What does it mean to write a history of the night? Evening's Empire is a fascinating study of the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced, and transformed the night. Using diaries, letters, and legal records together with representations of the night in early modern religion, literature and art, Craig Koslofsky opens up an entirely new perspective on early modern Europe. He shows how princes, courtiers, burghers and common people 'nocturnalized' political expression, the public sphere and the use of daily time. Fear of the night was now mingled with improved opportunities for labour and leisure: the modern night was beginning to assume its characteristic shape. Evening's Empire takes the evocative history of the night into early modern politics, culture and society, revealing its importance to key themes from witchcraft, piety, and gender to colonization, race, and the Enlightenment.
On April 26, 1784, the Journal de Paris published a letter on daylight and darkness from an anonymous subscriber. The author of the letter described an evening spent at a salon "in grand company" discussing, among other things, the new Argand oil lamp. After considering whether this lamp would burn more efficiently and reduce lighting costs, the author returned home and went to bed "three or four hours after midnight," reflecting a daily schedule typical of persons of quality in the eighteenth century. With generous satire, the author, who was accustomed to sleeping until noon every day, related his surprise upon discovering by accident the next day that the sun actually rises between six and eight in the morning (!) and that it "gives light as soon as it rises." Titling his letter "An Economical Project," the correspondent urgently sought to enlighten the journal's readers, "who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon" that they could save vast sums on lighting simply by rising at dawn and having "much pure light of the sun for nothing." 1 The author of this "Economical Project" quickly revealed himself to be Benjamin Franklin, representative of the new American republic in France. 2 His comments, which developed into the idea of daylight saving time, call our attention to the importance of nocturnal sociability in the last years of the Old Regime. They were echoed in much more critical tones by his conservative contemporaries in Italy, who complained that even the common people "profane the night either at long theater shows or at continual debaucheries" and noted that "people stay up so much later and longer that they then have to restore themselves by resting until very late the next day." 3 When had these late hours become fashionable? Two years after Franklin's "Economical Project," the German Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of Luxury and Fashion; Weimar and Gotha) published an essay on "the uses and divisions of the day and the night in various ages, and among various 743
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