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Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe
Abstract
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.
... This disadvantage is compounded by the vulnerability inherent to the behavioral state of sleep, which diminishes (but does not eliminate) our sensory responsiveness to external events, as well as our motor responsiveness and reactivity, should an actual threat emerge. The range of threats that have concerned human beings throughout our history do not stop at natural threats, but extend to perceived supernatural ones as well (Ekirch, 2005;Koslofsky, 2011;Millar, 2018;Worthman & Melby, 2002). How these threats may have been-and continue to be-addressed will be examined in detail. ...
... And that's just natural predators. Malevolent spirits and other supernatural threats have also been associated with darkness and the nighttime across historical periods and cultures (Ekirch, 2005;Koslofsky, 2011;Worthman & Melby, 2002). Darkness and the nighttime were greatly feared by Europeans during the early modern era (Ekirch, 2005;Koslofsky, 2011;Millar, 2018) and continue to be a source of concern across a multitude of non-industrial cultures in the present era (Worthman & Melby, 2002). ...
... Malevolent spirits and other supernatural threats have also been associated with darkness and the nighttime across historical periods and cultures (Ekirch, 2005;Koslofsky, 2011;Worthman & Melby, 2002). Darkness and the nighttime were greatly feared by Europeans during the early modern era (Ekirch, 2005;Koslofsky, 2011;Millar, 2018) and continue to be a source of concern across a multitude of non-industrial cultures in the present era (Worthman & Melby, 2002). These fears were likely to have been-and still are-reinforced by negative dream experiences, including nightmares, night terrors, and hypnagogic (at sleep onset)/hypnopompic (upon awakening) hallucinations, which often accompany sleep paralysis Bearden, 1994;Cheyne & Girard, 2007;Fisher et al., 1974;Gieselmann et al., 2019;Keith, 1975). ...
Sleep is a behavioral state whose quantity and quality represent a trade-off between the costs and benefits this state provides versus the costs and benefits of wakefulness. Like many species, we humans are particularly vulnerable during sleep because of our reduced ability to monitor the external environment for nighttime predators and other environmental dangers. A number of variations in sleep characteristics may have evolved over the course of human history to reduce this vulnerability, at both the individual and group level. The goals of this interdisciplinary review paper are (1) to explore a number of biological/instinctual features of sleep that may have adaptive utility in terms of enhancing the detection of external threats, and (2) to consider relatively recent cultural developments that improve vigilance and reduce vulnerability during sleep and the nighttime. This paper will also discuss possible benefits of the proposed adaptations beyond vigilance, as well as the potential costs associated with each of these proposed adaptations. Finally, testable hypotheses will be presented to evaluate the validity of these proposed adaptations.
... Elles se traduisent notamment par la mise en valeur des monuments et des infrastructures, par l'éclairage public ou encore par la création de quartiers dédiés à la vie nocturne dont la promotion est assurée par les offices du tourisme et les guides touristiques. Ainsi, la nuit représente tant une ressource pour l'économie et les affaires culturelles que pour les personnes dont les pratiques se déroulent la nuit pour des raisons historiques et sociales (Koslofsky, 2011 ;Schlör, 1998). ...
... Les historiens observent à partir du xvii e siècle, dans les villes européennes, une diffusion des pratiques nocturnes depuis la Cour vers le peuple dont les membres s'approprient la nuit et ses usages festifs (Delattre, 2004 ;Koslofsky, 2011). Or, ce sont avant tout les pratiques légitimes qui se diffusent puisqu'elles proviennent du pouvoir central. ...
... Au plan spatial, la conquête de la nuit fait s'imposer un nouvel ordre public nocturne au xvii e siècle. Elle marque une étape clé pour la définition de l'occupation de l'espace public en terme masculin et féminin (Delattre, 2004 ;Koslofsky, 2011). En effet, la diffusion de l'activité nocturne de la Cour vers le peuple, mentionnée plus haut, n'a pas été profitable de la même manière aux femmes issues de l'aristocratie et à celles non nobles qui apparaissent comme suspectes dans l'espace public nocturne à partir du xvii e siècle. ...
« Après 10 jours d’hospitalisation, la victime vit avec une balle dans les fesses », titre un quotidien suisse à propos d’une fusillade à la sortie d’une discothèque de Genève. Le tireur est un riverain de l’établissement ; exaspéré par les bruits d’une rixe aux portes du lieu en question, il a sorti son fusil de chasse pour mettre un terme aux nuisances. Espace-temps de la ville où cultures festives et nuisances sonores se trouvent en tension, la nuit est tel un baril de poudre, explosant à chacun des heurts entre riverains, tenanciers d’établissements publics, artistes, musiciens et noctambules. Cet ouvrage revient sur l’histoire récente de la construction d’une politique de la nuit à Genève. Il montre comment celles-ci s’inspirent d’expériences conduites dans d’autres villes suisses ou étrangères pour répondre aux problèmes publics nocturnes. Si les politiques urbaines de la nuit ne sont pas chose nouvelle, leur multiplication récente au sein d’échanges mondialisés est un phénomène inédit allant fortement croissant. L’enjeu majeur est de permettre à la nuit de demeurer cet espace-temps de rencontre, de sociabilité, de liberté dans lequel nous expérimentons et construisons nos relations et identités en tous genres. Un objectif qui ne saura être atteint sans initiatives innovantes, entre autres en termes de protection, d’égalité et d’accessibilité
... Historiquement, la nuit renvoie au diable et aux démons. C'est une période de négations, d'inattendus multiples, de fantastique (Gwiazdzinski, 2002) et de sorcellerie (Koslovsky, 2011). La peur de l'obscurité fait partie de la nature humaine, faute de lumière et de visibilité (Timothy, 2017). ...
... D'un point de vue social, la nuit est contrastée. En Europe, l'activité nocturne a longtemps été réservée aux élites avec des spectacles et des loisirs (Gwiazdzinski, 2005 ;Koslovsky, 2011). La démocratisation de la nuit n'apparaît qu'à la fin du XIX e siècle avec « by night ». ...
... Les activités humaines se multiplient. Des nouveaux rythmes s'imposent à l'urbain (Gwiazdzinski, 2014) qui poussent certains acteurs à parler de « nocturnalisation » (Koslovsky, 2011) ou de « diurnisation » (Gwiazdzinski, 2003). ...
La nuit est un espace-temps encore peu exploré, en transformation rapide dans le monde entier et particulièrement dans les villes chinoises en expansion. L’économie de la nuit, sa géographie et les dynamiques en cours sont particulièrement mal appréhendées compte-tenu notamment de l’absence de données temporelles à l’échelle d’entités urbaines tentaculaires.Nous avons choisi d’aborder l’économie de la nuit sur quatre villes chinoises différentes : Shanghaï métropole internationale de 23 millions d’habitants à l’Est, Xiamen ville touristique et commerciale côtière de 3,5 millions à l’Ouest, Lanzhou, ville industrielle de 3,6 millions d’habitants au centre de la Chine et Dunhuang ville touristique de 60 000 habitants au Nord-ouest.La recherche porte plus spécifiquement sur l’analyse de l’offre de services et les comportements spatio-temporels de consommation des individus. Nous utilisons des données de consommation géo-localisées issues des réseaux sociaux numériques chinois - « SINA micro-blog » (新浪微博) et « Commentaires Publics » (大众点评) - qui regroupe des différents services urbains évalués par les clients.Une méthodologie et des algorithmes spécifiques ont été développés pour traiter des dizaines de millions de données. Ils ont permis de localiser les consommateurs dans l’espace et dans le temps, des rythmes spatiaux et temporels de consommation, d’identifier des « petits mondes nocturnes » - agrégats spatio-temporels des comportements individuels -, de mettre en évidence des « typologies d’agrégats », des intensités d’agrégations, une hiérarchie de centralités et d’esquisser une première géographie nuits urbaines de Chine.Enfin notre étude ouvre sur une approche comparative à multi-échelles basée sur l’identification des « petits mondes nocturnes », leurs genèses et pertinences, limites et potentiels qu’il convient d’interroger. Elle a abouti sur une première prospective d’organisation spatio-temporelle qui pourrait améliorer les nuits urbaines, et être utilisée au-delà de la nuit et de l’espace chinois.
... La extensión de las redes eléctricas y de iluminación artificial permitió un mayor uso de la noche; esto generaría nuevas formas de relación de la sociedad con este periodo del día (Koslofsky, 2011). El tiempo nocturno, que estaba culturalmente relacionado con el descanso y el retiro a la seguridad del hogar, comenzó a llenarse de actividades fuera de las viviendas; no es que antes no existieran prácticas sociales nocturnas, sino que éstas se diversificaron y ampliaron. ...
... Retomando el argumento de Simmel, proponemos que los individuos viajeros y las sociedades emisoras y receptoras (Tribe, 2006) usan los espacios turísticos en la noche como parte de esta pugna por conservar su individualidad frente a la homogeneidad que impone el mercado, pero al mismo tiempo, para sentirse integrados a las fuerzas sociales de las que habla el autor. El uso de la noche y de la oscuridad en el turismo permite acceder a identidades y prácticas distintas a las que se acostumbran durante nuestra vida cotidiana (Koslofsky, 2011;Nottingham, 2003). Como argumentó Daniel Hiernaux (2000), el turismo construye su propia cotidianidad efímera, pero al mismo tiempo reconoce a los individuos como parte de los grupos sociales a los que aspiramos pertenecer, como la multitud que se reúne en una discoteca o un concierto. ...
... El peligro que la noche representaba para la cultura se construye en dos sentidos: el de la noche y el de la oscuridad. La noche en tanto el periodo del día en el que la sociedad (las instituciones sociales constituidas y las normas y los valores durante las interacciones sociales) disminuyen la vigilancia que ejercen sobre los comportamientos privados de las personas que son posibles, por ejemplo, al cobijo de la falta de iluminación de una calle o en la intimidad de una casa (Koslofsky, 2011). Por otra parte, la oscuridad representaba no únicamente lugares sin iluminación, sino espacios e incluso sociedades donde no predominaba la civilización occidental; ausencia de la luz de la razón. ...
