geoff Eley, “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere,” Positions 10, 1 (2002): 219–36.

66. For example, the essays in Peter Lake and Steven C. A. Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2007).

67. Structural Transformation, p. 34; Strukturwandel, p. 95: “Privatleuten, die produktive Arbeit tun.”

68. Brian William Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

69. See the valuable study by Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 185–88, arguing that alehouses and taverns, rather than coffeehouses or salons, were the leading sites of social and cultural exchange in the last century of the Old Regime.

70. Johann Baptist Suttinger, Consuetudines Austriacae ad stylum excelsi regiminis infra anasum olim accommodatae (Nuremberg: Martin Endter, 1718), p. 23. The Réflexions morales, satiriques et comiques, sur les moeurs de notre siècle of Jean Frédéric Bernard (Amsterdam: chez Jean Frederic Bernard, 1713) describes the coffeehouses of the Dutch Republic as filled with “a spirit of sedition and discord … an anarchy of libertine discourse,” as quoted in Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt,The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 37.

71. Steve Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–34.

72. Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 47.

73. Ibid., pp. 49–50. Of course, the gatherings essential to a public sphere did not take place only at night.

74. M.P., Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London: John Starkey, 1661). See below, chapter 8, on the implications of coffeehouse sociability at night for the early Enlightenment.

75. Alfred Franklin, Le café, le thé et le chocolat, La vie privée d’autrefois 13 (Paris: Éditions Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1893), pp. 73–74.

76. Ibid., p. 73.

77. Ibid., p. 74.

78. Ibid., p. 76.

79. 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, and “Kaffee und Kaffeehäuser in der Universitätsstadt Helmstedt vom Ende des 17. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 72 (1991): 95–118.

80. Mary Jepp Clarke, “Letter from Mary Jepp Clarke to Ursula Clarke Venner, March 01, 1691,” in Clarke Family Letters (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2002), record numer S7378-D180.

81. Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris, ed. Franklin, p. 52. On news-men or “nouvellistes” in French cafés see François Fosca, Histoire des cafés de Paris ([Paris]: Firmin-Didot et cie, 1934), p. 20.

82. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat Personen, ed. with a commentary by Gotthart Frühsorge (Berlin, 1728; repr. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990), pp. 467–68.

83. Chevalier de Mailly, Les entretiens des cafés de Paris et les diferens qui y surviennent (Trévoux: Chez Etienne Ganeau, 1702).

84. Abraham a Sancta Clara, Etwas für alle, das ist: Eine kurtze beschreibung allerley stands- ambts- und gewerbs-persohnen: mit beygeruckter sittlichen lehre und biblischen concepten (Würzburg: druckts Martin Frantz Hertz, 1711), p. 152. See Pieter van Eeghen and Johan Philip van der Kellen, Het werk van Jan en Casper Luyken (Amsterdam: F. Muller & Co., 1905), II: 407–13.

85. John Tatham, Knavery in all trades, or, The coffee-house a comedy: as it was acted in the Christmas holidays by several apprentices with great applause (London: Printed by J.B. for W. Gilbertson and H. Marsh, 1664), fo. D3r.

86. Franklin, Le café, pp. 65–69.

87. Willem van der Hoeven, ’t Koffyhuis: kluchtspel (Amsterdam: de erfg. van J. Lescailje, 1712). See Pim Reinders and Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, Koffie in Nederland: vier eeuwen cultuurgeschiedenis (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), p. 49.

88. A proclamation for the suppression of coffee-houses (London: Printed by the assigns of John Bill, and Christopher Barker, 1675); see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (London: HMSO, 1860–1939), XVII: 465, 503. A report of December 12, 1674 does refer to “much talk abroad” which “seems the nocturnal exercises at the coffee houses.” Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II, XVI: 459.

89. Jean-Baptiste Antoine Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, writing on December 27, 1685, as cited in Jean Leclant, “Coffee and Cafés in Paris, 1644–1693,” in Food and Drink in History, Selections from the Annales, Économies, Sociétes, Civilisations 5, ed. Robert Forster and Orest A. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 91.

90. Gustav Gugitz, Das Wiener Kaffeehaus; ein Stück Kultur- und Lokalgeschichte (Vienna: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1940), p. 31.

91. Casimir Freschot (1640?–1720), Mémoires de la cour de Vienne, ou Remarques faites par un voyageur curieux sur l’état present de cette cour (Cologne: Chez Guillaume Etienne [actually The Hague], 1705), pp. 31–32.

92. Stadtarchiv Leipzig [hereafter SdAL], Tit. I, Nr. 37, “Thee- und Caffe- Stuben,” May 18, 1697.

93. SdAL, Tit. I, Nr. 37, and Tit. LX B 3b, “in denen sogenandten Caffee-Häusern,” August 19, 1704. Closing hours were set at 9 p.m. in winter and 10 p.m. in the summer.

94. Stadtarchiv Frankfurt, Bmb 1703, fos. 93v–94v.

95. Stadtarchiv Frankfurt, Bmb 1703, fo. 142r: “ihre caffèschilde sovort einziehen und sich furters gaste auff den caffè, und anders getrancke zu setzen, bey hoher straffe enthalt(en) sollen.”

96. Stadtarchiv Frankfurt, Rechneiamt Bücher Nr. 7, fo. 69v (old fo. 67v): “Abschaffung der The und Caffee Häußer.”

97. See Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt, Studien zur Geschichte der Lebenshaltung in Frankfurt a. M. während des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karl Bräuer, Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission der Stadt Frankfurt a.M. 2: 1–2 (Frankfurt: Baer, 1915), I: 352.

98. The coffeehouses of Cologne were likewise closed by an edict of August 23, 1706: see the reference to “Abschaffung der Coffehäuser” in Karl Härter and Michael Stolleis, eds., Repertorium der Policeyordnungen der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. VI, Reichsstädte 2 Köln, ed. Klaus Militzer, Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 191 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2005), p. 1061.

99. Alexander Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Hermann Minjon, 1910–25), IV: 206–07.

100. Spectator 9 (March 10, 1711), as quoted in Valérie Capdeville, “Les clubs londoniens: vie nocturne et transgression,” in La nuit dans l’Angleterre des lumières, ed. Suzy Halimi (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2008), pp. 21–34. The majority of these clubs met in private rooms in taverns or pubs, rather than in coffeehouses. See Kümin, Drinking Matters, pp. 187–88.

101. Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 250.

102. In Europe’s very largest cities, retail trade helped light up the night. Schivelbusch (Disenchanted Night, pp. 144–46) cites Defoe’s Complete Tradesman (1728) on London shopkeepers’ use of lavish lighting to attract customers. The account of Paris by Nemeitz notes that “Many shops and most of the cafés, cookshops, and public houses are open until 10 or 11 o’clock, and the windows of these establishments are adorned with an infinity of lights, which shed a great light in the streets.” Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris, ed. Franklin, p. 57.

103. “Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit läßt sich vorerst als die Sphäre der zum Publikum versammelten Privatleuten begreifen; diese beanspruchen die obrigkeitlich reglementierte Öffentlichkeit alsbald gegen die öffentliche Gewalt selbst,” Habermas, Strukturwandel, p. 86.

104. As initiated by Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

105. Bertuch, “Moden in Gebrauche und Eintheilung des Tages und der Nacht,” pp. 199–201.

106. Ibid. See Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12–26 on feminization and “the Revenge of the night.”

107. For much more see Ellis, Coffee-House, pp. 137–38; Lawrence Klein, “Coffeehouse Civility, 1660–1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, 1 (1996): 30–52, here 38.

108. E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Landes, Women and the Public Sphere.

109. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Grossen Herren. Reprint of the second edn., Berlin, 1733, ed. with a commentary by Monika Schlechte (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990), pp. 18–19: “die Nacht in Tag, und der Tag in Nacht verwandelt,” and Théophraste Renaudot, ed., Quatriesme centurie des questions traitées aux conférences du Bureau d’Adresse, depuis le 24e Ianvier 1639, jusques au 10e Iuin 1641 (Paris: Bureau d’adresse, 1641), p. 416: “en la vie des courtizans de l’un et l’autre sexe qui font de la nuit jour et du jour la nuit.”

