I remember the great north eastern blackout of 2003. It was an unsettling night spent in our home...at the time located in a borderline sketchy area...looking out the window into utter blackness...hearing sirens in the distance and the occasional gunshot to the east. How we missed the simple act of flicking a switch to bring light (not to mention air conditioning! It was August.) My husband and I spent a long evening talking and keeping one ear to the door. One of the most fascinating relics of this experience was the aerial view of Earth taken from the Space Station on that night. The entire north east quadrant of the United States was bathed in darkness. It was an eerie image for most of us who have lived our entire lives under the constant glow of artificial illumination.At Day's Close: Night in Times Past is a truly fascinating exploration of night time in pre-industrial society. What was the populations relationship to darkness? How did they sleep? How different was their society from our 24-hour lifestyle? Was it dangerous? Was it more peaceful? These are not questions I had ever contemplated before reading a review of this book about a year ago. However, I found the topic to be most intriguing once I began reading.Imagine how the earth, as viewed from the sky, appeared in the 16th century at night. There would be no pulsing bursts of bright light from our metropolitan areas signalling a vivid message to extra-terrestrial travellers that our planet was a bustling hive of activity. The night side of the Earth, in contrast, would appear to be a mysterious black void...concealing all human presence and activity.The idea of living without the artificial comfort of modern lighting unsettles me. I grew up in an exurban community without street lights. My street was a small tertiary street located off of a secondary road. Our house was surrounded by large trees. The nights were murky. If I was dropped off late at night I would hasten up the driveway and fumble at the lock. Sometimes an owl would screech in the background and the hairs on the back of my neck would rise amidst a shiver. I never got used to it. I have always felt less threatened in cities where there are lights everywhere and something is always open. If something dangerous is coming for you there at least you can generally see it.Ekirch's study of night in history is culled from a wide variety of letters, diaries and other primary source materials from the pre-industrial age. According to his research, one facet of night time in earlier cultures was, indeed, fear. 16th and 17th century people often followed elaborate prayer and preparation rituals to ready themselves for the long dark night. Cities were walled and followed strict curfews. The population needed to make haste and find themselves within the walls of the city before night fell. Otherwise they risked being locked out in the relative lawlessness and insecurity of the countryside. Many travellers accounts from this period make mention of the fear they felt at missing the closing of the gates. Ekirch explains that people followed the phases of the moon religiously and planned trips during times when the moon was full and would provide more natural night time illumination. This is why the almanac was the best selling published work of this era.Criminals plied their trades at night when security was all but non existent. Cities and towns employed the night watch. However these men seemed to realize that they had a thankless and mostly impossible job. The watchmen were often the first victims of the 'night walkers' who carried on their nefarious business mostly undisturbed by the justice system of the day. The night belonged to the criminal, as many sayings of the era went...whereas the day belonged to the honest citizen.This is not to say that night time was a period of unmitigated despair. One of the most fascinating sections of this book, in my opinion, was the exploration of pre-industrial sleeping patterns: The First Sleep and then The Second Sleep. In brief, earlier generations would go to bed shortly after sun down and sleep for about 4 hours. Then they would awaken around midnight and take an hour or two for visiting, reading, quiet contemplation, prayer or sex. Afterwards, roughly another 4 hours of rest until morning. Eight hours of continuous sleep is not necessarily an instinctive need in humans. It appears to be more of a modern adaptation.This very readable treatment of a unique topic is recommended for readers who enjoy the history of everyday lives and discussions about how older societies worked. It made me tempted to try to adopt this more archaic sleeping schedule later in life when, hopefully, I will not need to answer to someone else's clock all the time. I find the idea of midnight contemplation, study, and connection (I have a night owl spouse!) somewhat compelling.
The topic of this book is really fascinating - a social history of nighttime in preindustrial western society. Clearly the author has gathered a huge trove of sources both primary and secondary to illuminate his target. However, I felt like the subject ended up being a little too much for him to handle. Chapters describe all of the horrors and amusements of night, the various associations, folk tales, and aphorisms associated with the darkness. Quotes evoke the fear and the freedom that were once associated with the night. However, the sources are gathered in a fashion that spans centuries and are grouped by topic, not by period. This leads to questions about whether the author paints with too broad a brush in describing his subject. I often felt like his theses were arbitrarily imposed and artificially assembled from disparate evidence. This feeling grew over the course of the book as he marshaled evidence from the same sources for seemingly contradictory assertions. Was the night a source of fear and fount of legislative restrictions, suitable only for cowering indoors for respectable citizens during the late 17th century, or a time of freedom and unfettered license and entrepreneurial piece-work? Maybe it was both, and it probably was, but I don't feel like there was enough authorial explication to make those connections. Instead, the book is often more of a catalog of the night. Further, when the author describes in the final section the creeping influence of artificial light as the harbinger of rationality on attitudes towards the night season, he quotes many of the same superstitious sources previously quoted for the preindustrial, pre-rationalist view. The primary sources belie a more complicated and vacillating history of people's relation to the darkness and its horrors than the enumerative thematic approach the book uses. This subject is interesting, but it is left to the reader to make some of the theoretical leaps that bring the subject to life. The book is written in a sort of dry academic tone, but it almost feels like an amateur's mimicry of academia, as it lacks that theorizing impulse that often informs the professional historian. In some ways, it feels like there is some psychological impulse driving Ekirch to compulsively list the connotations of nighttime. There are strange bursts of poetry in the language but most often it feels like a workmanlike effort to exhaustively describe how premodern people felt about the night. That said, his approach avoids too much editorializing and often lets the diaries or depositions bring the time period to life. The end of the book offers some tossed-off lament for the deeper rhythms that existed before artificial lights were ubiquitous, but that position little informs the majority of the text. Despite the shortcomings, I still really enjoyed many parts of the book and felt like I learned a lot. Worth reading as it offers ample inspiration to dream of a different time, even if the author may fail to evoke the dream himself.