In social sciences and geography, the night is of increasing relevance. This paper explores the night’s importance in tourism, identifying areas of study in these and other disciplines where it has been analyzed. The article notes that night and darkness are significant components of the tourism experience. Based on arguments from Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias, it proposes that individuals and societies use dark tourist spaces to preserve their individuality against the homogeneity imposed by markets but also to foster their feeling that they are perfectly integrated into society.
... T here are long-standing cultural connotations with diurnal day-night cycles. In Western societies, nighttime carries negative associations as a domain fraught with danger from criminality and the supernatural, in contrast to the morning and daytime with its positive, safe associations (Koslofsky, 2011). At the same time, the night is not unambiguously undesirable, as it is also associated with socializing, particularly after the advent of widespread artificial lighting (Edensor, 2015;Koslofsky, 2011), whereas daytime and mornings may carry associations of unpleasant necessities, such as work and chores. ...
... In Western societies, nighttime carries negative associations as a domain fraught with danger from criminality and the supernatural, in contrast to the morning and daytime with its positive, safe associations (Koslofsky, 2011). At the same time, the night is not unambiguously undesirable, as it is also associated with socializing, particularly after the advent of widespread artificial lighting (Edensor, 2015;Koslofsky, 2011), whereas daytime and mornings may carry associations of unpleasant necessities, such as work and chores. These cultural associations speak to social norms and values regarding the proper use of time. ...
... Morning-night attitudes (i.e., having a positive or negative evaluation of morning or night), whether explicit or implicit, are conceptually distinct from chronotype as an individual difference and from morning-night self-concept. These measures may capture whether individuals subscribe to the long-standing cultural associations with daytime and nighttime (Edensor, 2015;Koslofsky, 2011). Endorsing unconventional diurnal attitudes may correspond to a reformist political ideology, perhaps through a motivated social cognition process. ...
Social scientists have begun to uncover links between sleep and political attitudes and behaviors. This registered report considers how diurnal morning-night associations relate to political ideology using data from the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences Study, a large-scale online data collection effort. Measures encompass perceived cultural attitudes and social pressures regarding diurnal preferences and explicit and implicit measures of both morning-night attitudes and morning-night self-concepts. Together, the analyses demonstrate a relationship between morning orientation and conservatism for explicit morning-night self-concepts and, to a lesser extent, explicit morning-night attitudes. This relationship is not present for implicit associations, and associations with perceived cultural attitudes and social pressure are also largely absent. This study reinforces the notion that morningness and eveningness as explicit identities are associated with political ideology.
... 87 Ces titres étant issus de propositions faites à l'oral par André Guillerme suite à une discussion à trois, comprenant également notre directeur de thèse, Youssef Diab. 88 Avant l'Ere Commune. 89 Article de la BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7318180.stm 90 Nous mettons ici sciemment de côté les analyses a posteriori ayant attribué au texte un contenu aux accents érotiques. ...
... Beaucoup d'autres villes européennes y trouvent un moyen de prolonger, de manière beaucoup plus efficace, les temps d'activités diurnes au-delà du crépuscule. Un état des lieux des villes possédant un éclairage public 98 est visible en Figure 16 avec également le frontispice de Jan van der Hayden à l'origine de cette adoption généralisée des lanternes à huile en Europe [88]. ...
Le réseau d’éclairage public semble au cœur de nombreuses attentions ces dernières années. Autrefois considéré comme une infrastructure tierce (en comparaison des réseaux de transport ou d’assainissement par exemple), on attend aujourd’hui de lui qu’il règle des problématiques de consommation d’énergie et fasse entrer la ville dans « l’ère numérique ». Mais alors qu’en est-il ? En quoi est-ce que ce réseau technique a-t-il accompagné les mutations urbaines, les transformations sociales, les décisions politiques et les progrès technologiques ? Surtout, de quelles évolutions son utilisation actuelle est-elle le visage ?C’est à ces questions que cette thèse essaie de fournir des éléments de réponse, en adoptant plusieurs axes d’analyse (donc plusieurs disciplines scientifiques) et en concentrant le travail sur un objet précis afin de valider les hypothèses théoriques. L’objet en question est le réseau d’éclairage public parisien, circonscrit territorialement et dont les sources techniques et historiques précises nous sont accessibles.La première partie est urbanistique et technique et permet de définir ce qu’est un « réseau d’éclairage public » et d’inscrire cet objet dans la bibliographie géographique et urbaine. La seconde partie est axée « histoire des techniques » et retrace les évolutions du réseau d’éclairage public sur le territoire parisien, ceci du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine. L’occasion d’un état des lieux quantitatif, technique, social et même politique sur cette infrastructure urbaine. La troisième partie est une étude sociologique auprès des acteurs actuels influençant la gestion du réseau. Des entretiens qualitatifs ont ainsi été menés auprès de cadres de groupes du BTP, de membres de collectivités et de gestionnaires afin de savoir en quoi des termes comme « révolution numérique » ou « Ville Intelligente » sont à relier avec le réseau d’éclairage et ses évolutions. La quatrième partie sera une réflexion de type « recherche-action » sur notre participation à des ateliers de co-construction de la « ville de demain » organisés par la Mairie de Paris. Cette dernière partie sera aussi l’occasion d’une prise de position sur le rôle que peut jouer le réseau d’éclairage (témoin, vecteur de construction ou catalyseur) dans les nouveaux enjeux (technologiques et environnementaux) auxquels sont confrontées les villes
... 2 Street lighting and crime 2.1 Evolution of the conceptions of night, public lighting, and crime Historical research has revealed that already in early modern Europe, crime was often linked with the night and its darkness (Koslofsky, 2011;. Religion played an important role in the development of this association. ...
... (Youngs & Harris, 2003). When demonologists tied witchcraft to crime in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, this process was further intensified (Koslofsky, 2011). Day and its light stood for God; evil and the devil were connected to darkness and the night. ...
... The penetration of daytime activities into the night-time, i.e. the 'nocturnalisation' of social practices (cf. Koslofsky, 2011;Shaw, 2018), is a typically modern phenomenon, which has challenged the traditional 'diurnal' character of the social world (Garnert, 1993;Melbin, 1978). This development is made possible by improved city infrastructure, e.g. the introduction of artificial illumination, the employment of safety measures, and keeping city streets free from obstacles, but also by the normalisation of working at night, the spread of late-night entertainment opportunities, and the proliferation of unconventional household structures (cf. ...
... Thus, it enhances what has been occurring in the modern age (Melbin, 1978, Giddens, 1984, i.e. the 'nocturnalisation' of city life (cf. Koslofsky, 2011;Shaw, 2018). This is, among other things, mostly thanks to the proliferation of electricity and the development of lighting technology (Garnert, 1993), which effectively reveals the environment and channels shopper movements (cf. ...
During recent decades, shopping’s geographical manifestations have altered radically and the presumed ‘death’ of town centre retailing has become a public concern. The social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of this decentralisation of retail and its effects on city life have been studied comprehensively. However, to date, few studies have examined the changing dynamics of non-mainstream shopping geographies, particularly local shopping streets. How shopping is enacted in such places, and shopping’s part in shaping them, has been largely overlooked. Aspiring to fulfil this knowledge gap, this dissertation examines shopping activities on Södergatan, a local shopping street in a stigmatized ‘super-diverse’ district of Helsingborg, Sweden known as Söder, and contributes to the literature on shopping geographies by drawing on a sociocultural perspective.
The study draws on practice theory and focuses on shopping as the main unit. The analysis is built on a sensitivity to the interrelationships existing between social practices and place, emerging from the epistemic positioning resulting from the identification of 'modes of practices'. In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping, which is complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography was employed as the primary research collection method, in combination with go-along interviews, observation and mental-mapping. The research reveals five major modes of shopping practice which jointly represent a typology for understanding shopping in terms of being enacted in the street; i.e. convenience shopping, social shopping, on-the-side shopping, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. This thesis also shows that the bundling of these modes of shopping shapes the street into a vibrant part of the city by interrelating with the shopping street’s sensomaterial and spatiotemporal dimensions in complex and multifaceted directions. Consequently, the local shopping street is conceptualized as a praxitopia, a place co-constituted through social practices.
... Apesar da vibrante vida noturna no antigo mundo urbano greco-romano, a noite ocidental tem sido considerada, ao longo dos séculos, como um tempo de reposo, sosego e intimidade. No entanto, desde a revolução industrial, as atividades humanas em muitas cidades e vilas capitalistas têm-se aberto progressivamente à noite, compondo um novo espaço-tempo urbano de produção, reprodução e consumo de lazer (Cunningham, 1980;Koslofsky, 2011). Em Europa, a revolução do lazer dos "anos dourados" dos anos 1950 e 1960 precedeu o nascimento de uma nova divisão internacional do trabalho que emergiu na década de 1970 e que deu como resultado -entre outrosa posterior fragmentação espaço-temporal do sistema produtivo nos países capitalistas avançados. ...
