Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (3 page)

There were in fact many reasons to work at night in the early modern period. Harvests could not wait, especially if bad weather or pilferage threatened the crop. Once heated, furnaces and forges were used around the clock; brewing and distilling were complex tasks that could not be halted at nightfall. The tides set the work rhythms on the London docks and for rural fishermen.
²³
Bakers rose very early; in eighteenth-century Paris their work “day” began between 11. 30 p.m. and 2.30 a.m., and we read of one master and his baker-boys who worked straight through from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m.
²⁴
The domestic labor of wives and servants extended nearly around the clock.
²⁵
Consumption also promoted work at night. The extraordinary growth of London and Paris in the eighteenth century had to be fed, and an army of local farmers and vendors traveled overnight to bring their wares into the cities’ markets for the morning. In cities and villages “labor at night developed significantly at the end of the seventeenth century, and the regulations intended as safeguards quickly became obsolete,”
²⁶
reflecting the nocturnalization of early modern daily life.

When the workday ended, some were too exhausted to do anything but sleep. But even the urban day laborers, artisans, and farmhands with the most physically demanding work looked to the evening and night for their free time. Church and state authorities recognized, at least in principle, the need for leisure time, and the service contracts of apprentices and servants gave them some expectation of free time during the day and in the evening. These servants and apprentices could hardly afford to drink in alehouses, taverns, or
cabarets
, but these public houses provided the “night life” for the more established men and women of the village or neighborhood. Among the many diversions in local public houses at night (especially conversation, singing, or dancing), card-playing stands out as near-universal by the end of the sixteenth century.
²⁷
The increasing regulation of leisure from the Reformation onward focused on the use of the night by
young people, with countless proclamations of curfews for servants and apprentices, and on holding public houses to strict closing times (usually 9 p.m. in winter and 10 p.m. in summer). The limited success of these regulations, together with the enormous growth of nocturnal leisure for the wealthy, has led Alain Cabantous to conclude that “one way or another, the vast majority of the population of Western Europe slowly began to see the night as a period of free time.”
²⁸

The night was becoming the focus of one’s free time, but it was not a time free from suspicion. In the eyes of early modern criminal courts, any night life outside the home made an individual, whether defendant, victim, or witness, suspect. But this suspicion was not distributed equally. When brought together, the existing scholarship reveals a matrix of reputation, location, class, and gender used to evaluate nocturnal activities. Wealthy or well-born men stood in one corner of this evaluative grid, with poor women “nightwalkers” in the opposite position. There was room on this grid for well-born, respectable women to attend the opera or a ball at night, and for day laborers to drink late into the night at a public house without drawing the charge of disorder. Likewise, ordinary married women frequented the drinking establishments of their neighborhood or village in the evening or at night; these visits were more respectable when the married women went as a group, perhaps to celebrate a baptism or churching. The night fascinated (and continues to fascinate) because one could move in the blink of an eye from the most legitimate and respectable locations in this nocturnal matrix to a far more disorderly, vulnerable, or exciting position.

The line between licit leisure, drunken disorder, and violent crime was easily crossed at night. Disturbances of the peace by young men or by those leaving public houses arose from masculine leisure cultures, rural and urban. Following these men further into the night, they might be the victims of theft, or perpetrators of assault. The most recent work on crime at night from Alain Cabantous seeks to distinguish between early modern perceptions of the night as criminal and the actual incidence of crime at night. According to the studies surveyed by Cabantous, in England and France homicides were not more numerous at night; nor was theft. But both crimes
were classified differently and punished more severely if committed at night.
²⁹

Indeed, the night remained a separate jurisdiction with its own crimes, policing, and sanctions through the end of the Old Regime. The venerable watch policed the night as best it could. There was no corresponding “day watch”: the cities and towns of early modern Europe did not employ any general daytime policing until the nineteenth century. Some crimes and misdemeanors were also specific to the night – walking without a light, keeping a public house open too late, disturbing the peace, lantern-smashing, dueling (at dusk or dawn), and grave-robbing.

In cities like London, Paris, or Leipzig, the curfew was overwhelmed by a growing night life in the seventeenth century, well before the establishment of street lighting. Authorities focused on the requirement that anyone out on the streets after dark carry a light so that they could be seen, and on the closing times of public houses. In 1700 the lieutenant-general of police of Paris, d’Argenson, sought to “establish some order in the cabarets of the villages neighboring Paris.” He proposed that “upon order of the King … the proprietors of those cabarets found open after midnight will be led to prison.” As the legal closing time in summer was 10 p.m., he thought this a reasonable step.
³⁰
D’Argenson noted that “cabarets of this sort depend for all their profits on the countryside parties,” reminding us of nocturnal movement throughout Paris and out to its suburbs. This night life was facilitated by street lighting (already a generation old in Paris by this time), but as Cabantous has observed, growing nocturnal sociability and mobility also sustained and promoted assaults, brawls, and theft by night. Almost all perpetrators and victims were male; female victims included shop assistants, peddlers, and prostitutes.
³¹
Cabantous’s findings on gender and crime raise significant questions about women and the urban public sphere examined below in
chapter 6
.