110. “Nous revînmes gaiement à la faveur des lanternes et dans la sûreté des voleurs.” Marie de Rabutin-Chantal Sévigné, Correspondance: texte établi, presenté et annoté par Roger Duchene (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), I: 623.

111. Letter dated Paris, August 26, 1679. The writer and satirist Leti was a Milanese convert to the Reformed church, writing to the marquise while she was in prison. C.H. de Saint-Dider, ed., Mémoires de la marquise de Courcelles … et sa correspondance, précédés d’une histoire de sa vie et de son procès. Revue et augmentée d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Académie des Bibliophiles, 1869), pp. 287–304, 341ff.; here p. 292.

112. See Susanne Claudine Pils, Schreiben über Stadt. Das Wien der Johanna Theresia Harrach 1639–1716, Forschungen und Beiträge zur Wiener Stadtgeschichte 36 (Vienna: Deuticke, 2002), pp. 227–32, 253–55 on the evening and night life of the Countess Harrach.

113. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67), I: 20–21.

114. John Vanbrugh, A Journey to London, 2.1, in John Vanbrugh, The Relapse; The Provoked Wife; The Confederacy; A Journey to London; The Country House, ed. Brean Hammond (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 274–75.

115. Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 250.

116. Albrecht, “Coffee-Drinking,” p. 94; Leclant, “Coffee and Cafés,” pp. 89–90; Ellis, Coffee House, pp. 80–81.

117. Franklin, Le café, pp. 65–69.

118. Ibid., p. 62, quoting Le porte-feuille galant, ouvrage mêlé de prose et de vers. Avec plusieurs questions sérieuses et galantes (June 15, 1700), p. 3.

119. Mailly, pp. 367–68, and Marie-Pascale Pieretti, “Is That Seat Taken? Women and Café Life in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris,” unpublished paper, 2004.

120. On salons, see Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2006). These national and regional contrasts call for more research on gender and the early modern night.

121. Paul Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England,” Seventeenth Century 13, 2 (1998): 212–38.

122. OBSP, “Dorothy Hall, of the Parish of St. Clement Danes,” May 12, 1687.

123. OBSP, “Jane King, a notorious Night-walker,” May 31, 1688.

124. Bernard Mandeville, An enquiry into the causes of the frequent executions at Tyburn (London: Printed and sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, 1725), pp. 10–11.

125. Ibid., p. 10.

126. For an overview of the debate, see Brian William Cowan, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 127–57. See also Helen Berry, “‘Nice and Curious Questions’: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury,” Seventeenth Century 12, 2 (1997): 257–76.

127. Ellis, Coffee House, pp. 66–67.

128. On satires of women who kept coffeehouses, see ibid., pp. 109–10, especially re London’s Amsterdam Coffee House.

129. Ibid., p. 124.

130. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I. and George II. The Letters of Monsieur César De Saussure to His Family, ed. and trans. Madame Van Muyden (London: J. Murray, 1902), pp. 164–65.

131. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 60.

132. The case of Sarah Turbat, OBSP, October 10, 1722, is noted in McDowell, Women of Grub Street, p. 73. Cf. pp. 58–62 on “Hawkers and Ballad-Singers.”

133. As quoted in Peter Albrecht, “Die ‘Caffe-Menscher’ im. 18. Jahrhundert,” in Coffeum wirft die Jungfrau um: Kaffee und Erotik in Porzellan und Grafik aus drei Jahrhunderten, ed. Ulla Heise (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1998), pp. 36–46; here p. 39.

134. Die Verschlemmerte und bezauberte Koffe- und Thee-Welt: welche eine Menge artiger Begebenheiten enthält, so sich seit kurzem zu Amsterdam, Rotterdam, in dem Haage, zu Uitrecht, und in denen benachbarten Orten, sowohl unter verheyratheten als ledigen Personen, zugetragen (Frankfurt and Leipizig, 1737; first edn., Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1701), as quoted in Albrecht, “Die ‘Caffe-Menscher’,” p. 39.

135. Gottlieb Siegmund Corvinus, Nutzbares, galantes und curiöses Frauenzimmer-Lexicon: Worinnen nicht nur Der Frauenzimmer geistlich- und weltliche Orden, Aemter, Würden, Ehren-Stellen, Professionen und Gewerbe … Nahmen und Thaten der Göttinnen … gelehrter Weibes-Bilder … auch anderer … Trachten und Moden … Gewohnheiten und Gebräuche … Ergötzlichkeiten … Gebrechen … und alles … was einem Frauenzimmer vorkommen kan, und ihm nöthig zu wissen … Ordentlich nach dem Alphabet … abgefaßt (Leipzig: bey Joh. Friedrich Gleditsch und Sohn, 1715), col. 285. Albrecht, “Die ‘Caffe-Menscher’,” p. 44, quotes Braunschweig records from 1698 and 1711 expelling from the city “Caffeejungfer” and a “Caffeeschenkerin” for moral offenses.

136. SdAL, Tit. I, Nr. 37, and Tit. LX B 3b, “in denen sogenandten Caffee-Häusern,” August 19, 1704.

137. Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 244.

138. On respectable women in English alehouses and taverns, see Bernard Capp, “Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse in Late Stuart England,” in The Trouble with Ribs: Women, Men and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anu Korhonen and Kate Lowe, Collegium: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2 (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2007): 103–27. E-publication accessed at www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume_2/index.htm.

139. Habermas, Strukturwandel, p. 18: “in derselben Weise wie Arbeiter, Bauern und der “Pöbel”, also die “unselbstständigen” Männer.”

140. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

141. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 40.

142. Cowan, “What Was Masculine,” p. 132, citing McDowell, Women of Grub Street, pp. 285–86.

143. McDowell, Women of Grub Street, p. 285.

144. The rich scholarship on colonial cultures and European empires has identified several features of early modern and modern colonization that resonate with the colonization of the night described here. The most prominent feature is the role of gender; for the British empire see Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 14–45, and the literature cited there on the co-production of colonized spaces (and times!) by state and private actors, and by colonizer and colonized, and on gendered access to colonized sites. Other key issues which suggest valuable comparisons, such as respectability, the control of sexuality, mobility, and the role of the middle class, are discussed in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette M. Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Adelle Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (University of Toronto Press, 2001); and Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). These comparisons warrant further investigation.

7 Colonizing the rural night?

1. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg [hereafter HstAM], Bestand 17d Reg Cassel Familienrep. von Eschwege, Paket 5 (“Causa Criminalis”), fo. 1: “Morgens fruhe vortage ungefehr zwischen zwey undt drey Uhr.”

2. HstAM, Bestand 17d Reg Cassel Familienrep. von Eschwege, Paket 5, fo. 1.

3. HstAM, Bestand 17d Reg Cassel Familienrep. von Eschwege, Paket 5, fos. 2–4

4. Hermann Grebe, “Ein Erbvergleich zwischen den Adelshäusern von Eschwege zu Aue und Reichensachsen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde 95 (1990): 233–58, here 233–34.

5. 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 (Constance: UVK, 2002), pp. 173–90; here p. 177.

6. HstAM, Bestand 17d Reg Cassel Familienrep. von Eschwege, Paket 5, fo. 2.

7. The phrase is from Norbert Schindler, “Guardians of Disorder: Rituals of Youthful Culture at the Dawn of the Modern Age,” in A History of Young People in the West, ed. Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), I: 240–82.

8. Robert Muchembled, “La violence et la nuit sous l’Ancien Régime,” Ethnologie française 21, 3 (1991): 237–42, 238; see above, chapter 1, for a similar comment from the Halle barber-surgeon Johann Deitz.

9. 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.

10. Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009), pp. 307–10.

11. Cornelius Novelli, “Sin, Sight, and Sanctity in the Miller’s Tale: Why Chaucer’s Blacksmith Works at Night,” Chaucer Review 33, 2 (1998): 168–75.

12. Alain Cabantous, “La nuit rustique. Monde rural et temps nocturne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Les fruits de la récolte. Études offertes à Jean-Michel Boehler, ed. Isabelle Laboulais and Jean-François Chauvard (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg,2007), pp. 53–56. A south German guide from 1705 advised that “what can be done under the roof by night and during a storm shall neither be done during clear, beautiful weather nor outside in the fields.” See Bernd Roeck, Civic Culture and Everyday Life in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 239–40.