Nofre, J. (2022). Desafiando as noites de exclusão social: A diversão noturna como mecanismo innovador para a construção de comunidades mais inclusivas e sustentáveis. Em Cardoso, A. D. & Vaz, D. (eds.)., Cidades, escalas e transações, pp.. 168-192. Famalicão, Portugal: Edições Húmus. * Esta é a versão pré-impressa do capítulo, que também precede a edição linguística do texto. 1. INTRODUÇÃO. Apesar da vibrante vida noturna no antigo mundo urbano greco-romano, a noite ocidental tem sido considerada, ao longo dos séculos, como um tempo de reposo, sosego e intimidade. No entanto, desde a revolução industrial, as atividades humanas em muitas cidades e vilas capitalistas têm-se aberto progressivamente à noite, compondo um novo espaço-tempo urbano de produção, reprodução e consumo de lazer (Cunningham, 1980; Koslofsky, 2011). Em Europa, a revolução do lazer dos "anos dourados" dos anos 1950 e 1960 precedeu o nascimento de uma nova divisão internacional do trabalho que emergiu na década de 1970 e que deu como resultado-entre outros-a posterior fragmentação espaço-temporal do sistema produtivo nos países capitalistas avançados. Como resultado disso, a noite nas principais cidades globais emergiu como um novo nicho produtivo baseado-entre muitos outros factores-na precarização e exploração laboral. Assim, a crescente "nocturnalização" das sociedades urbanas globais contemporâneas durante a última parte do século XX tem produzido modos de vidas cada vez mais dessincronizados (Galinier et al., 2010). Daí que a noite urbana contemporânea apareça como um fenômeno complexo, ambivalente, socialmente e culturalmente construído (Body-Gendrot, 2011) que, recentemente, tem sido alvo de uma crescente atenção por parte da comunidade académica (Nofre & Eldridge, 2018). O principal foco deste capítulo é a noite e, mais particularmente, a diversão noturna nas cidades pós-industriais ocidentais. De facto, todas as semanas do ano, dezenas de milhões de pessoas em toda a Europa saem à noite para jantar, beber e dançar com os seus companheiros/as, amigos/as, etc. Interessa salientar aquí o facto que, ao longo das últimas décadas, discotecas, locais de música ao vivo, pubs e bares têm-se tornado centrais na produção, reprodução e consumo de vida social-1
... However, urban nightscapes in most European cites remain clearly segmented socially, racially and spatially (May, 2015;Shaw, 2015;among others). This is despite the "nocturnalization of Western life" (Koslofsky, 2011) and the role the night-time economy has played in (re)shapping how tourists, visitors and different segments of local population (especially university students) "experience" the city today (Grazian, 2008). Actually, in some European cities the expansion and commodification of the youthoriented nightlife in the city center has been acompanied by the strengthening of race, class, ethnic, and labor inequalities, which feature the neoliberal city (Brenner & Theodore, 2005). ...
... In order to understand how and why the subjective experience of light remains an epistemic wasteland, it is worthwhile taking a historical view of the fragmentation of lighting purposes, disciplines and perceptions. In Western society, the conquest of the urban night really started in the 17th century when European absolutist rulers invented night-time entertainment -at the time, an extremely luxurious alternative to daytime festivities as candles and oil lamps were very expensive and only the upper classes could afford to illuminate the night and sleep during daytime working hours (Brox 2010;Koslofsky 2011). During industrialisation, the implementation of gas lighting infrastructures and, later, electricity (Schivelbusch 1988;Tomory 2009) made artificial lighting widely available and affordable. ...
... Tehnicile şi practicile somnului identificate de Mauss (1934/1973) şi Turner (1996 arată că, deşi nu în totalitate învăţat, somnul urmează pattern-uri construite de alţi membrii ai societăţii în care indivizii trăiesc (vezi Williams şi Crossley, 2008). Astfel că "practicile somnului" (vezi Taylor, 1993;Williams 2001Williams , 2002 sunt asociate unor "patternuri ale organizării sociale" (Williams şi Crossley, 2008, p. 6) ce variază cultural şi istoric (vezi şi Ekirch, 2001Ekirch, , 2005Koslofsky, 2011;Melbin, 1978;Summers-Bremner, 2008;Wright 1962Wright /2004. În plus, tot mai multe studii recente ale unor cercetători din domeniul ştiințelor sociale indică faptul că relația dintre somn şi locuință, somn şi dormitor nu mai este una de dependență (vezi Avenel, 2013;Avenel şi Duvoux, 2013). ...
... Tehnicile şi practicile somnului identificate de Mauss (1934/1973) şi Turner (1996 arată că, deşi nu în totalitate învăţat, somnul urmează pattern-uri construite de alţi membrii ai societăţii în care indivizii trăiesc (vezi Williams şi Crossley, 2008). Astfel că "practicile somnului" (vezi Taylor, 1993;Williams 2001Williams , 2002 sunt asociate unor "patternuri ale organizării sociale" (Williams şi Crossley, 2008, p. 6) ce variază cultural şi istoric (vezi şi Ekirch, 2001Ekirch, , 2005Koslofsky, 2011;Melbin, 1978;Summers-Bremner, 2008;Wright 1962Wright /2004. În plus, tot mai multe studii recente ale unor cercetători din domeniul ştiințelor sociale indică faptul că relația dintre somn şi locuință, somn şi dormitor nu mai este una de dependență (vezi Avenel, 2013;Avenel şi Duvoux, 2013). ...
... According to Schivelbusch, by the end of the seventeenth century, most big cities in Europe, such as Paris (1667), Amsterdam (1669), Hamburg (1673), Berlin (1682), Copenhagen (1683), and London (1684) had installed street lighting. Koslovsky (2011) views this development as marking the beginning of the 'nocturnalization of European life' (131). Since then, human society has begun to exhibit a tendency toward more wakeful activities at night. ...
Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into "night studies", the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the center of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items constitute the database. Altogether 808 LL items were collected during the daytime and 283 of these LL items were found to be illuminated during nighttime site visits. The quantitative analysis reveals that the nocturnal LL differs from the diurnal LL in several ways: at the top-down level, the nocturnal LL shows a strong monolingual English tendency, while the diurnal LL has a tendency towards multilingualism; at the bottom-up level, fewer languages are used in the nocturnal signs than in the diurnal signs and Chinese is used as the prominent language in nocturnal signs, whereas English has a leading position in the diurnal signs. Our findings complicate previous scholarly understanding of bilingual and multilingual configurations in Singapore, suggesting that the LL has its own unique representation at night. The potential for integrating nighttime as a new dimension to examine LL is discussed.
In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labelled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.
This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming ‘truthful’ representations of ‘real life experiences’ of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how ‘light’ violence is exercised in vertical development.
The nighttime economy, or NTE—the combination of nocturnal specialties and the extension of the diurnal economy into the night—has been implemented as an effective boosting instrument set to “revitalize the urban space”. The instrument, applied in regions around world, develops new socioeconomic dynamics and poles of growth within cities. Although some cases emphasize the functional success of NTE practices, disequilibrium between urban elements—social groups, communities, and the cultures in which they live—are ongoing. The present article argues that urban nights must be considered within a broader reflection on the question of sustainability because a closer integration between brands, cultural elements, employment, and capital in different scales is demonstrated at night. Based on growth pole theory, this study combines data mining, spatial modeling, and other complementary approaches, and successfully (1) identifies the growth poles of the NTE in Lanzhou City, a postindustrial city transitioning towards a nighttime economy that forms dotted and non-uniform nocturnal zones through its geography and demography; (2) characterizes their socioeconomic organization, and (3) analyzes various causes and manifestations of the disequilibrium.
La croissance rapide de l'industrie du tourisme a créé des défis importants en matière de marketing touristique pour de nombreuses destinations. Les destinations touristiques doivent se concurrencer pour attirer de nouveaux touristes ou persuader les précédents de renouveler leur visite. En conséquence, ils doivent imaginer une image tentante pour leur marché cible. Par conséquent, l'image de la destination est un concept marketing crucial qui joue un rôle central dans la compréhension de la sélection de la destination (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999). A l’origine, Echtner et Ritchie (1991) définissent l'image de la destination touristique comme un ensemble de qualités fonctionnelles (utilitaires) liées au comportement touristique, telles que les infrastructures touristiques, les attractions et la tarification des produits touristiques (Echtner & Ritchie, 1993 ; P. Pearce, 1982). Cependant, de nombreux autres facteurs influents peuvent jouer un rôle important. Cette recherche de doctorat en philosophie (PhD) explore le rôle des événements et des innovations culturelles (telles que la gamification) dans l'amélioration de l'image de la destination touristique en étudiant leurs impacts, car l'image peut affecter directement le choix de la destination touristique (Beerli et al., 2007 ; Crompton, 1992 ; MacKay & Fesenmaier, 1997 ; Seddighi & Theocharous, 2002 ; Sirakaya et al., 2001 ; Um, 1998 ; Walmsley & Young, 1998).Les événements, en particulier les plus petits, pourraient être considérés comme l'un des outils utilisés en faveur des destinations touristiques lorsqu'elles sont en concurrence avec d'autres. Cependant, une grande partie de l'attention a été concentrée sur des événements à grande échelle ou méga-événements, avec peu de connaissances ou de compréhension des contributions apportées par leurs homologues beaucoup plus petits. Les événements culturels locaux, contrairement aux méga-événements, nécessitent peu d'investissements ou de développement d'infrastructures (Gursoy et al., 2004), ce qui les rend facilement accessibles aux milliers de petites lieux qui cherchent à renforcer leur image.Outre les événements, les innovations culturelles dans les destinations touristiques deviennent un nouveau mot à la mode dans les destinations ; la gamification fait partie des tendances qui pourraient aider les destinations dans cette compétition, notamment en ce qui concerne le goût des nouvelles générations (Gen Y et Z). Cependant, comme il s'agit d'un nouveau sujet, peu d'études ont été utilisées pour analyser le résultat de cette tendance et si la gamification peut aider les destinations à améliorer leur image. L'objectif global de cette thèse est d'offrir des informations solides sur la façon dont les destinations peuvent améliorer leur image et attirer plus de touristes en utilisant des moyens créatifs, dans les dimensions qui viennent d’être évoquées. De plus, les événements culturels et les innovations, populaires dans de nombreux endroits, ont de bons résultats en matière d'économie, de socialisation et de culture et sont considérés comme des outils pratiques. En conséquence, les organisations de marketing de destination (OMD) et les décideurs auront plus d'informations et de connaissances sur ce domaine d'étude et d’arguments pour soutenir leurs processus de prise de décision. Ce domaine spécifique est actuellement sous-étudié et a sa place dans l'étude plus large de l'industrie du tourisme et des impacts des événements. En conséquence, cette thèse tente d'enrichir la littérature théorique et méthodologique en se concentrant sur la question des événements et des innovations culturelles ; comment peuvent-ils contribuer efficacement à l'amélioration de l'image des destinations et les rendre plus attrayantes ou tentantes pour les touristes ?
