Evening's Empire

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.

ISBN 0521721067   Pages 448 ISBN13 9780521721066 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 700 Publisher Cambridge University Press   Published in Cambridge Imprint Cambridge University Press   Series title New Studies in European History Format Paperback   Height (mm) 228 Publication date 30 Jun 2011   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 304.230940903   Spine width (mm) 21 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

1. An early modern revolution; 2. Darkness and the devil, 1450-1650; 3. Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530-1650; 4. Princes of darkness: the night at court, 1600-1750; 5. 'An entirely new contrivance': the rise of street lighting, 1660-1700; 6. Colonising the urban night: resistance, gender and the public sphere; 7. Colonising the rural night?; 8. Darkness and enlightenment; 9. Conclusion.

'Koslofsky's epic history of the night reveals a revolution: how stage lights remade theater, how Lutheran mystics penetrated the night, how witch hunters fought the devil on his own nocturnal turf, how racism mirrored the presumed iniquity of blackness, and how street lights pacified cities. Readers will find surprises on every page.' Edward Muir, Northwestern University 'Koslofsky plays skilfully with the oppositions of light and darkness, day and night, to reveal dramatic changes in both the social and the symbolic worlds of early modern Europeans. This is a sensitive and [thought-provoking] synoptic study, of very great interest for all students of European society, thought, and culture.' Robin Briggs, University of Oxford 'Evening's Empire is a remarkable foray into a long-neglected dimension of early modern history: Europe's conquest of darkness and night time. Craig Koslofsky convincingly proves that the transition to modernity and the emergence of the public sphere cannot be fully understood without taking the 'colonization' of night into account. An enlightening study, in every way.' Carlos M. N. Eire, Yale University 'Ambitious ... a valuable study, and a genuinely supranational one, of the way in which nightlife in the modern sense was created, as the essentially urban phenomenon it remains. It was, as the author clearly shows, one expression of the increasing self-confidence and aggression of early modern European humanity.' Ronald Hutton, Times Higher Education 'Sometimes the most obvious and important historical subjects are among the least explored ... Craig Koslofsky's thoughtful and imaginative study of the experience of the night for early modern people goes some way towards redressing that balance. It is, in a word, enlightening.' Literary Review 'Craig Koslofsky has given so much in this consistently stimulating, cogently argued and elegantly written book.' Tim Blanning, Times Literary Supplement 'This is a tremendous read, full of human stories and suggestive argument. Like many of the best history books it makes one pause for thought not only about the past but about the present too.' BBC History Magazine 'Evening's Empire offers a fertile and richly European account of deep and sometimes unexpected cultural associations ... This is a valuable contribution to the history of the everyday and, especially, of the experience of temporality.' History Today 'Any book worthy of the Longman/History Today prize should be elegantly written, exhaustively researched, profoundly original and methodologically bold. Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire is all of these ... [it] is worthy of the widest possible audience, a work that stands alongside that of Jurgen Habermas in the light it sheds on our understanding of the transformation of the public sphere and the origins of modernity.' History Today

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