13. See Renate Müller, Licht und Feuer im ländlichen Haushalt: Lichtquellen und Haushaltsgeräte (Hamburg: Altonaer Museum, 1994).

14. “Ein Hausvater gleichet einer Hausuhr, darnach sich jedermann mit Aufstehen, Schlafengehen, Arbeiten, Essen und allen Geschäften richten muß,” as cited in Otto Brunner, Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist; Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg, 1612–1688 (Salzburg: O. Müller, 1949), p. 285. See also Heimo Cerny, “Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg (1612–1688). Ein niederösterreichischer Landedelmann, Schriftsteller und Agronom,” Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich n.s 54/55 (1988/89): 59–84.

15. Thomas Tusser (1524?–1580), Five hundred points of good husbandry as well for the champion or open countrey, as also for the woodland or several, mixed, in every moneth, with huswifery, over and besides the book of huswifery (London: Printed by J.M. for the Company of Stationers, 1663), pp. 133–34.

16. See Jürgen Bücking, Kultur und Gesellschaft in Tirol um 1600: des Hippolytus Guarinonius’ Grewel der Verwüstung menschlichen Geschlechts (1610) als kulturgeschichtliche Quelle des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1968), pp. 153–54, and Alwin Schulz, Das Häusliche leben der europäischen Kulturvölker vom Mittelalter bis zur zweiten Hälfte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1903), p. 337.

17. See Birgit Emich, “Zwischen Disziplinierung und Distinktion: Der Schlaf in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Werkstatt Geschichte 34 (2003): 53–75, and the literature cited there.

18. Mary Jepp Clarke, “Letter from Mary Jepp Clarke to Edward Clarke, April 13, 1700,” in Clarke Family Letters (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2002), record number S7378-D368.

19. Early modern spinning bees have been examined primarily within the various national and regional traditions. The most recent studies are Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, pp. 64–68; Michel Vernus, La Veillée: découverte d’une tradition (Yens-sur-Morges: Cabédita, 2004); Carl- Jochen Müller, “‘Rechte Pflanzschulen aller Laster’? Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen – Bekämpfung und Behauptung einer ländlichen Institution,” in Stadt und Land: Bilder, Inszenierungen und Visionen in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Wolfgang von Hippel zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Sylvia Schraut and Bernhard Stier (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001), pp. 373–89; Albert Schnyder, “Lichtstuben im alten Basel. Zu einer von Frauen geprägten Form frühneuzeitlicher Geselligkeit,” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 92, 1 (1996): 1–13; and Uwe Henkhaus, Das Treibhaus der Unsittlichkeit: Lieder, Bilder und Geschichte(n) aus der hessischen Spinnstube (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1991).

20. John Cashmere, “Sisters Together: Women without Men in Seventeenth-Century French Village Culture,” Journal of Family History 21, 1 (1996): 44–62.

21. Achim Landwehr, Policey im Alltag: die Implementation frühneuzeitlicher Policeyordnungen in Leonberg (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), p. 254, and Henkhaus, Treibhaus der Unsittlichkeit, pp. 16–23, emphasize the importance of labor at spinning bees as a balance to the authorities’ fixation on sociability at the gatherings.

22. Schnyder, “Lichtstuben im alten Basel.” The season for the spinning bees thus matched that of the court in residence in Paris or Vienna.

23. See ibid. and Edward Shorter, “The ‘Veillée’ and the Great Transformation,” in The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France, from the Old Régime to the Twentieth Century, ed. Jacques Beauroy, Marc Bertrand, and Edward T. Gargan, Stanford French and Italian Studies 3 (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1977), pp. 127–40.

24. As quoted in Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” p. 376.

25. Felix Vialart de Herse, “Ordonnances et règlements faits dans le cours de sa visite en l’anné 1661,” in Statuts, ordonnances, mandements, règlements et lettres pastorales du diocèse de Châlons (Châlons: s.n., 1693), pp. 19–20, as published in Dominique Julia, “La réforme posttridentine d’après les procès-verbaux de visites pastorales: ordre et résistances,” in La società religiosa nell’età moderna: atti del Convegno studi di storia sociale e religiosa, Capaccio-Paestum, 18–21 maggio 1972 (Naples: Guida, 1973), pp. 403–04.

26. Darryl Ogier, “Night Revels and Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey,” Folklore 109 (1998): 53–62, here 54, quoting from the travel journal (1677) of Charles Trumbull.

27. Hans Medick, “Village Spinning Bees: Sexual Culture and Free Time among Rural Youth in Early Modern Germany,” in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 317–39; here p. 322.

28. Wilhelm Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland: moralhistorische Studien (Jena: Costenoble, 1897), p. 62.

29. C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 114.

30. “Dann sie weiß noch wol Zeit und Tag / Daß sie auch so zu Leben pflag. Denckt / auch noch wol der guten Zeit / Darinn sie hät gar manche Frewd.” On this print see Alison G. Stewart, “Distaffs and Spindles: Sexual Misbehavior in Sebald Beham’s Spinning Bee,” in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 127–54.

31. Medick, “Village Spinning Bees,” pp. 322–23.

32. Schnyder, “Lichtstuben im alten Basel,” pp. 7–10.

33. On the Netherlands see Gerard Rooijakkers, “Spinningen in de Pre-Industriële Plattelandssamenleving,” Focaal: Tdschrift voor Antropologie 4 (1986): 43–61

34. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), pp. 178–79.

35. The description of spinning bees in Guernsey by the English traveler Charles Trumbull in 1677 suggests they were unknown to him from his experiences in England, for example. See Richard Hocart, ed., “The Journal of Charles Trumbull,” Transactions of la Société Guernesiaise 21 (1984): 566–85.

36. Barkle was convicted of theft, sent to a Bridewell, and whipped. See James Rosenheim, ed., The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, Norfolk Record Society 54 ([Norwich]: Norfolk Record Society, 1991), p. 49.

37. See Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” p. 381.

38. See Niederstätter, “Rechts- und Kulturgeschichte der Nacht,” pp. 182–85; Stefan Breit, “Leichtfertigkeit” und ländliche Gesellschaft: voreheliche Sexualität in der frühen Neuzeit, Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution 23 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 87–89; and Thomas Paul Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln: Untersuchungen zur Durchsetzung der katholischen Reform in den Dekanaten Ahrgau und Bonn anhand von Visitationsprotokollen 1583–1761, Veröffentlichungen des Stadtarchivs Bonn 43 (Bonn: Edition Röhrscheid, 1989), pp. 176–79, on village dances in the Cologne region.

39. See Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, pp. 88–93; Ekirch, Day’s Close, pp. 197–202; Yochi Fischer-Yinon, “The Original Bundlers: Boaz and Ruth, and Seventeenth-Century English Courtship Practices,” Journal of Social History 35, 3 (2002): 683–705; Breit,“Leichtfertigkeit” und ländliche Gesellschaft, pp. 97–98 (“Bettfreien”); Arie Theodorus van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge University Press,1991), p. 94 (“night-courting” in North Holland); Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Renaissance (Munich: A. Langen, Verlag für Literatur und Kunst, 1909), pp. 230–38.

40. Jean-Louis Flandrin, “Repression and Change in the Sexual Life of Young People in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” Journal of Family History 2, 3 (1977): 199–203.

41. George A.E. Parfitt and Ralph A. Houlbrooke, eds., The Courtship Narrative of Leonard Wheatcroft, Derbyshire Yeoman (Reading: Whiteknights Press, 1986), pp. 21, 52–54.

42. Ibid., p. 61.

43. Ibid., p. 64.

44. Paul Delsalle, La Franche-Comté au temps des archiducs Albert et Isabelle, 1598–1633: documents choisis et présentés (Besançon: Presses universitaires franc-comtoises, 2002), pp. 59–60.

45. Ibid., p. 60.

46. Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 264.

47. On France, see ibid., pp. 235–76; on England, Parfitt and Houlbrooke, eds., Courtship Narrative, pp. 19–22; on southern Germany, Govind Sreenivasan, The Peasants of Ottobeuren, 1487–1726: A Rural Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 246–54.