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within individual states. This comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries focuses on a formative time in European history, from the late fifteenth century until the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, to demonstrate how the sharing of sovereignty through alliances influenced the evolution of the Empire, the Dutch Republic, and their various member states in fundamental ways. Alliances simultaneously supported and constrained central and territorial authorities, while their collaborative policy-making process empowered smaller states, helping to ensure their survival. By revealing how the interdependencies of alliance shaped states of all sizes in the Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close opens new perspectives on state formation with profound implications for understanding the development of states across Europe.
Recent protests against police violence remind us just how volatile are the emotions inspired by law enforcement. Yet despite current interest in both the history of emotions and the history of policing, these two areas of research have for the most part remained separate. This article brings them together to explore the emotional impact of policing in eighteenth-century Paris. Drawing on documents from the police archive, it shows how fears of the police's expanding influence spread through various milieus. Denizens of the night who were engaged in illicit activities lived in fear of late-night raids. Parents with young boys feared the dangers to their sons posed by seemingly indiscriminate arrests of children found loitering in the streets. Yet sometimes those police actions triggered explosions of anger. Under what conditions did fear of the police become so intolerable that it provoked rebellion rather than subjugation?
Les protestations récentes contre la violence policière nous rappellent la volatilité des émotions inspirées par la police. Mais malgré l'intérêt croissant pour l'histoire des émotions et pour celle de la police, rares sont les études qui les mettent en relation. Cet article se situe à cheval entre les deux champs de recherche. Il se propose d'examiner l'impact affectif de la police parisienne au XVIIIe siècle. Il montre, sur la base de documents trouvés dans les archives de la police, comment les craintes inspirées par l'influence grandissante de la police ont touché différents milieux sociaux. Certains habitués de la vie nocturne engagés dans des activités illicites vivaient dans la crainte de rafles policières. Les parents de jeunes garçons craignaient de voir embarquer leurs enfants lors des campagnes d'arrestations apparemment arbitraires menées pour débarrasser les rues de jeunes qui y traînaient. Mais ces interventions enclenchaient parfois des mouvements de colère. Dans quelles circonstances la peur des services répressifs est-elle devenue si intolérable qu'elle ait provoqué la rébellion plutôt que l'assujettissement ?
Sleep is fundamental to life and essential to one’s health behavior, scholastic achievement, and work performance. Recent years have seen an increase in empirical investigations incorporating sleep research into political science. This study complements existing sleep-politics studies by examining the associations between chronotype (a person’s preferred time to sleep and wake up) and attitudinal and behavioral political outcomes (left–right ideology and social conservatism proxied by religious service attendance). We analyze representative samples from 10 national contexts (Finland, Greece, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea, and Switzerland) to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrate that morning chronotype has significant links with political conservatism in six national contexts depending on model specification (most robustly in Switzerland). Unexpectedly, the morning chronotype may have links to liberalism in three other countries depending on model specification (most robustly in Russia). The results for religious observance are more uniform, indicating a link between morningness and greater religious observance across all cases in many specifications (excepting a reversed relationship in New Zealand in some models). Urbanization, seasonal effects, geographical characteristics, and religious denominations are explored as potential confounders.
The center of gravity in Roman studies has shifted far from the upper echelons of government and administration in Rome or the Emperor's court to the provinces and the individual. The multi-disciplinary studies presented in this volume reflect the turn in Roman history to the identities of ethnic groups and even single individuals who lived in Rome's vast multinational empire. The purpose is less to discover another element in the Roman Empire's 'success' in governance than to illuminate the variety of individual experience in its own terms. The chapters here, reflecting a wide spectrum of professional expertise, range across the many cultures, languages, religions and literatures of the Roman Empire, with a special focus on the Jews as a test-case for the larger issues. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Current evidence suggests that preventive measures, such as social distancing and wearing face masks, are critical to contain the spread of COVID-19. The recent burgeoning literature has empirically examined how a wide range of facet-level personality and individual-differences variables are associated with people's adherence to COVID-19 regulations. However, there lacks direct evidence regarding the role of chronotype in compliance with pandemic safety measures. According to the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis, people of later chronotype are more likely to breach COVID-19 restrictions. Despite this hypothesis shedding considerable light on the potential role of chronotype in the abidance of the virus-mitigating measures, it has not been rigorously tested using empirical data. To fill this gap, the present research investigated the link between morningness-eveningness and compliance with COVID-19 containment policies in Chinese samples. Two studies using multiple populations (students and community adults) and diverse measures of adherence to public health guidelines (self-report and actual behavior) consistently show that individuals who orient towards morningness display a higher level of compliance with COVID-19 prevention than people who orient towards eveningness. Overall, these findings present the first empirical confirmation of the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis, highlighting the role of chronotype in adherence to COVID-19 prevention guidelines.
This article examines the nature of sociability, communication and the ‘practical public sphere’ of Hamburg's early coffeehouses (1677–1714) and provides insight into the ‘social life’ of these coffeehouse spaces during the ‘early’ Enlightenment. Using licensing records, administrative sources and supplications, it shows how novelty, popularity, political partisanship and fashionability were characteristic of these early coffeehouses, creating a fluid and capricious dynamic of custom and communication that stressed established notions of honourable sociabilities and communication in urban public spaces. It argues that these destabilizing social and communication practices led to social stratification and a redefinition of ‘honourable’ burgherly behaviour in the normative public sphere. Strategies to govern the coffeehouses sought thus to bind these spaces and their actors to this newly articulated ‘normative’ burgherly public sphere.
Throughout urban Europe, the introduction and presence of vehicles in the city caused tensions of safety and scarcity of space. This article discusses the vehicle culture of early modern Amsterdam, where vehicles and their users had no undisputed right to the streets. The current view in the historiography is that regulations that tried to curb wheeled horse-drawn vehicles were ineffective and that the streets rapidly became a vehicular space from the seventeenth century onward. This narrative is reconsidered by differentiating by vehicle type and location within the city. Specific parts of the city formed distinct vehicular spaces, and draft horses carrying sleighs formed an underestimated but important part of early modern street life. This difference between wheeled and non-wheeled vehicles is explored through new empirical observations from notarial attestations, and additional attention is paid to the role of vehicle speed and the gendered nature of early modern vehicle culture.
During the early eighteenth century, the eastern coastline of Sweden received an unprecedented number of internal refugees fleeing from Russian attacks in Finland and Sweden’s Baltic territories. This chapter traces the reception of these refugees in terms of delegated and conditional hospitality, and the responses it provoked. While the king formulated policies of hospitality, he delegated the coordination of efforts and the responsibility for separating deserving refugees from undeserving ones to a commission. The practical tasks of providing funds and performing day-to-day hospitality were delegated to local communities and individual subjects. The conditions of hospitality are revealed in the security measures that authorities and communities imposed on the refugees. By analyzing these measures and the responses they provoked from the refugees, I argue that hospitality hinged on the refugees being in Sweden temporarily—as soon as the war ended, they were expected to return home. Furthermore, the hospitality proved frail as the security measures led to autoimmunization: attempts by the commission to separate deserving from undeserving refugees created rifts between hosts and guests, aggravating the situation.
This article investigates shifting expectations of hospitality and security in the eighteenth-century free town Altona. Although the Danish authorities preferred to keep the city relatively unregulated, the instruction for the burgher captains from 1748 introduced a more organized evening patrol, and the new police instructions from 1754 demanded detailed records of lodging guests to be reported to the police director on a daily basis. This order was motivated further in the city’s police director Johann Peter Willebrand’s book on the ideal police practice, Abrégé de la Police (1765). In this book, the importance of politeness and hospitality towards strangers and guests in the city was emphasized with clarifying examples from his experiences, ambitions, and seemingly utopian ideals, which the burgher captains were expected to support by performing their everyday duties. On the basis of Willebrand’s writings, police records, administrative correspondence, and travel accounts, as well as the burgher captains’ complaints about the hardship of their work, this article shows how the reforms of public security in eighteenth-century Altona strengthened colliding expectations of private and public responsibilities, and resulted in requests from the burgher captains for a more clear-cut division between home and city.
The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volume and explicates its guiding questions and conceptual framework. Our focus is on the Baltic Sea region, considered as a multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict and its specific legacy of hospitality. In terms of guiding concepts for the empirical chapters, this introduction combines issues of host–guest relations with the problems of securitization. It is our contention that hospitality in Baltic migration contexts, from the turn of the first millennium until the twentieth century and beyond, triggered security issues both on the part of arriving strangers and receiving host communities. Why and how were multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity? Under what circumstances did hospitality turn into hostility? How was hospitality practiced and contained spatially? By focusing predominantly on coastal contexts as spaces for meetings and confrontations, we decouple the study of hospitality and migration from state-centered methodology. Instead, we offer a close-up view on hospitality dilemmas and practices of dealing with arriving guests and strangers, which we consider in transhistorical perspective. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters.