The existing scholarship on the symbolic valences and associations of the night in the pre-modern West reveals an ambivalent legacy. All the religious traditions of early modern Europe – Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim – used the night to think about God and humankind, good and evil. Certainly some of the
most complex and sustained discussion of darkness and the night in the West took place within the Christian tradition. The volume, complexity, and variety of writing about the night in the Christian tradition and the range of topics it understood through the night far surpass modern attempts to address the night in philosophical or literary terms. And the upheavals within early modern Christendom from the Reformations to the Enlightenment make the symbolic associations of the night in this period especially dynamic and significant.

For early modern Christians, darkness and the night had long served as powerful metaphors. From the tradition’s earliest writings, darkness and the night have borne strongly -– though not exclusively – negative associations. The letters of Paul repeatedly contrast light as righteous with darkness as evil, as in 2 Corinthians 6:14: “For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” and 1 Thessalonians 5:5: “You are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.”
³²
The night represents evil or separation from God. The light–night opposition is especially intense in the Johannine books: “Jesus answered and said unto him … this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil,” and “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 3:10–19; 9:5). The betrayal and arrest of Jesus at night and the mid-day darkness that marked the crucifixion reflect the same associations.

Do these early Christian writings present any counter-associations in their use of the night? In the frame of its powerful light–darkness / good–evil oppositions, the Gospel of John introduces “a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.” Later when he is praised for preparing the body of Jesus for burial, he is described as “Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night” (John 3:1–2; 7:50–51; 19:39). There has been little consensus among commentators on this obscure figure, on the one hand criticized for coming to Jesus only in secret, on the other
hand praised as a true disciple.
³³
As we will see below in
chapter 3
, the religious persecutions of the confessional era gave Nicodemus – and the night – new valences. Further exceptions to identification of the night and its darkness with evil are also seen in the story of the Apostle Paul. As Wolfgang Speyer has observed, in pagan, Jewish, and Christian antiquity midnight
and
noon were liminal times, both associated with blessings and maledictions. Paul, first struck blind at midday (Acts 9:8; 22:6–11), is later freed from prison “at midnight” as he and Silas pray (Acts 16:25).
³⁴

Augustine repeated the dominant biblical motif, noting in book 13 of his
Confessions
that “we are now light … and children of the light and children of the day, not children of night and darkness.”
³⁵
When writing against the dualists of his age, however, Augustine affirmed the place of darkness in divine creation:

Yet even these privations of things are so ordered in the universe of nature … For by not illuminating certain places and times, God has also made the darkness as fittingly as the day.
³⁶

Even so, Augustine considers literal darkness only in terms of privation (“darkness is the absence of light in the same way in which silence is the absence of voice”), not as a material complement to light or as a source of positive imagery.
³⁷

The influence of Neoplatonism on Christian spirituality helped generate a set of ideas centered on “interiority”, “ascent”, complementary “light and darkness”, and “oneness with God” (as Denys Turner has described them) that first allowed darkness and the night to serve as paths to God.
³⁸
Most influential were the writings of Denys (or Dionysius) the Areopagite, a Syrian theologian of the late fifth century
CE
. Denys created a rich and complex mystical vocabulary of apophatic darkness which reoriented the light–darkness motif in the Christian tradition. As he proclaimed in
The Mystical Theology
: “I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light!”
³⁹

Denys placed darkness in his apophatic theology of that which
cannot
be expressed about God. Introducing his
Mystical Theology
, he explained that “the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that
now as we plunge into the darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”
⁴⁰
This association of darkness with apophatic and mystic theology laid the foundation for all later discussions of nocturnal spirituality in the tradition. “Darkness” served to evoke a theology of speechlessness, a “darkness which is beyond intellect,” later described by Nicholas of Cusa as a
docta ignorantia
. Denys evoked this darkness to open
The Mystical Theology
:

Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,

up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture,

where the mysteries of God’s Word

lie simple, absolute and unchangeable

in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Amid the deepest shadow

they pour out overwhelming light.
⁴¹

Darkness, and by extension the night, could now help to express a Christian’s approach to an ineffable and utterly transcendent God. And Denys held almost apostolic authority in the West from the twelfth until the sixteenth century, when his identification with the biblical Areopagite of Acts 17:34 was decisively proven false.
⁴²

The mystic praise of the night and its darkness in late antiquity would find little echo in the Christianized Germanic culture of the early medieval period. Anglo-Saxon texts such as
Beowulf
and “The Dream of the Rood” present a night of utter danger and evil, with no redeeming qualities. Fear, treachery, and violence fill the night in the earliest German and Scandinavian poetry as well. Clerical writers of this age understood the night in dismal terms: Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) explained that “Night represents injustice, infidelity, and all misfortune.”
⁴³
“The day is for the living, and the night is for the dead,” Thietmar of Merseburg (976–1018) asserted.
⁴⁴
Describing his journey from Reims to Chartres in March 991, the Benedictine Richer of Reims spoke of “the threat of the night” as the sun began to set. After a slow and dangerous bridge crossing he saw that “the night had fallen, covering the world with horrid darkness.”
⁴⁵
As scholars such as Chris Fitter have noted, early medieval texts never present the night as positive in a material or spiritual sense, focusing instead on themes of assault and danger.
⁴⁶