48. Cabantous makes this point for rural life in general: Histoire de la nuit, p. 302.

49. See Medick, “Village Spinning Bees,” p. 323.

50. See Rosenheim, ed., Notebook of Robert Doughty, p. 47: “28 January 1665: [I] sent Robert Coe, Sir John Palgrave’s man, to Bridewell.”

51. Josephus Antonius Steiner, ed., Acta selecta ecclesiae Augustanae: accedit synopsis episcopalium decretorum per eandem ecclesiam a tempore Concilii Tridentini usque in praesentem annum promulgatum (Augsburg: M. Rieger, 1785), p. 257; cited in Rainer Beck, “Illegitimität und voreheliche Sexualität auf dem Land: Unterfinning, 1671–1770,” in Kultur der einfachen Leute: bayerisches Volksleben vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Munich: Beck, 1983), pp. 112–50; here p. 126.

52. As cited in Breit, “Leichtfertigkeit” und ländliche Gesellschaft, p. 217. Beck, “Unterfinning,” p. 235, n. 23 cites similar Bavarian mandates from 1643, 1654, 1671, and 1682.

53. Christoph Selhamer, Tuba Rustica. Das ist: Neue Gei-Predigen (Augsburg: Verlag Georg Schlüters, 1701), as excerpted in Karl Böck, Das Bauernleben in den Werken bayerischer Barockprediger (Munich: Schnell & Steiner, 1953), p. 79. See Thomas Groll, “Der Salzburger Dompfarrvikar, Weilheimer Stadtpfarrer u. Vilgertshofener Wallfahrtspriester Christoph Selhamer (1638–1708) als ausdrucksstarker Barockprediger,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Augsburger Bistumsgeschichte 43 (2009): 545–81.

54. Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” p. 380.

55. Breit, “Leichtfertigkeit” und ländliche Gesellschaft, p. 217.

56. See Robert Muchembled, La violence au village: sociabilité et comportements populaires en Artois du XVe au XVIIe siècle ([Turnhout]: Brepols, 1989), p. 219.

57. See the valuable study by Beat A. Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

58. See Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, “Introduction,” in The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 8–9, and Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne. Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Norm und Struktur. Studien zum sozialen Wandel in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit 21 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004).

59. Sébastien Cabantous, “Crimes et délits nocturnes en pays tarnais au siècle des lumières,” Revue du Tarn, third series, 181 (2001): 107–31, here 110–12; Kümin, Drinking Matters, p. 65; Michael Frank, “Satan’s Servant or Authorities’ Agent? Publicans in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in The World of the Tavern, ed. Kümin and Tlusty, p. 31. The main light at public houses in the evening came from the hearth, but inventories from seventeenth-century English public houses, for example, mention great and small candlesticks as well. See Janet Pennington, “Inns and Taverns of Western Sussex, 1550–1700: A Documentary and Architectural Investigation,” in The World of the Tavern, ed. Kümin and Tlusty, p. 125.

60. Kümin, Drinking Matters, p. 65, as seen in the north German county of Lippe, for example, where public houses were to close at 8 p.m. in the winter and 9 p.m. in the summer: Frank, “Satan’s Servant or Authorities’ Agent?” p. 36, and Hans Heiss, “The Pre-Modern Hospitality Trade in the Central Alpine Region: The Example of Tirol,” in The World of the Tavern, ed. Kümin and Tlusty, pp. 170–71, citing a complaint about “raucous and reckless games, boozing, and dancing until late in the night hours” from Brixen, 1785.

61. S. Cabantous, “Crimes et délits nocturnes,” p. 111, describing cabarets “never empty all night long” in 1764.

62. Kümin, Drinking Matters, p. 132.

63. B. Howard Cunnington, ed., Records of the County of Wilts: Being Extracts from the Quarter Sessions Great Rolls of the Seventeenth Century (Devizes: G. Simpson & Co., 1932), pp. 131–32. Perhaps dancing until the candles went out added a thrill absent from dancing in a public house.

64. Becker, Konfessionalisierung, pp. 176ff. In 1677 a Polish royal entourage was traveling near the small city of Schwangau late at night when they heard a distant rhythmic noise. Riding toward it, they found a large wooden hall built atop a local peak, filled with Bavarian peasants dancing. Michel Komaszynski, “Das Bayern des XVII. Jahrhunderts in polnischen Reisebeschreibungen,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 56, 3 (1993): 635–48.

65. Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung,” pp. 230–33 on brawls after tavern visits. On the nocturnal excesses of young men, see also Eva Lacour, “Faces of Violence Revisited. A Typology of Violence in Early Modern Rural Germany,” Journal of Social History34, 3 (2001): 649–67, here 657.

66. Kümin, Drinking Matters, p. 65.

67. Ekirch, Day’s Close, pp. 233–36; Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung,” pp. 230–33; Karl-S. Kramer, “Rechtliches Gemeindeleben im Maindreieck zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung,” Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde (1953): 136–48, here 140.

68. Peter Lahnstein, ed., Das Leben im Barock: Zeugnisse und Berichte 1640–1740 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1974), p. 148.

69. Ibid.

70. Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” pp. 382–84; Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: zur Kultur des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit, Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution 35 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), pp. 117–18.

71. As Schindler has commented in his “Guardians of Disorder.”

72. See the examples in Jacques Le Goff and Jean Claude Schmitt, eds., Le Charivari: actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris, 25–27 avril 1977, Civilisations et sociétés 67 (Paris: L’Ecole, 1981). The riding described by Justice of the Peace William Holcroft in Essex in 1682 took place during the day, as did a well-documented “groaning” (a mock childbirth meant to accuse a man of sodomy) held in Gloucestershire in 1716. See J.A. Sharpe, “William Holcroft, His Booke”: Local Office-Holding in Late Stuart Essex, Essex Historical Documents 2 (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1986), pp. xv, 73, and David Rollison, “Property, Ideology, and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village 1660–1740,” Past & Present 93, 1 (1981): 70–97.

73. Kramer, “Rechtliches Gemeindeleben,” pp. 139–40, as cited in Hermann Heidrich, “Grenzübergänge: Das Haus und die Volkskultur in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Kultur der einfachen Leute, ed. van Dülmen, pp. 17–19.

74. Kramer, “Rechtliches Gemeindeleben,” p. 140.

75. Jon Mathieu, “In der Kirche schlafen. Eine sozialgeschichtliche Lektüre von Conradin Riolas ‘Geistlicher Trompete’ (Strada im Engadin, 1709),” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 87, 3/4 (1991): 121–43. See also Emich, “Schlaf in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 62–63, and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 39.

76. Elfriede Moser-Rath, Predigtmärlein der Barockzeit: Exempel, Sage, Schwank und Fabel in geistlichen Quellen des oberdeutschen Raumes (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964), Urs Herzog, Geistliche Wohlredenheit: die katholische Barockpredigt (Munich: Beck,1991), and Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 39–40.

77. Wilhelm A. Eckardt and Helmut Klingelhöfer, ed. Bauernleben im Zeitalter des Dreissigjährigen Krieges: die Stausebacher Chronik des Caspar Preis, 1636–1667, Beiträge zur hessischen Geschichte 13 (Marburg: Trautvetter und Fischer, 1998), pp. 100–01. See also Kümin, Drinking Matters, p. 136.

78. Malcolm Greenshields describes a remarkably similar incident from the rural Haute Auvergne in 1654; see his An Economy of Violence in Early Modern France: Crime and Justice in the Haute Auvergne, 1587–1664 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 80–83.

79. Muchembled, Violence au village, pp. 20, 29–32; Muchembled, “Violence et la nuit,” p. 237. The majority of homicides in Muchembled’s sample probably occurred during the day, but violence was more common in the evening than later at night.

80. Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, p. 162.

81. Muchembled, Violence au village, pp. 122–23.

82. Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung,” p. 229.

83. Ibid., pp. 242–45; Muchembled, Violence au village, p. 122.

84. James Raine, ed., Depositions from the Castle of York, Relating to Offenses Committed in the Northern Counties in the Seventeenth Century, Publications of the Surtees Society 40 (Durham: Published for the Society by F. Andrews, 1861), pp. 141–42.