This chapter examines the ambivalent relations between peddlers and hosts in the Northern Baltic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period of modernization and growing consumption, peddlers played an important role for the distribution of consumer goods in the vast and sparsely populated region. Using the concepts of hospitality and securitization as analytical tools, the article focuses on the threats that peddlers were perceived to pose, the ambiguous relations between mobile traders and their sedentary hosts, and the ambivalent encounters around the goods that the peddlers carried. The sources consist of Finnish and Swedish newspapers, accessed through digital newspaper archives, and the responses to three ethnographic questionnaires. While both material types pose source critical challenges, the article illustrates how the conclusions that can be drawn on hospitality and rejection depend on which types of sources are studied and on the voice of which group in the host community they represent. The situational and relational character of hospitality is reflected in how the four groups of peddlers analyzed—knallar, “Rucksack Russians,” Eastern European Jews and Tatars—were received on a graded scale stretching from warm hospitality to extreme rejection.
On the medieval Baltic Rim, foreign merchants staying in town for their trade were usually called “guests.” This linguistic connection between otherwise very different languages raises the question of whether, and how far, the medieval coastal societies around the Baltic Sea may have shared common conceptions of trade hospitality and securitization of foreign presence. This paper departs from a critique of the German/Catholic chroniclers’ guest-perspective division of the Baltic people into hospitable and unhospitable communities and argues that trade hospitality was an ambivalent enterprise that was never unconditional and always negotiated between the guests and their hosts. Indeed, from the latter’s perspective, treaties with foreign merchants raised the question of the level of safety they were prepared to provide. This meant considering not only in which ways they could benefit from their openness, but also to what extent they were ready to commit themselves toward the strangers and to protect them. In any case, trade hospitality was never unconditional, and the status of guests included rules and boundaries, such as reciprocity or peacekeeping that the rulers and the local populations expected the foreign merchants to abide by. If they did not, the hosts had to find ways to force them to comply with their expectations—if possible without them off.
Relationship between Novgorodians and Hanseatic merchants in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries present a striking example of long-term and ongoing interaction between communities differing in ethnicity, culture and Christian denominations in Northern Europe. There is a unique corpus of sources allowing to study contacts between them—numerous documents dating mostly from the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, written in Middle Low German, related to the activities of the Hanseatic Kontor in Novgorod. Some very important evidence can also be found in Novgorodian sources: chronicles, hagiographical texts, laws and charters. The following issues are addressed in the chapter: the infra-structure of hospitality in Novgorod (first of all, history of the main residences of the Hanseatic merchants in Novgorod—the so-called “trading yards”); legal aspects and rhetoric of hospitality and hostility towards the guests and securitization of both hosts and guests; everyday practices of hospitality and hostility in Novgorod towards German merchants. The author comes to the conclusion that the “Black Legend” widespread in the mainstream scholarship in the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries which assumed that relations between Novgorodians and German merchants had been almost exclusively hostile and based upon mutual distrust has to be revised. Novgorod was able to shape a variety of notions and practices, which allowed, despite conflicts, to efficiently keep contact with the numerous German merchant community for centuries.
The inseparable connection between hospitality and hostility is a central characteristic of hospitality. This article takes up this aspect and examines it using the example of Riga’s surrender in July 1710. Within barely two weeks, the city and its inhabitants changed their legal status twice: from a besieged to an occupied city and from occupied to Russian subjects. These transformations were embedded in forms of ritualized hospitality in which attackers and besieged, occupied and new rulers met. While the provision of hostages in the course of the negotiations on the surrender of the city enabled non-hostile communication and were intended to ensure the success of the negotiations, the entry of the Russian General Field Marshal Sheremetev into the city of Riga ten days later transformed Riga into a Russian city and its inhabitants into Russian subjects. It thus served to display Russian rule and secure it.
This chapter analyzes the changing public opinion towards street entertainers, as expressed in nineteenth-century Swedish press, identifying a shift towards a discourse of securitization 1850. Until then, entertainers were seldom mentioned and occasionally seen as a positive element of urban social life; their services were often appreciated, and this in a country which otherwise had developed strong legal institutions for controlling and rejecting itinerant and marginalized individuals. From 1850, entertainers became more present in the press, the tone being almost completely negative, portraying them as threats to public morals and economy. Criticism focused on three issues. Firstly, entertainers were claimed to be beggars in disguise, parasites on the social body. Secondly, they made noise, making everyday life a nuisance to the urban population. Lastly, their use of children was used to emphasize their inhumane greed. Behind the shift was an increase in the numbers of entertainers following processes of proletarization in Europe, but also the growth of a middle-class striving to take control of city spaces. Between the lines, it becomes clear that entertainers still were popular among working classes. The discourse of securitization seems to have lacked the necessary audience, and the outcries against entertainers mostly without effect.
The construction of the sea fortress Sveaborg outside Helsinki started in 1748 and caused an enormous influx of military staff into town; the soldiers far outnumbered the civilian population. The locals’ hospitality towards the army was not voluntary; the law obliged all burghers to accommodate military staff in their own homes. The biggest risks when soldiers arrived in town were related to public health, public order, and the billeting of soldiers. In mid-eighteenth-century Helsinki public health was not yet a concern, but the large-scaled billeting was an acute problem. Public order was a pressing concern too, to avoid conflicts the social order had to be maintained, everyone should know their proper places and behave accordingly. Since the army arrived in peacetime to its own country, the army and the local authorities constantly negotiated about the terms of the hospitality to maintain a safe and peaceful co-existence. The townsmen remained masters of their own houses and their own town, but they still had to submit to the state, the social hierarchies, and the common good. But the billeting also provided new economic opportunities for the burghers in the tavern and alcohol business, as well as skilled workforce for bold entrepreneurs.
Long-distance trade brought merchants, skippers, and other visiting traders to the early modern towns of the Baltic rim. This chapter explores how they were received in the visited towns through the court protocols from the towns of Lübeck, Malmö, Stockholm, and Reval covering the period 1515–1559. A spatial perspective on the reception of merchants and traders shows that the level of hospitality granted to visitors depended on their perceived trustworthiness and social standing. The view on visiting traders was conflicted, as they simultaneously offered possibilities for lucrative trade and posed a perceived threat to the social order of the early modern towns.
Hospitality in the Middle Ages was inseparable from security measures. A welcomed guest was the one who was not feared. A settlement in the lower reaches of the Volkhov River named Ladoga (Old Ladoga) used to serve as a gateway on the water route from Scandinavia (via the Baltic Sea) to Old Rus’ and back (the so-called route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”). In this chapter, using the material of the Old Norse-Icelandic literature (sagas, chronicles, and law-codes) and Russian chronicles, as well as archaeological data, I am going to discuss the role of Ladoga as an intermediate station on the way from Scandinavia to Novgorod and back. It will be demonstrated that travelers to Old Rus’ were forced to make a halt in Ladoga to send their messengers to the central authorities based in Novgorod in order to conclude a temporary truce and receive a certain guarantee of safety on the way to Novgorod and back for all those who had arrived. Trade and control functions of the Ladoga region are clearly traced during the period of the Novgorod-Hanseatic trade. But scholars believe they were inherited from much earlier times. Perhaps in the sagas we find confirmation of this assumption.
This chapter studies examples of confrontations between missionary guests and pagan host communities on the Baltic Rim from the late tenth to mid-twelfth centuries to uncover the spatial dynamics and intercultural articulations of hospitality in Christianization contexts. In terms of method, the chapter focuses on the functional, political, and symbolic mechanisms structuring collective production spaces of hospitality during such encounters. The addressed problems consider how spaces of hospitality were practically and discursively produced and negotiated through such meetings. It delves also into the ways arrival of this special type of Christian strangers and guests was contained in terms of power relations and security measures. And, finally, how these interactions involved and oscillated between hospitable and hostile attitudes. The results point out the deeply ambiguous, volatile, and heavily contested nature of spaces of hospitality in the Christianization of the Baltic Rim, both for missionary agents and for the host communities receiving/rejecting them.
This chapter studies how host communities in the Danish town of Aarhus and the Swedish town of Uppsala approached the question of providing security in everyday interaction with prisoners of war during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Blomqvist argues that the prisoner policy of the Danish and Swedish crown tapped into established systems of public hospitality, modeled on the billeting of military personnel. The crown employed norms of hospitality to mobilize local resources for the war effort, delegating the cost of feeding and guarding the prisoners onto the host community. At the same time, negotiations between the state and the host community regarding the legitimacy of the prisoner policy redefined the very notions of hospitality. The prisoner policy relinquished the idea that public hospitality was founded on a fundamental solidarity between members of the community of the realm. Prisoners of war were entitled to hospitality, despite the fact that they were not members of the realm, but, quite the opposite, identified as enemies. Instead, the prisoners were expected to compensate their host by performing labor. Through service arrangements, the prisoners were formally placed in a subordinate position to their hosts and employers, expected to serve and obey. This negotiated hospitality served both as an integrative and an excluding force in the two towns.
This article investigates questions of ‘designing for value change’ via a ubiquitous, yet often taken-for-granted, technology – streetlights. Smart city trends are spurring a new generation of streetlights, with lampposts being fitted with sensors, cameras and a host of other technologies aimed at monitoring and data collection. This has raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and power relations, arguably creating a changing value landscape for streetlights. However, the article will argue that, while smart streetlights may seem to instantiate a moment of value change, they in fact represent a continuity of values fundamental to the very foundations of public lighting. They embody a set of values – and value tensions – that can be traced back to the origins of modern public lighting in the seventeeth–eighteenth centuries. Moreover, urban nights occupy a liminal space at the boundaries of social order, which likewise informs streetlights’ technical functions and symbolic meanings. Appreciating this continuity of values (and value tensions) is necessary for analysing the potential impacts of new innovations, as well as the value landscape that will inevitably shape their design and use. In adopting a historical perspective on a specific case study, as well as proposing the notion of value continuity, the article offers generalizable insights, as well as future research directions, for the theory and practice of designing for value change.
