Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  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 History 34, 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 J
ustice 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 Niederst�
�tter, “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.