85. The Ruddock family had long held the Eddlethorpe farm; see Charles Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, Publications of the Surtees Society 62 (Durham: Published for the Society by Andrews and Co., 1875), p. 355.

86. Thomas Isham, The Diary of Thomas Isham of Lamport (1658–81), kept by him in Latin from 1671 to 1673 at his father’s command, trans. Norman Marlow, with Introduction, Appendixes and Notes by Sir Gyles Isham (Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), p. 207. Eva Lacour describes a similar encounter in the village of Onse (Rheinland-Pfalz) in “Faces of Violence Revisited,” pp. 655–56.

87. See Rainer Hambrecht, “‘Das Papier ist mein Acker …’ Ein Notizbuch des 17. Jahrhunderts von Handwerker-Bauern aus dem nordwestlichen Oberfranken,” Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung 29 (1984): 317–450, here 350, 388. Serge Dontenwill describes a similar clash at a church fair in Ambierle (near Roanne) on June 25, 1683, in his article “Aspects de la vie quotidienne et de l’organisation sociale des communautés paysannes du centre sud-est de la France au temps de Louis XIV (1638–1715),” Dix-septième siècle 234, 1 (2007): 97–134, here 132.

88. Paul Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England,” Seventeenth Century 13, 2 (1998): 212–38, here 213.

89. Rosenheim, ed., Notebook of Robert Doughty, p. 110.

90. See J.H. Porter, “Crime in the Countryside, 1600–1800,” and John E. Archer, “Poachers Abroad,” in The Unquiet Countryside, ed. G.E. Mingay (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 9–22, 52–64. Poaching and other rural nocturnal activities that unfolded outside the village, such as the clandestine gatherings of Anabaptists, the wanderings of lone travellers, and groups travelling by post-coach also came under increasing scrutiny in the eighteenth century. See below, section 7.2, on attempts to colonize the rural night.

91. Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung,” p. 244.

92. Isham, Diary, p. 180.

93. On rural travel at night, and on post-coaches and messengers’ access to cities after their gates had closed for the night, see Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, pp. 245–49; Roland Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing under Louis XIV: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), pp. 90–106; and Klaus Gerteis, “Das ‘Postkutschenzeitalter’: Bedingungen der Kommunikation im 18. Jahrhundert,” Aufklärung 4, 1 (1989): 55–78.

94. See Emich, “Schlaf in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 57–67.

95. Norbert Schindler has described the entire process, urban and rural, as an attempt “to colonise the night” – see above, chapter 6, note 4. See also the discussion of the “colonial context” of the attempts by Sir Richard Holford, a London businessman and Master in Chancery, to “civilize” his Gloucestershire estates, in Rollison, “Property, Ideology, and Popular Culture,” pp. 87–94.

96. For England, the importance of gender in the new contrast between the rural and the urban night can be seen in the shifting meaning of the term “nightwalker,” which came to refer exclusively to women in seventeenth-century London while keeping its centuries-old association with idle men in rural usage. See Griffiths, “Meanings of Nightwalking.”

97. More villages established regular night watches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but we see no establishment of any village street lighting intended to facilitate labor or leisure at night. See Cabantous, “Nuit rustique,” p. 63, and David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 73 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 58.

98. Selhamer, Tuba Rustica, in Böck, Bauernleben, p. 79.

99. See Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit, pp. 140–46, and the essays in Mario Sbriccoli, ed., La Notte: Ordine, sicurezza e disciplinamento in eta moderna (Florence: Ponte alle grazie, 1991).

100. Briggs, Communities of Belief, p. 263.

101. Nancy Locklin, Women’s Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 132.

102. François Lebrun, “La religion de l’évêque de Saint-Malo et de ses diocésains au début du XVIIe siècle, à travers les statuts synodaux de 1619,” in La religion populaire. Actes du colloque international … Paris, 17–19 octobre 1977, Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 576 (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1979), pp. 45–51; here p. 48. Also cited in Locklin, Women’s Work, p. 132.

103. Locklin, Women’s Work, p. 132.

104. Charles Lalore, ed., Ancienne et nouvelle discipline du diocèse de Troyes, de 1785 à 1843. Statuts et règlements (Troyes: Au Secrétariat de l’evêché, 1882–83), III: 257–58.

105. Medick, “Village Spinning Bees,” pp. 321–29.

106. Ibid., pp. 321–22.

107. Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” p. 380.

108. Flandrin, “Repression and Change,” pp. 201–02.

109. Becker, Konfessionalisierung, p. 297.

110. Renate Dürr, Mägde in der Stadt: das Beispiel Schwäbisch Hall in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 1995), p. 265.

111. Beck, “Unterfinning,” p. 126.

112. See Niederstätter, “Rechts- und Kulturgeschichte der Nacht,” p. 186 (Alpine Switzerland and Austria); Briggs, Communities of Belief, p. 263 (France); and Henkhaus, Treibhaus der Unsittlichkeit, pp. 133–50 (Hesse).

113. Kümin, Drinking Matters, pp. 74–114, 193.

114. Jürgen Schlumbohm, “Gesetze, die nicht durchgesetzt werden – ein Strukturmerkmal des frühneuzeitlichen Staates?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (1997): 647–63.

115. Müller, “Lichtstuben im Limpurgischen,” p. 381.

116. In this period no other established church attempted anything as ambitious as the Catholic program of public nocturnal devotion.

117. Bernard Dompnier, “Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des Quarante-Heures,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 67 (1981): 5–31; here 31; Schindler, “Nächtliche Ruhestörung,” p. 218.

118. See Jill R. Fehleison, “appealing to the Senses: The Forty Hours Celebrations in the Duchy of Chablais, 1597–98,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, 2 (2005): 375–96, and Dompnier, “Dévotion eucharistique.”

119. As quoted in Herbert Thurston, “Forty Hours’ Devotion,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Herbermann et al. (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913), VI: 152.

120. Dompnier, “Dévotion eucharistique,” pp. 12–31.

121. Fehleison, “Appealing to the Senses,” and Dompnier, “Dévotion eucharistique.”

122. Dompnier, “Dévotion eucharistique,” p. 11, quoting the contemporary account of Charles de Genève, Les trophées sacrés … en la conversion du duché de Chablais et pays circonvoisins de Genève.

123. Dompnier, “Dévotion eucharistique,” p. 31.

124. Ibid., p. 24, quoting a Paris document of 1633.

125. Briggs, Communities of Belief, p. 269.

126. Actes de l’église d’Amiens; recueil de tous les documents relatifs à la discipline du diocèse (Amiens: Caron, 1848–49), II: 51 (emphasis mine). Rural services at night were also prohibited in the diocese of Troyes in 1706; see Lalore, ed., Ancienne et nouvelle discipline du diocèse de Troyes, III: 311.

127. For an overview see Fred G. Rausch, “Karfreitagsprozessionen in Bayern,” in Hört, sehet, weint und liebt. Passionsspiele im alpenländischen Raum, ed. Michael Henker, Eberhard Dünninger, and Evamaria Brockhoff (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1990), pp. 87–93. Friedrich Zoepfl, “Die Feier des Karfreitags im Mindelheim des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins Dillingen an der Donau 30 (1917): 79–94, notes the importance of participants and spectators from neighboring villages at these processions.

128. Norbert Hölzl, “Das Jahrhundert der Passionsspiele und Karfreitagsprozessionen in St. Johann,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde n.s. 23, 2 (1969): 116–32. For an account of a nocturnal procession in a Steiermark village in 1671, see Roswitha Stipperger, “Eine Karfreitagsprozession in Schladming aus dem Jahre 1671,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde n.s. 33 (1979): 95–102.

129. Norbert Schindler, “‘Und daß die Ehre Gottes mehrers befördert würde …’. Mikrohistorische Bemerkungen zur frühneuzeitlichen Karfreitagsprozession in Traunstein,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde 136 (1996): 171–200; here 185.

130. Zoepfl, “Feier des Karfreitags im Mindelheim,” p. 85.

131. Julia, “La réforme posttridentine,” p. 383 on forbidding nocturnal processions in the dioceses of Senez, Aix, and Fréjus. On rural piety and confraternities in villages, see Joseph Aulagne, La réforme catholique du dix-septième siècle dans le diocèse de Limoges (Paris: H. Champion, 1908).