A poluição luminosa, talvez a mais visível mas menos falada das formas de poluição com impactos importantes, atingiu nos últimos anos níveis jamais alcançados, com tendência para agravar-se. O conhecimento científico em torno dos efeitos da luz artificial à noite permitiu alargar a identificação dos seus impactos muito para além da astronomia ou do desperdício energético. A estes, somam-se hoje diversos impactos reconhecidos nos ecossistemas e outros prováveis na saúde. O ciclo natural claro-escuro foi substituído por uma presença permanente de luz durante 24h, de forma não exclusiva mas mais notável nas cidades, com alcances que fazem com que, ainda que com diferentes níveis de intensidade, em Portugal Continental não exista hoje nenhum local isento de poluição luminosa.
Guardians of the Night (2018) is a short‐length film set in Guantánamo, Cuba, that aims to engage with a temporal scape too long disregarded by visual anthropologists: the night. This article, written by the filmmakers, reflects on some of the challenges and opportunities offered by the night for ethnographic fieldwork, filmmaking, and more specifically, sound recording. We locate our work as part of a movement to recognize the night as a spatiotemporal dimension that should be explored further from a sensorial perspective and outside the diecentric focus that social sciences have established in their approaches to social and cultural phenomena.
Bengal light was among the earliest commercial sources of artificial lighting for photographic use, patented as Photogen in February 1857. Essentially, a pyrotechnic flare whose vital ingredient was saltpeter, it was mined by low caste laborers in Bengal, which had emerged as the leading global producer of saltpeter by the eighteenth century. Saltpeter was a coveted global commodity because it served as the primary material for the manufacture of gunpowder and also had wide-ranging industrial applications. Its use for photography provides an early instance of the commodification and trade in lighting technologies and materials, challenging dominant assumptions about photographic light as a freely available natural resource accessible to all. It asserts the presence of artificial lighting in early photography to contest invocations to the sun and divine light that dominate characterizations of the period. Finally, saltpeter ties early photographic lighting into a wider imperial trade of commodities for war, to further cement the analogies between the camera and the gun noted in many photographic studies. Encapsulated in its use is an imperial history of global trade that hinged on extraction of natural sources, colonial labor, and alliances between military and industrial technologies of light.
This article analyses the contested adoption of electric lights by the Spanish Catholic church during the Bourbon Restoration era (1874–1931). Through a careful reading of primary sources, namely Catholic popular magazines, and official documents, it will show how Catholic authorities and practitioners resisted, negotiated and, ultimately, engaged with electricity in religious spaces. The article argues that electric light contributed to wider exchanges in a non-monolithic Spanish Catholicism on the observance of traditional values or the possibilities of the church’s modernization. However, amid a particularly tense moment regarding the secular–clerical relations, the systematic use of electric lights in churches at the turn of the twentieth century—but also in other public ceremonies—contributed to the making of religious sensations aimed at attracting new believers and reasserting the presence of the institution in a disputed public space.
Recent years have seen the renewal of historiography concerning the police in the early modern period. Specialists no longer receive the figure of cities without police forces before the creation of modern institutions. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated convergence of a great movement of reflection with reforms of the police forces and organizations in European towns, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. Two tendencies illustrate this evolution: first, the general decline of the institutions of civic police forces and their replacement by professional forces and, second, the professionalization of municipal police forces. But these reforms of the police force could also be realized via use of traditional mechanisms of community policing. In several cities, inhabitants of the district or neighborhood were again in charge of functions of “modern” policing. Although it is premature to present a global synthesis, various European examples demonstrate that there is no linear historical process leading directly from community or civic policing to a state police force while bypassing the municipal police force. The historical processes of the modernization of the police in early modern Europe are more complex.
This study focuses on François Boucher's 1758 portrait of Mme de Pompadour at her toilette to explore cultural meanings implied in Boucher's painting and to reevaluate how the Rococo has been traditionally understood. The converging discourses of art making, “femininity,” artifice, and social class that inflect the picture are examined here. Also considered is how anti-Rococo art criticism became entwined with a critique of public women centered on the use of cosmetics, with each contributing to a devaluation of the Rococo as feminine and to a devaluation of “femininity” in the Enlightenment critique of elite culture.
This is the first modern book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain.
L’expression du martyre et de la souffrance a marqué et défini le mouvement de réforme qui a eu lieu en France au seizième siècle. Ce langage a servi à unir la collectivité, à réécrire et à réinterpréter l’histoire et à former la mémoire collective. Mais si le martyre a valorisé la collectivité, le nicodémisme l’a minée. Cette étude soutient que pour saisir la controverse nicodémiste, il faut l’examiner sous l’angle du martyre. D’ailleurs, dans les textes antinicodémistes, qui manifestent clairement cette rhétorique, on retrouve le vocabulaire, les images et les symboles du martyre.
Early European monks were preoccupied with the night. They were quintessential men of the dark, for nocturns, by far their longest liturgical office, was conducted each night, in the blackness of virtually unlit churches. In so doing monks not only ritually anticipated the coming of the dawn but also, and especially, engaged with the primordial cosmological darkness that preceded the original creation of Genesis. Various aspects of daily monastic life prepared monks for this primary nightly labor, the emotional and psychological effects of which were probably further heightened by physiological reactions to chronic sleep deprivation.
En 1528, l'imprimeur de Nuremberg, Jobst Gutknecht, publie un tract qui est reste inedit jusqu'a aujourd'hui. L'auteur anonyme est reste cache sous le pseudonyme de Nicodemus Martyr. Du point de vue spirituel, il critique les fruits de la Reforme. Son argumentation et son style rappelent ceux de Sebastian Franck. Le lieu de publication et le pseudonyme rendent possible une attribution du Creutz Christi a Franck, probablement avant qu'il abandonne son poste de predicateur protestant. En 1543, le Creutz Christi est publie une seconde fois avec de nombreuses corrections et un autre tract qui est surement l'oeuvre de Sebastian Franck
ACCEPTANCE OF night air had grown slowly and unsteadily through the nineteenth century. It was pushed forward by discomfort in stuffy homes, by fear of carbonic acid, by fear of contamination by other human bodies, and by desire for contact with nature-yet held back by folk knowledge about the danger of malaria. Cautious, yet still struggling to understand the hazards of night air, ventilation experts and health advisers recommended ineffective methods of filtered ventilation. Once medical research had identified the hazards of mosquitoes and tacitly acknowledged the errors of earlier ventilation advice, Americans felt able to safely inhale night air in heroic doses. The early-twentieth-century cult of the wilderness further boosted the popularity of night air among the health-conscious. New medical knowledge, mosquito eradication, and window screens transformed the sleeping experience for only a generation or two. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Americans would alter their relationship with night air once again, thanks to the spread of residential air-conditioning. By the early twenty-first century, when over 8o percent of American households are at least partially air-conditioned, bedroom windows on hot nights are as tightly shut as those of George Templeton Strong during that 1843 heat wave. Unlike Strong, though, Americans no longer face agonizing conflicts between comfort and health. By sealing out the breezes, summer and winter, they secure for themselves both a constant, pleasant temperature and a feeling of safety from pollen and outdoor dust-and perhaps a sense of protection from the increasingly distrusted world outside. The resurgence of the hermetically sealed home has taken place within a different system of knowledge about the body and nature. Such a radical separation of indoor and outdoor environments-technologically impossible even in the most "airtight" homes of the nineteenth century-both reflects and strengthens a modern belief in firm boundaries between the human and the natural.
George Gifford, Elizabethan minister and puritan activist, was among the earliest English writers to address the witch-hunts of the latter sixteenth century. Though not as influential as the works of his contemporaries Reginald Scot and William Perkins, Gifford's Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593) is notable for its attention to the ministerial challenges posed by witch belief as well as for its entertaining dialogue designed to appeal to a wide audience. Gifford understood witch belief primarily as a pastoral problem, and this led him to discount the power of witches and to reject witch-hunts as spiritually distracting for the "common sort" of Christian. His approach contrasts with that of other writers, both skeptics and believers, who understood witchcraft primarily as an intellectual or theological problem.
This article explores Catholic missionaries' use of emotions to promote conversions in the duchy of Chablais from 1597 to 1598, highlighting in particular three Forty Hours Devotions celebrated in the Alpine villages of Annemasse and Thonon. Evoking early Christianity through images of the Eucharist and the Crucifixion, a small band of missionaries, led by François de Sales and Capuchin Chérubin de Maurienne, hoped to spark overt emotions in their audience and to distinguish baroque Catholicism from the more introspective Calvinist faith of nearby Geneva. Published accounts of the devotions, correspondence of the organizers, and records of the reactions from Geneva indicate the success of the Forty Hours Devotions and demonstrate the missionaries' willingness to shape the presentation of their message to appeal to people's senses rather than to their intellects.
In contrast to the extensive research devoted to the Marian exiles, little detailed attention has been paid by modern historians to the Englishmen who simply tried to continue Protestant worship during 1553–8 within the country. Yet developments in these years provide unusual insights into mid-Tudor Protestantism at its grass roots, particularly into what remained after the Edwardian Church of England had suddenly had the power of the state not merely removed from its support but actively turned against it. Not surprisingly, the change from Edward to Mary is referred to in contemporary Protestant tracts in something of the tone used toward an inexplicable natural disaster like an outbreak of the plague, for Mary's measures to return England to Roman Catholicism were indeed radical in their impact. Among other things, most of the Protestant hierarchy was soon in prison or in exile, and men and women intent on continuing the communal worship of the Edwardian Church were in effect cast into the same boat with religious groups like the Freewillers which that Church had previously repressed. Legally, all of them were now religious separatists – that is, persons who persistently conducted worship apart from the established Church – and any gatherings for Protestant worship were mere conventicles – that is, periodic meetings of self-selected persons worshipping without the participation of an authorised cleric.