This is a non-fiction book about nighttime in the period 1500 - 1750. Impeccably researched, Ekirch regularly quotes from poems, diaries, court transcripts, news articles and other records to illustrate his point. Covering Europe and early colonial America, the book is divided into 'themes,' which makes it easy to read about the topics that interest the reader (but of course I read it all).It would be obvious to most that danger increased after the sun went down as did the number and the nature of crimes which are described in the book. A common term of 'shutting in' described how people in towns and rural areas would shut themselves in their homes at the same time each day, closing shutters, barring doors etc. Superstitions and fears were rife and included witches, demons, faeries, monsters and satan amongst fear of burglary. People even feared the damp night air, which gave birth to the night cap, to keep the damp night air from settling on the head.Most households would light a rush light, tallow candle, (made from animal fat) or a lantern for light, at least an hour after shut in to save on costs (candles and other methods of producing light were expensive). In fact, it was very common to move furniture back against the wall at night so as to remove obstacles while moving around in the dark.These fears kept many shut in at night, but social activities and gatherings did occur at night, especially during a full moon or a clear night, where the light from the night sky was at it's brightest. Ekirch informs the reader about many of the activities men and women of all backgrounds indulged in at night time.It is believed that most people went to bed between 9pm and 10pm when all forms of light were extinguished and the fire was raked over. The most interesting revelation in this book is that during this period, sleep patterns were drastically different to today. This fact is relatively unknown today, but hundreds of years ago, people enjoyed two sleeps in one night! Ekirch provided many quotes from plays, diaries etc to support his research and I was quite astonished to say the least. After the 'first sleep', a person would wake up for anywhere up to 2 hours or more. This time was generally used to ponder their dreams and 'visions' and for quiet contemplation and prayer. This is the time most lovemaking took place given that most laborers were too tired when they went to bed. It was also considered to be the best time for conception!The second sleep then took place, followed by the 'cock crow' (roosters crowing) and dawn. These marked the time of night for most people living during this time. In London and Paris, it was interesting to learn about the 'night watch' whose job it was to patrol the streets, apprehending criminals or thieves, watching for signs of fire (a serious danger in any city or town) as well as calling out the time. They usually called out the time accompanied by a rhyme or catch cry. Ironically, many residents often complained that they were continually woken up by the nightwatch who were on duty primarily to keep people safe from fire and burglary.With the introduction of artificial light, this sleep pattern slowly dissolved and Ekirch claims that our connection to our dreams (an extremely important practice during these times) has been lost as has our time for peaceful inner reflection.It was interesting to learn that the Churches across Europe were not in favour of the introduction of artificial light, as they viewed night time the time for prayer and worship.Did you know that when walking at night in a town or city, it was best to walk as close as you could to the wall, so as not to be showered with the contents of chamber pots being emptied from above? In fact, if two men were walking towards each other, the poorer man would always give the 'gentleman' the wall and walk on the side closest to the street. Walking close to the wall wasn't without it's own perils though, and falling down into cellars and coal shutes was common.Anyway, I could go on and on about this book, because it was so fascinating and such a great read! Did you know that men used to urinate into the fireplace at night time, if they didn't have a chamber pot? Gross!I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history and especially an interest in 'night in times past'.
—Tracey Allen at Carpe Librum
I have to admit that I was "transported" for some of the book, and even got excited with each new rhyme or interesting quote, but with each new so-called revelation about night I'd immediately start dozing. Way too much repetition and hammering home the themes which we didn't really need to reinforce in our own minds - it is very dark, it is evil, it is scary, and whodathunkit but you couldn't even see the road! It is brighter during the full moon, believe it or not. I had super high hopes for this one, it's just too bad I couldn't stay awake. Don't pick this one up at night, zzzz.
—Emily
This is about the way people spent night before the introduction of street lighting in the nineteenth century. Ekirch is a history professor and, according to the dust jacket, this is the product of twenty years of research. The sheer breadth of the material is incredible. He draws on diaries, court records, novels and newspapers from the time. Plus there are fascinating illustrations throughout. Ekirch's research is mostly from Britain, though the picture seems similar all over Europe. The most common euphemism for night was 'shutting in', because people basically bolted themselves indoors to be safe from the dangers outside. Murder, theft, violence, drunkenness and rape were common on the streets. There were so many poor and desperate people that there was anarchy after dark. Just waking outdoors was dangerous, with the risks of slipping on uneven paving, falling down open cellars, or being drenched by urine or feces that was thrown out of windows. Inside the homes it was one big sleepover: families huddled together for warmth and security, visiting guests sometimes joined the party, masters shacked up with servants, and animals were brought indoors at night. The most interesting chapter for me is the one about sleep rhythms. Natural human sleep before electric lighting was in two phases. People went to bed at around nine, lay awake for an hour or two and then slept until around midnight. This is what they called first sleep (or Fyrste Slepe as they put it in the seventeenth century). Then woke up for a couple of hours and then slept again till morning - the second sleep or morning sleep. During the waking period, they talked, prayed, meditated, read, had sex, or all of the above, and it seems to have been valuable part of their lives. In laboratory studies of people deprived of electric light, scientists have found that they also fall into the same pattern. And apparently this is common in primitive cultures.
—Diana