132. Julia, “La réforme posttridentine,” p. 396.

133. Published ibid., “Pièce annexe n. 8,” p. 396.

134. The struggle in France to make Christmas night a time of devotion rather than festivity needs further research. See the comments in Louis Pérouas, ed., Pierre Robert (1589–1658). Un Magistrat du Dorat entre érudition et observation, Foreword by Michel Cassan (Limoges: PULIM, 2001) and Michèle Bardon, ed., Journal (1676–1688) de Jean-Baptiste Raveneau (Étrépilly: Presses du Village, 1994).

135. Cf. Schlumbohm, “Gesetze,” pp. 653–56.

136. Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, second edn., ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 243.

137. The essay is “… Minimâ contentos Nocte Britannos,” Tatler 263 (December 14, 1710).

138. Henry Bourne, Antiquitates vulgares; or, the antiquities of the common people. Giving an account of several of their opinions and ceremonies (Newcastle: Printed by J. White for the author, 1725), p. 38.

139. Ibid., p. 76

140. Mark Aikenside (1721–70), The Pleasures of Imagination. A Poem. In Three Books (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, 1744), p. 24.

141. Birgit Emich pairs these terms in her article on “Schlaf in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 57–74. The divergence of urban and rural daily rhythms has also been noted by Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World(Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 169–71. See also John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), section II on windows, mirrors, and domestic lighting.

142. Curioses Gespräch: zwischen Hänsel und Lippel zweyen oberländischen Bauern bey der den 14.Märzen in … Wien … gehalten Illumination (Vienna: J.J. Jahn, 1745), fo. 2.

143. A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” American Historical Review 106, 2 (2001): 343–86; here 383.

144. The Letters of Mrs. E. Montagu, with Some of the Letters of Her Correspondence, ed. Matthew Montagu (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1809), I: 109 (July 11, 1740).

145. Ibid., pp. 113–14 (August 21, 1740).

146. Friedrich Justin Bertuch, “Moden in Gebrauche und Eintheilung des Tages und der Nacht zu Verschiedenen Zeiten, und bey verschiedenen Völkern,” Journal der Moden [after 1786 Journal des Luxus und der Moden] 1 (May 1786): 199–201.

147. Ibid., p. 200.

148. Ibid.

149. Ibid., pp. 200–01.

150. See Emich, “Schlaf in der Frühen Neuzeit,” p. 73.

151. Jean Baptiste Pujoulx, Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle; ou, Esquisse historique et morale des monumens et des ruines de cette capitale; de l’etat des sciences, des arts de l’industrie à cette époque, ainsi que des moeurs et des ridicules de ses habitans (Paris, Mathé: 1801).

152. Steele, “… Minimâ contentos Nocte Britannos.”

153. Sabine Ullmann, “Kontakte und Konflikte zwischen Landjuden und Christen in Schwaben während des 17. und zu Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Ehrkonzepte in der frühen Neuzeit: Identitäten und Abgrenzungen, ed. Sibylle Backmann et al. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp. 299–300.

8 Darkness and Enlightenment

1. “Il fera comme en plein midi / Clair la nuit dedans chaque rue …” Gazette de Robinet, October 29, 1667, as cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 90.

2. Baruch Spinoza, “Metaphysical Thoughts,” in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), p. 178.

3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 251.

4. The Athenian Oracle: being an entire collection of all the valuable questions and answers in the old Athenian mercuries … By a member of the Athenian Society. In three volumes. The third edition corrected (London: Printed for Andrew Bell, 1706–16), III: 429–30. This Athenian Mercury article does consider the possibility of divine or supernatural darkness, corresponding to its cautious stance on the existence of ghosts; see below, section 8.1.

5. Johann Gottfried von Herder, “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 324. On the sources of the light metaphors used in the Enlightenment, see Fritz Schalk, “Zur Semantik von Aufklärung,” in Studien zur französischen Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1977), pp. 323–39.

6. On periodization, see Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 14–22, 159–66, and the literature cited there.

7. See Gillian Bennett, “Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, ed. Brian P. Levack, vol. III, Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 259–70.

8. See Ernst Thomas Reimbold, Die Nacht im Mythos, Kultus, Volksglauben und in der transpersonalen Erfahrung; eine religionsphänomenologische Untersuchung (Cologne: Wison, 1970).

9. David Lederer, “Ghosts in Early Modern Bavaria,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 25–53; here pp. 46–47.

10. Lavater’s treatise appeared in English editions in 1572 and 1596. See Ludwig Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, 1572, ed. with an Introduction and Appendix by J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford University Press, 1929).

11. Ibid., p. 90.

12. Ibid., p. 98.

13. Pierre Le Loyer, IIII. livres des spectres, ou apparitions et visions d’esprits, anges et démons se monstrans sensiblement aux hommes (Angers: G. Nepueu, 1586). See Bennett, “Ghost and Witch,” p. 267.

14. Balthasar Bekker, The World Turn’d Upside Down, or, A Plain Detection of Errors, in the Common or Vulgar Belief, Relating to Spirits, Spectres or Ghosts, Dæmons, Witches, &C.: In a Due and Serious Examination of Their Nature, Power, Administration, and Operation (London: Printed for Eliz. Harris, 1700).

15. The Character of a town-gallant exposing the extravagant fopperies of som[e] vain self-conceited pretenders to gentility and good breeding (London: Printed for W.L., 1675), p. 4.

16. Geheime Briefe, So zwischen curieusen Personen über notable Sachen … gewechselt worden (Freystadt [i.e. Leipzig]: Hüllsen, 1701), pp. 904–10: “Was von denen jenigen Christen zuhalten sey / welche keine Gespenste und Erscheinungen der Geister glauben auch derselben thätliche Verrichtungen leugnen.”

17. Ibid., p. 905.

18. Ibid., p. 906.

19. Edmund Hobhouse, ed., Diary of a West Country Physician, A.D. 1684–1726 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1934), pp. 55–56, 18–19.

20. Balthasar Bekker, De betoverde weereld, zynde een grondig ondersoek van ’t gemeen gevoelen aangaande de geesten, derselver aart en vermogen, bewind en bedrijf: als ook ’t gene de menschen door derselver kraght en gemeenschap doen. In vier boeken ondernomen (Amsterdam: Daniel van den Dalen, 1691–94).

21. Balthasar Bekker, The World Bewitched; or, An Examination of the Common Opinions Concerning Spirits: Their Nature, Power, Administration, and Operations ([London]: R. Baldwin, 1695), p. [liv].

22. The first translations were into German (1693), French (1694), and English (1695, 1700). References to this work are to the English edition of 1695, and to the French edition of 1694: Balthasar Bekker, Le monde enchanté ou Examen des communs sentimens touchant les esprits, leur nature, leur pouvoir, leur administration, & leurs opérations (Amsterdam: Chez Pierre Rotterdam, 1694).

23. Bekker, World Bewitched, p. 256.

24. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 375–405.

25. Bekker, World Bewitched, p. [lvi].

26. As quoted in Andrew C. Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza,” in Disguised and Overt Spinozism around 1700, ed. Wiep van Bunge and Wim Klever (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 23. In these controversies “Sadducism” (Sadduceeism) referred to the denial of the doctrine of the Resurrection or the immortality of the soul in general, hence the denial of spirits or ghosts.

27. As quoted in Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, second edn. (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 245.

28. Henry More, An antidote against atheisme, or, An appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man, whether there be not a God by Henry More (London: Printed by Roger Daniel, 1653), p. 164.

29. Letter to Hugo Boxel, September 1674, in Baruch Spinoza, “Correspondence,” in Complete Works, ed. Morgan, p. 899, letter 54. See Gunther Coppens, “Spinoza et Boxel. Une histoire de fantômes,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 41, 1 (2004): 59–72.

30. Benjamin Camfield, A theological discourse of angels and their ministries wherein their existence, nature, number, order and offices are modestly treated of … by Benjamin Camfield (London: Printed by R.E. for Hen. Brome, 1678), p. 172.