From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Guernsey's Calvinist régime sought to control the rival cultural attractions of night-time activities, enjoyed especially by the young. These included the vueille and “gadding” between parishes. Cases of disguising in 1624 and 1630, the former under a mare's skin, when examined alongside examples from the other Channel Islands, England and Wales, demonstrate analogies with hobby horse perambulations and the Mari Lwyd. A unique reference to vouarouvarie [werewolfery] also describes a rowdy nocturnal activity, here with elements drawn from medieval identifications of the werewolf with outlawry and the dead. Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey may also have involved the harassment of women.
seventeenth century witch, there is one curious aspect still left unexplored: that is, the mutual influence of the concepts of ghost and witch. Historians charting the development of the witch crazes have often been concerned with the basis of folklore out of which the stereotype of the witch arose-either to affirm its importance (Kittredge, Lea, Cohn)' or to deny it (Peters).2 But, as far as I am aware, in all the folkloristic material there has been little or no direct consideration of the traditional figure of the ghost. For instance, Keith Thomas gives a cogent account of ghost belief in the medieval and early modern period, but he treats it in a separate section as an "allied belief' and does not integrate it into his main line of reasoning.3 As might be expected, folklorists are more aware of the links between the two,4 but even here the tendency, even in historical works, is to keep to certain well defined classes of supernatural creatures and exclude consideration of others for convenience' sake. In the literature of the period, however, no such clear-cut picture emerges. A view of the English literature of the supernatural from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth-the age of maximum belief in both creatures-shows that, in this country at least, the two were so closely allied that for over a hundred years they constituted virtually a single subject. This close connectedness has important repercussions for historians of the witch persecutions and especially for folklorists interested in the historical tradition of the ghost. The literature of the period shows that ghost and witch were for people of early modern times not merely 'allied beliefs' but intrinsic parts of a single system. One was seldom mentioned without the other, as in this passage from Religio Medici: It is a riddle to me ... how so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicke, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of Spirits. For my part, I have ever believed, and now do know, that there are witches: they that doubt of these, doe not only denie them, but Spirits: and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of Infidels, but Atheists. Those that to confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to be so much as Witches; the Devil hath them already in a heresie as capital as Witchcraft; and to appear to them were but to convert them.5 In this passage the fit between ghosts and witches is so neat as to constitute virtual synonymity. After introducing the topic of spirits, Browne moves in the next sentence and without apparent change of topic to witches and in the one after that to apparitions, explaining that sceptics wishing to see apparitions cannot even be witches. The Devil will not waste his time appearing to them-whether to witches or as apparitions, this statement leaves ambiguous, and the confusion between the two is
Europe's first street lighting has been studied exclusively in local and practical terms. Based on evidence from northern Europe and the Empire, in particular the Electorate of Saxony between the reigns of Electors John George II (1656-1680) and Frederick Augustus I (1694-1733, as Augustus II King of Poland, 1697-1733), this article examines street lighting in a broader history of the night. In Saxony, the absolutist ruler Augustus II established public street lighting in Leipzig, the leading city of his principality, in 1701. Placing Saxon street lighting in its European context illustrates a surprising set of relationships between the court, the city, and the night in seventeenth-century Europe.
Examines the ideas of luxury, control, and utility in order to understand the urge to light streets in the nineteenth century, when adequate lighting technology was invented. The grounds on which lights were justified in three fairly typical nineteenth century cities - Minneapolis, Minnesota; Sheffield, England; and Bochum, Germany - are examined. -Author
It is often assumed that the institution of the family and all that implied in terms of patriarchal power, settlement patterns, and inheritance customs restricted women within village communities. This article sets out to explore the possibility that there were female-centered households in seventeenth-century France, based on sibling relationships, that these households did not require male suzerainty, and that they may have survived in village communities with the support offemale networks operating through the evening spinning bees. The article focuses on texts that represent a legal dispute over a village fire in Normandy toward the end of the seventeenth century and on the complex ways in which male voices in these texts constituted the lives of the female villagers involved.
The limits of honor and dishonor, order and disorder, and theirs and ours were negotiated in the early modern nighttime streets. These cultural negotiations are approached here from the viewpoint of one particular street fight in the seventeenth-century town of Turku in the province of Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden. The drunken, out-of-control fight included both ritualistic forms of a masculine street fight and uncontrolled rage as well as a territorial contest over urban space. The material form of the street as well as the time of the day added their own influences. The nighttime street emerges as a place of metaphorical and physical boundaries, where open and closed, shared and private, and controlled and suppressed were defined. The aim of the article is to see urban space as something more than just a neutral site of actions and practices or a mere network of social interactions without clear material referents.
Recent disciplinary reconfigurations have shifted focus from a temporal-historical explanation of social life to one designed to investigate the latter's spatial dimension. This article examines the development of various spaces in the eighteenth century—physical, social, colonized, epistemological, and esthetic—and proposes a mode of cultural analysis and of historical understanding relating to the eighteenth century that takes account of these disicplinary shifts.
Callaloo 25.3 (2002) 821-843
—Jamaica Kincaid
—Warren Montag
—John Locke
—Jamaica Kincaid
In a brilliant satire on every tourist's epiphany upon first entering an African, or Africanized environment like a Caribbean island, Kincaid interrupts white people's preying on Antigua:
Jamaica Kincaid's brazen address to her white reader/tourist stepping off the plane in A Small Place and submitting the black world of Antigua to his/her rather deluded gaze has sent me on my own particular journey that I would like the readers of this article to share. I mean to take readers on a tour to visit their own whiteness (my own included), as perceived and passed on in almost viscerally painful terms by Kincaid. She is shredding the assumed universality of whiteness to pieces in unforeseen and unspectacular, but nonetheless aggressive ways. It bespeaks the entrenchment of whiteness as that which is unquestionable that critics—feminist or otherwise—have chosen to read past these shattering moments and have preferred, instead, to couch their perception in terms like: Kincaid's uncorrupted view of "colonialism," of "the British (culture, ruling class, poetry, you name it) or of "Western domination."
The effect of this mechanism of "refusing the message," as I want to call it, is to neutralize one of the most clear sighted attacks on and fracturings of whiteness, white ideology, and white subject positions that contemporary literature has produced, and to maintain a position of critical comfort, a position of "I am not the target of these attacks," an evasive de-personalization of reading working to the advantage of underwriting white assumptions—for example, the assumption to be able to be a critic of a black person's criticism of one's own privilege and domineering cultural, social and individual history, without being "meant," without, accordingly, having to own the responsibility for it. Part of the problem seems to derive from the fact that, whereas there is by now a weighty corpus of critical research on the history of racism, on the inherent relations between the genealogy of European humanism and the development of biologist, racist thought in various disciplines, the not so...
The courtship habits of Early Modern England included a wide spectrum of sexual togetherness. Between penetrative sex, which could end in premarital pregnancy, and no physical contact at all, there was a wide spectrum to maneuver. The paper offers a new tentative research orientation attempting to interpret the social place and meaning of one custom of premarital sexual togetherness-namely: Bundling, in late sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Rather then relating the question of bundling to diaries, life stories or the church courts, as has usually been done, the interpretation focuses on a different source. the contemporary understanding and representation of the biblical story of Ruth and Boaz. The night meeting of Ruth and Boaz at the threshing floor (Book of Ruth ch.3) served as a kind of biblical example of pious, virtuous bundling. By offering a kind of conservative via media between full intercourse and no sexual contact at all, it seems that godly guidance, and not just economic needs or changes in Church legislation, could have had a potentially casual role in shaping, and in the same time, delimiting, sexual habits of popular as well as elite social classes.
This article explores the construction and administration of a new, large combination poor house, orphanage, insane asylum, and penitentiary named St. George in the central German city of Leipzig from 1700 onward. This case study contributes to discussions about early modern poor care and punishment in two ways. First, it explores interactions among various groups involved with the house, especially the city council, propertied citizens, and inmates of the house. Relating different perspectives of these groups not only illuminates the workings of poor care and punishment, but also allows for a broader exploration of the relative positions and authority of men and women from different social groups in the city. The sources available on St. George, unusually rich, provide a rare opportunity to compare pronouncements by councilors, propertied citizens, and inmates on one subject. Second, the article explores how religion shaped the ideology and practice of poor care and punishment. This bears on the first issue, since religion structured many of the interactions among social groups.
Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 381-395
What is Descartes's contribution to Enlightenment? Undoubtedly, Cartesian philosophy added to the conflict between philosophical and theological views which divided intellectual life in the Dutch Republic towards the end of its "Golden Age." Although not everyone was as explicit as Lodewijk Meyer, who said that his theological doubts were inspired by Descartes's philosophical method, Cartesianism along with Copernicanism, Socinianism, and Cocceianism played an important part in the growing skepticism towards the authority of Scripture. Apart from Descartes's general method, however, specific Cartesian ideas encouraged a new view towards nature and towards God's role in governing it. In physics and physiology the new philosophy replaced the image of mind working on matter with the image of a self sufficient mechanism. This new causal metaphor led to a typically Cartesian form of "disenchantment." In this article I argue that on account of their approval of a Cartesian theory of causality, even authors with sincere religious motives came close to accepting radical and nearly Spinozistic ideas. I start with disenchantment in a very literal sense: Balthasar Bekker's denial of the activities of devils, angels, and other spirits. A comparison of Bekker's arguments with those of another Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx will, I hope, bring out the nature and importance of what I shall present as Descartes's "mechanical reduction" in physics. Finally, I argue that the Cartesian separation of mind and body gave rise to a form of disenchantment that reached far beyond contemporary debates.
