Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe by Craig Koslofky (review)

The past two decades have witnessed heightened interest in the history of nighttime, with particular emphasis upon early modern Europe. A growing number of books and articles by American and European historians have explored a variety of topics related to night, from crime and sociability to magic, mysticism, and demonology. A few studies have probed the “night season” as a distinctive culture with many of its own conventions, values, and rituals.¹

Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe by Craig Koslofky, a cultural historian of Germany and the author of several earlier articles on nighttime, is the most recent contribution to this scholarly corpus. With the exception of Scandinavia, this learned study focuses upon northern Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, punctuated by occasional forays into the Middle Ages. The first chapters break extensive new ground in examining the cultural context of nighttime, from baroque opera to religious discourses. No previous work, at least in English, boasts the density of evidence that Koslofsky has unearthed in probing the intellectual underpinnings of elite attitudes and practices. Less novel are descriptions of efforts by church and state to colonize darkness, though the incorporation of German sources lends welcome weight to existing accounts. Fresh details also supplement our knowledge of such matters as witchcraft, alehouses, spinning bees, youth cultures, and courtship.

Central to Evening’s Empire is the notion of “nocturnalization,” which Koslofsky defines as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night.” For the most part, this approach serves him well. As previous historians have shown, night’s early pacification, owing to new intellectual currents and eighteenth-century improvements in street lighting and law enforcement, brought notable changes in portions of cities and large towns, particularly for people of property anxious to impose a greater measure of public order. He brings welcome insights to the philosophical and cultural ramifications of these alterations. A chapter devoted to the Enlightenment offers an intriguing analysis of the symbolic associations that darkness conjured, with implications for our understanding of race and European expansion.

Invariably, the concept of nocturnalization compromises Koslosky’s desire to craft a history of “the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced, and transformed the night.” In stressing the colonization of darkness, Evening’s Empire is less a comprehensive exploration of the nocturnal world than a narrative of its incipient demise, with courtiers, city councils, and prosperous merchants in the forefront. And yet—to take but one example—far more critical, even by the mid-eighteenth century, than innovations in artificial illumination to traversing the forbidding nightscape in most localities was the natural light afforded by the heavens, coupled with the arcane wisdom and popular skills inculcated in children at an early age—learning, for instance, to depend heavily upon hearing, touch, and smell. Fundamental differences between nighttime and the visible world—changes that occurred in crime and legal systems, social encounters, conceptions of time and space—are addressed, at most, within the heuristic parameters of nocturnalization. We are treated to an incisive discussion of the symbolic importance of fireworks, but references are wanting to the scourge of fire, the gravest threat to life and property after dark. The book’s inattention to sleep, apart from passing references, is singularly striking in view of the value that households attached to both the safety and quality of their slumber. Dreams might have afforded a rewarding field of investigation, not least for their impact upon daily life.

Equally problematic is the failure to recognize the importance of darkness in its own right. For much of the early modern population—in urban as well as rural areas on both sides of the North Atlantic—obscurity afforded a refuge from the rhythms of daily life. Despite night’s perils, both real and imagined, darkness conferred unprecedented autonomy on diverse groups, including “slumming” aristocrats and...