31. See above, chapter 4.

32. More, Antidote against atheisme, p. 164.

33. Bennett, “Ghost and Witch,” p. 262.

34. Michael F. Graham, The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 139.

35. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 375 and Spinoza, “Correspondence,” in Complete Works, ed. Morgan, pp. 893–906, letters 51–56.

36. Recent scholarship has argued that focusing on the changing purposes for which the idea of witchcraft was deployed is more productive than merely pursuing simple questions of belief or unbelief in witchcraft, or to associate its decline with a single outlook, whether Cartesian, materialist, or empiricist. See Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations: c. 1650–c. 1750 (Oxford University Press, 1997), and Thomas Jefferson Wehtje, “Out of Darkness, Light: The Theological Implications of (Dis)Belief in Witchcraft in Early Modern English Literature and Thought”, PhD thesis, Stony Brook University, 2004.

37. The Compleat Library, or, News for the Ingenious 2 (December, 1692): 50.

38. Francis Grant, Sadducimus debellatus: or, a true narrative of the sorceries and witchcrafts exercis’d by the devil and his instruments upon Mrs. Christian Shaw, daughter of Mr. John Shaw, of Bargarran in the County of Renfrew in the West of Scotland, from Aug. 1696 to Apr. 1697 (London: Printed for H. Newman and A. Bell, 1698), p. vi.

39. Ralph Thoresby, The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., Author of the Topography of Leeds, 2 vols., ed. Joseph Hunter (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), II: 118–19 (June 13, 1712). See also entry for June 12, 1712: “Was after with Mr. Gale and Mr. Oddy, a learned gentleman at the Coffeehouse.”

40. John Beaumont, An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, and other magical practices … With a refutation of Dr. Bekker’s World bewitch’d; and other authors that have opposed the belief of them (London: Printed for D. Browne, 1705). The compendious work was published in a German translation in 1721.

41. Thoresby, Diary, II: 119.

42. Beaumont reported that “it’s a custom of the Jews” during Sukkoth “to go forth in the Night, because they think all things that will happen to them that year, are revealed to them that Night in the Moonshine.” In this case, if a man’s shadow in the moonlight appeared headless (as suggested in the illustration), this foretold his death within the year. Beaumont, Treatise of Spirits, pp. 88–89.

43. Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique 21 (1691): 122–51; here 150.

44. Ibid., p. 150.

45. J.B. Williams, ed., Memoirs of the Life, Character and Writings of the Rev. Matthew Henry (Boston: Peirce & Williams, 1830), pp. 56–57.

46. As noted in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the poet Abel Evans denounced Tindal in his poem The Apparation (Oxford: Printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1710). His verses associated free-thinking, debauchery, and the night, referring to Tindal as follows: “In Vice and Error from his Cradle Nurs’d: / He studies hard, and takes extreme Delight, / In Whores, or Heresies to spend the Night.” (p. 3)

47. Matthew Tindal, An essay concerning the power of the magistrate (London: Printed by J.D. for Andrew Bell, 1697), p. 6.

48. Philip C. Almond, “The Contours of Hell in English Thought, 1660–1750,” Religion 22, 4 (1992): 297–311; here 304.

49. Carlos Eire, “The Good Side of Hell: Infernal Meditations in Early Modern Spain,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 26 (2000): 286–310; here 290.

50. Ibid., pp. 286–91.

51. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), p. 209; VI.870.

52. William George Scott-Moncrieff, ed., Narrative of Mr. James Nimmo written for his own satisfaction to keep in some remembrance the Lord’s way dealing and kindness towards him, 1654–1709, Publications of the Scottish History Society 6 (Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. Constable for the Society, 1887), pp. xiii–xiv, quoting “from a copy of Mrs. Nimmo’s Narrative, in which the spelling has been adapted.”

53. See the references to nocturnal conversations among free-thinkers at this time in Edinburgh in Graham, Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead, pp. 60–65.

54. D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 3–51.

55. Ibid., p. 226.

56. Ibid., pp. 158–59.

57. Walker, Decline of Hell, p. 159, quoting Thomas Burnet, De statu mortuorum et resurgentium tractatus (London: A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1733), p. 309.

58. Walker, Decline of Hell, pp. 171–72.

59. Ibid., pp. 182–83, n. 5.

60. Ibid., p. 247. On concealing radical belief, see Stephen D. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419.

61. Walker, Decline of Hell, p. 144.

62. Ibid., p. 190.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., pp. 93–103; Snobelen, “Newton,” pp. 401–12.

65. Walker, Decline of Hell, p. 262.

66. Ibid., p. 96.

67. Ibid., p. 262.

68. Snobelen, “Newton,” pp. 408–19.

69. See his Mannhafter Kunstspiegel (Noble Mirror of Art) (Augsburg: Schultes, 1663), as translated in Allardyce Nicoll, John H. McDowell, and George R. Kernodle, trans. and Barnard Hewitt, ed., The Renaissance Stage: Documents of Serlio, Sabbattini and Furttenbach (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1958), p. 229.

70. As Jonathan Israel has shown, seemingly obscure intellectual and cultural issues, such as the diabolical basis of pagan oracles, could bring the commitments of the early Enlightenment into sharp focus. See his Radical Enlightenment, pp. 359–74.

71. The most widely circulated clandestine philosophical manuscripts of the period 1680–1750 “devote considerable space to … condeming belief in demons, spirits, sorcery, divination, and the Devil” – all issues tied to the night and its associations. See Israel,Radical Enlightenment, pp. 690–91.

72. Censor (London, 1715–) 3, 67 (March 26, 1717): 20–21.

73. Ibid., p. 21. He adds that late-night conversations like these “no less encourag’d Superstition in Those, who have imbib’d odd Sentiments from the Weakness of their own Constitutions, or swallow’d them from the Imposition of their Teachers.”

74. Cited in Edouard Fournier, Les lanternes: histoire de l’ancien éclairage de Paris (Paris: Dentu, 1854), p. 25.

75. Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris: c’est à dire, instructions fidèles, pour les voiageurs de condition, comment ils se doivent conduire, s’ils veulent faire un bon usage de leur tems & argent, durant leur Séjour à Paris (Leiden: J. Van Abcoude,1727), ed. Alfred Franklin as La vie de Paris sous la Régence (Paris: Éditions Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1897), p. 52.

76. Ibid., p. 51.

77. As quoted in Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol. I, The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 12.

78. John Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 629.

79. Ibid., p. 585.

80. As suggested by a query in the Athenian Gazette which began, “Being in company the other Night, among other discourse, one of the company said a man might be too Godly, and quoted that text for it, Eccl. 7:16, ‘Be not Righteous overmuch.’” The editors of the Gazette replied that this was “an old objection of the Atheists,” and sought to bring sound Christian virtue into this nocturnal coffeehouse conversation. Athenian Gazette 6, 18 (March 16, 1692): 119–20.

81. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 147; Bekker, Le monde enchanté, book IV, p. 49.

82. English translations from Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H.A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); see p. xxiv on the early editions.

83. Werner Krauss, Fontenelle und die Aufklärung (Munich: Fink, 1969), p. 7.

84. Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 59: “A Monsieur L***”; Fontenelle, Conversations, p. 8.

85. Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 63; Fontenelle, Conversations, p. 11, first evening.

86. Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 64; Fontenelle, Conversations, p. 12, first evening.

87. Des eröfneten Ritter-Platz. Anderer Theil, Welcher zu Fortsetzung der vorigen noch andere galante Wissenschaften anweiset (Hamburg: Benjamin Schiller, 1702), pp. 43f., as quoted in Jörg Jochen Berns, Frank Druffner, Ulrich Schütte, and Brigitte Walbe, eds., Erdengötter: Fürst und Hofstaat in der Frühen Neuzeit im Spiegel von Marburger Bibliotheks- und Archivbeständen. Ein Katalog (Marburg Universitätsbibliothek, 1997), pp. 487–88, 151.

88. Fontenelle, Entretiens, pp. 144–45.

89. Nicola Sabbatini’s Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri (Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638) as translated in Hewitt, ed. Renaissance Stage, pp. 96–97.