Balthasar Bekker's classic book The World Bewitched (1691-93) does not so much deal with the practice of sorcery as with its theory. Bekker offers a wide range of theological and philosophical arguments in order to combat the idea that ghosts, devils, and angels influence natural or historical events. In particular Bekker draws some important conclusions from the philosophy of Descartes. Yet it is immediately clear to the reader that the motives for his critique are religious rather than philosophical. The World Bewitched is not written as a scientific assault on superstition. Bekker, at the time serving as a Calvinist minister in Amsterdam, presents his work as a new and perhaps final phase in the perfection of Christianity. For two centuries it had been a goal of the Protestant Reformation to accentuate God's majesty and to establish the idea of His absolute power over creation. Bekker's World again expresses this idea. His denial that ghosts and devils are active in the world is a logical consequence of the belief that there is no room for demigods in nature. Bekker thus adds a final touch to the project of the Reformation. The World Bewitched will testify to the fact "that I return as much of the honor of His Power and Wisdom to the Almighty, as they took from Him who gave it to the Devil. I ban [the Devil] from the World and I bind him in Hell." Removing devils and spirits from nature, Bekker aims to distinguish superstition from true faith. The battle against superstitious beliefs had formed a characteristic element of Protestant tactics. Dutch Calvinists, for instance, took offense at the continuing practices of blessings and incantations. Bekker wanted to go even further. The Protestantization of Christian dogma could only be completed by making everything in nature's course depend on God's unique power and providence. "Science" in our sense of the word was a subsidiary matter. Still, Bekker saw the new scientific theories of his day as useful allies. In particular it was the new philosophy of Descartes that attracted him. Following Descartes, Bekker reasons "that I think, that I will, [and] that I understand something," without any part of my body being involved in this type of consciousness. Mind and body in fact have nothing in common:
ELH 72.2 (2004) 455-495
The early modern stage led a double life. It was a site of representation, on which Danish princes, Scythian warriors, alchemists, Egyptian queens, fairies, whores, shoemakers, caesars, shepherdesses, coneycatchers, and gulls played out their imaginary lives. But it was, at the same time, what Karl Marx would call a means of production. When combined with other such means, including stocks of costumes, stage properties, play texts, and so forth, and when set in motion by the human labor of actors, gatherers, prompters, playwrights, and stage hands of various kinds, it produced the cultural commodity known as the performance of a play, from which tidy profits could be and were made. The sum of these theatrical means of production thus constitutes a form of capital. This essay explores the question of whether the stage's status as means of production can be brought into some meaningful relation with its status as site of dramatic representation. To put the matter more simply: what does the stage's somewhat abstract economic function have to do with what concretely transpired on it, in the production of a play? And how did play texts take cognizance of the structures necessary to their economic and artistic realization? Here I shall address one specific kind of labor associated with the early modern stage, that of playwrighting. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus provides a particularly shrewd and penetrating commentary on the playwright's confrontation with theatrical capital, an abstraction which, for introductory purposes, will be personified by Philip Henslowe.
Henslowe, the well-known theatrical impresario, owned the Rose Theatre and served as landlord to the Lord Admiral's Men, who gave the first recorded performances of Doctor Faustus in 1594. We know nothing about Henslowe's business dealings with Marlowe, if any, and I want to explore his importance for Doctor Faustus more indirectly, by way of his relationship with the minor playwright Robert Daborne. Daborne was a competent but not brilliant professional writer who never achieved theatrical eminence. Only two of his plays have survived, and only one of these was published. He is best known to theater historians for his correspondence with Henslowe, beginning in April 1613. By this time Henslowe had moved his business from the Rose Theatre to the Fortune, and he was in the (at least occasional) practice of buying plays directly from playwrights, either as a factor for an acting company or in order to resell them.
On 17 April 1613, Daborne contracts with Henslowe to write a tragedy called Machiavel and the Devil. Daborne will receive 20 pounds, to be paid in installments, and he promises to deliver the completed play by the end of Easter term. On the same day he signs a performance bond for 20 pounds with Henslowe, from which he will be released if he finishes the play by the promised date. At about the time he signs his contract, however, Daborne also becomes entangled in a lawsuit over his estate. The legal proceedings strain Daborne's savings and delay completion of the play until well past the promised date. Most of Daborne's subsequent correspondence with Henslowe consists of pleas for additional cash advances, along with protestations of his good faith and promises to deliver the completed play soon. Typical is a letter of 10 June 1613, in which Daborne writes: "I intended no other thing, god is my judge till this be finished: the necessity of term business exacts me beyond my custom to be troublesome unto you wherefore I pray send me the other 20 s. I desired." By 25 July, Daborne has still not completed the play. Upbraided by Henslowe for his tardiness, he responds with a combination of injured pride and abject submission: "[B]efore God I can have twenty-five pounds for it [that is, the play] as some of the company know, but such is my debt to you that so long as my labors may pleasure them and you say the word I am wholly yours to be, ever commanded Robert Daborne" (H, 73-74). By 30 July...
This essay proposes a new view of demonology, arguing that it was not just a set of theological and legal writings but could also form part of a literature of entertainment. Demonologists frequently used literary techniques such as the dialogue form, hyperbolic set-piece descriptions of the dance or the Sabbath, told stories to pique the reader's interest, and employed humour, salaciousness and horror. Their work intersected with that of artists, influenced by classical images of witches, who began to produce elaborate panoramas of the Sabbath. The cultural legacy of demonology was immense. Through theFaustbuchof 1587, which borrowed from demonological treatises, demonology influenced drama and even figured in the development of the early novel.
This article examines the nature, extent and location of post-mortem punishments in late 17th- and early 18th-century England. It is particularly concerned to illuminate the discontinuity between that world and ours by showing the way in which the contours of hell reflected and embodied images of the nature of personal identity, of human personality and the role of the individual in society.
positions: east asia cultures critique 10.1 (2002) 219-236
When I rashly agreed to contribute a commentary to this collection, I knew that I would learn far more than I could ever hope to add. But the limitations of my European expertise and modest comparative abilities leave me all the more reticent now that I am actually faced with the scholarly brilliance and quiet authority of these essays. So in pulling a few thoughts together, I would like to reflect briefly on some of the forms taken by the contemporary reception of Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which provides the main referent for this collection's shared if only partially explicated problematic. In so doing, I hope to suggest ways in which the existing discussion might be further developed.
For some three decades after its original German edition in 1962, Habermas's book had virtually no impact on historians in any language or national field. Indeed, the international resonance of its author's other works among social scientists proceeded largely independently of the standing of this earlier book. In the English-speaking world his reception was defined far more by his renewed of critical theory in Knowledge and Human Interests and Theory and Practice (published in English in 1971 and 1973); by his polemic against the West German student movement, Toward a Rational Society (translated in 1970); by his analysis of the state under late capitalism, Legitimation Crisis (translated in 1975); and finally by his mature general theory broached in Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979) and culminating in the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1984). These works moved from the original German into English with growing rapidity. Thereafter, translations appeared virtually simultaneously, from his disputes with French poststructuralism, an important collection of interviews, and the many volumes of the philosophical-political writings to the major theoretical treatise Between Facts and Norms and beyond. Even among the rising generation of historians in West Germany itself, who were self-consciously fashioning a new “historical social science” partly under Habermas's influence, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit also mattered far less than the various works of critical epistemology, which during the 1970s were invoked with talismanic regularity.
For many years, access to Strukturwandel through the English language was gained mainly via the translation of a short encyclopedia article on “The Public Sphere” in an early issue of New German Critique, a journal which also pioneered the earliest discussions of Habermas's idea. In the book-length English commentaries on Habermas's work that began appearing at the end of the 1970s, for example, Strukturwandel remained notable by its absence. Surprisingly, it was no more visible during the 1980s in the flourishing discussions of “civil society,” a concept that in many ways stood in for the idea of the public sphere. A French translation of the book was published in 1978 as L'espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, a title that managed to imply both a Foucauldian inflection to the book's intellectual history and a more directly class-based social history than it actually possessed. Otherwise, a younger West German historian, Günther Lottes, published an avowedly Habermasian and highly original account of English Jacobinism and its relationship to the “preprocedural” turbulence of the eighteenth-century plebeian public. Meanwhile, the appearance in 1972 of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's New Left theoretical tract, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, also established a critical West German counterpoint to Habermas's idea.
In my own early work on political change in Germany between the 1890s and the First World War, I began using the concept of the public sphere at the start of the 1970s. It proved invaluable for thinking about the changing circumstances of political mobilization during the nineteenth century and for placing the rise of German liberalism and its subsequent crises in a broader meta-analytical frame. This was true of a number of Habermas's specific themes, especially the circulation of news and the growth of the press, the rise of a reading public, the organized sociability associated with urban living...
This article explores the early modern historiography of the public sphere concept with special reference to the role of sex
and gender in the coffeehouses of post-Restoration England. It examines the way in which normative concepts of gendered propriety
shaped, but did not determine, the practical experience of a coffeehouse society for both men and women. While offering a
distinction between a ‘normative’ and a ‘practical’ public sphere as a means of better understanding the nature of public
life after the Restoration, the article concludes by suggesting that historians of the period might be well advised to worry
less about the Habermasian origins of the term and concern themselves more with understanding the complex ways in which civil
society was both imagined and experienced in early modern England.
The long-term decline of severe physical (criminal) violence since the late Middle Ages is well documented for England and Germany. The question is whether the trend can be understood in terms of Norbert Elias' 'process of civilization'. In a rural German region, only few major changes concerning quality and character of violence were detected during Early Modernity. There was a shift from predominance of conflicts about property towards increasing importance of domestic violence during the 18th century. Violent robbery became rare. Harshness of life, acceptance of violence, and weak self-control may be regarded as the crucial factors throughout the whole epoch. Uncontrolled angry violence was dominant. While the share of 'rational', planned violence remained low, willfully exerted instrumental violence was the second frequent type. The process of civilization not only brought improved individual self-control but also a change of attitudes and values. This process has to be viewed as complex and many-layered.