Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  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 1654 Flores 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 Dresd
en (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.