90. See Claire Cazanave, “Une publication invente son public: les Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes,” in De la publication: entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 267–80, and Steven F. Rendall, “Fontenelle and His Public,” MLN 86, 4 (1971): 496–508.

91. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 592–93, 684.

92. On the reception of The World Bewitched see ibid., pp. 374–405 and Jonathan Israel, “Les controverses pamphlétaires dans la vie intellectuelle hollandaise et allemande à l’époque de Bekker et Van Leenhof,” XVIIe Siècle 49, 2 (1997): 254–64.

93. Bekker, World Bewitched, pp. [liii–lvii].

94. Ibid., p. [xvi].

95. Han van Ruler, “Minds, Forms, and Spirits: The Nature of Cartesian Disenchantment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, 3 (2000): 381–95; here 382.

96. Bekker, World Bewitched, p. 311.

97. Ibid., p. 224.

98. Andrew C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1991).

99. Spinoza explained that the miracles described in Scripture were “adapted to the beliefs and judgment of the historians who recorded them. The revelations, too, were adapted to the beliefs of the prophets.” Neither miracles nor revelations could be accepted at face value, since the biblical accounts reflect the limitations of those who recorded them and of the audience addressed by them. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley with an Introduction by Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), p. 87.

100. Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique 21 (1691): 150; see the translation in the Athenian Gazette 4, 18 (November 28, 1691): 17–23. See also the sympathetic critique of Philippus van Limborch in his letter to John Locke, July 27, 1691, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford University Press, 1976–1989), IV: 294–301.

101. Bekker, Le monde enchanté, book II, p. 187.

102. Ibid., book IV, pp. 385–474. In his debunking of witch and ghost stories in book IV Bekker mentions the night as the time of the incident in about fifty cases. Beaumont noticed this emphasis on the night as a time of confusion and error and sought to respond in his Treatise of spirits, pp. 307–09.

103. Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 157 (sixth evening).

104. Fontenelle, Entretiens, p. 107; Fontenelle, Conversations, p. 46 (third evening).

105. Édit du Roi, touchant la police des isles de l’Amérique Française. Du mois de Mars 1685. Registré au Conseil Souverain de S. Domingue, le 6 Mai 1687 (Paris, 1687), 28–58. See the modern edition of Louis Sala-Molins, ed., Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987).

106. See Guillaume Aubert, “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, 3 (2004), and the literature cited there.

107. Miscellaneous Letters 1, 7 (November 28, 1694): 120.

108. Bekker, World Bewitched, p. 8. The English translation of The World Bewitched included only this first book and a summary of the rest, suggesting that author and publishers thought its arguments were coherent on their own.

109. Ibid., pp. 237, 256, and in the Preface, “An Abridgement of the Whole Work,” pp. [xxiii–lxxiii].

110. Ibid., p. 259.

111. Kors, Atheism in France.

112. Ibid., p. 93.

113. Benjamin Binet, Idée Genérale de la Théologie Payenne, Servant de Refutation au Systeme de Mr. Bekker. Touchant L’existence & l’Operation Des Demons. Ou Traitté Historique des Dieux du Paganisme (Amsterdam: Du Fresne, 1699), p. 222.

114. Kors, Atheism in France.

115. See Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

116. Samuel Briggs, ed., De Tribus Impostoribus … The Three Impostors: Translated (with Notes and Comments) from a French Manuscript of the Work Written in 1716 with a Dissertation on the Original Treatise and a Bibliography of the Various Editions([Cleveland?]: Privately printed for the subscribers, 1904), p. 44. On its publication see Hunt et al., The Book That Changed Europe, pp. 39–43. See also Abraham Anderson, The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des trois Imposteurs (1777 Edition) with Three Essays in Commentary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).

117. Binet, Idée Generale de la Théologie Payenne, pp. 212–17.

118. Another critic of Bekker’s argument from universal error, John Beaumont, was no theologian, and his approach to refuting the arguments of Bekker focused not on Cartesianism or the interpretation of Scripture, but on the argument in the first book of The World Bewitched, regarding the widespread belief in witches and the relationship between paganism and Christianity, citing the works of authors who challenged Bekker on those terms, especially Benjamin Binet. Beaumont translated long sections of Binet’sIdée Generale de la Théologie Payenne into his Treatise of Spirits.

119. Bekker, World Bewitched, p. 91. This theme is discussed by Rolf Reichardt, “Light against Darkness: The Visual Representations of a Central Enlightenment Concept,” Representations 61 (1998): 95–148, though without reference to European views of the larger world.

9 Conclusion

1. A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” American Historical Review 106, 2 (2001): 343–86. See above chapters 1 and 7.

2. Aufgefangene Brieffe, welche Zwischen etzlichen curieusen Personen über den ietzigen Zustand der Staats und gelehrten Welt gewechselt worden (Wahrenberg: J.G. Freymunden [actually Leipzig: Groschuff], 1701), p. 890.

3. “Von der Illuminations-Pracht und Mißbrauch / und hingegen von nützlichen und nöthigen Gebrauch der See-Lichter und Nacht-Laternen auch nunmehr zu Leipzig aufgesteckt.”

4. Aufgefangene Brieffe, p. 890:

Der Epicurer macht

Den Tag zu seiner Nacht.

Die Eitelkeit pflegt solches umzukehren.

Denn diese lässet sich bethoren /

Das sie die Nacht verwandelt in den Tag /

Und zwar durch die Illuminationen.

Wer aber nicht so viel vermag /

Daß er Wachslichter kan bezahlen /

Und will doch die Reichen prahlen /

Darneben gern auch mit schlampampen /

Der brennet Kühn / Oel-Funtzeln oder Lampen.

So weit ist nun die Thorheit eingerissen /

Daß ihr so gar die Armen folgen müssen /

Steckt mancher auch schon in den grössten Nöthen.

Das sind die Früchte der Solennitäten!

Den Unrath hat das Pabsthum erst erfunden /

Darüber wird das Land so sehr geschunden.

Es bleiebe wohl / wenn nur hierzu die Pfaffen

Das Geld / und nicht die Layen müsten schaffen.

5. Victor Lieberman has argued convincingly that the combination of forced conformity in religion, the growth of the state’s disciplinary ambitions, and commerce tied to urban consumption shaped polities across Eurasia in a global early modern period. See his Introduction to Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed. Victor B. Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 2: “between c. 1450 and 1670 societies across Southeast Asia experienced a commercial and urban vigor, a trend towards political absolutism, and an emphasis on orthodox, textual religions that in combination gave birth to an ‘Age of Commerce,’ also termed the “early modern period.” See also Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East–West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” in Beyond Binary Histories, ed. Lieberman, pp. 19–102, esp. pp. 53–63, and Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. II, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

6. I.W. [i.e., John Walton], “To my worthy friend, Mr. Henry Vaughan the Silurist” (1678), in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L.C. Martin, second edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 620.

7. André Félibien, Tapisseries Du Roy, Ou Sont Representez Les Quatre Elemens Et Les Quatre Saisons. Avec Les devises Qvi Les Accompagnent Et Leur Explication = Königliche Französische Tapezereyen, Oder überaus schöne Sinn-Bilder, in welchen Die vier Element, samt den Vier Jahr-Zeiten … vorgestellet werden … Aus den Original-Kupffern nachgezeichnet (Augsburg: Krauß / Koppmayer, 1690), p. 2.

8. See Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 285–87.

9. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 107 (third evening).

10. A missionary voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, performed in the years 1796, 1797, 1798, in the ship Duff, commanded by Captain James Wilson. Compiled from journals of the officers and missionaries; and Illustrated with Maps, Charts, and Views … by a Committee Appointed for the Purpose by the Directors of the Missionary Society (London: The Missionary Society, 1799), p. 3.

11. Christa Bausch, “Das Nachtmythologem in der polynesischen Religion und seine Auswirkungen auf protestantische Missionstätigkeit,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 22 (1970): 244–66, and Christa Bausch, “Po and Ao. Analysis of an Ideological Conflict in Polynesia,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 34 (1978): 169–85.

12. A missionary voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, p. 240.

13. William Wyatt Gill, Jottings from the Pacific (London: Religious Tract Society, 1885), p. 21, describing travels in 1875.

14. Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression, from Medieval to Modern (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 454.