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  1. Home
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  3. Evening's Empire
  • Cited by 120
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511977695
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511977695
Subjects:
Social and Population History, Area Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies
Series:
New Studies in European History
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Book description

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.

Awards

Winner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2011 Award

Reviews

‘Koslofsky’s epic history of the night reveals a revolution: how stage lights remade theater, how Lutheran mystics penetrated the night, how witch hunters fought the devil on his own nocturnal turf, how racism mirrored the presumed iniquity of blackness, and how street lights pacified cities. Readers will find surprises on every page.’

Edward Muir - Northwestern University

‘Koslofsky plays skilfully with the oppositions of light and darkness, day and night, to reveal dramatic changes in both the social and the symbolic worlds of early modern Europeans. This is a sensitive and [thought-provoking] synoptic study, of very great interest for all students of European society, thought, and culture.’

Robin Briggs - University of Oxford

‘Evening’s Empire is a remarkable foray into a long-neglected dimension of early modern history: Europe’s conquest of darkness and night time. Craig Koslofsky convincingly proves that the transition to modernity and the emergence of the public sphere cannot be fully understood without taking the ‘colonization’ of night into account. An enlightening study, in every way.’

Carlos M. N. Eire - Yale University

'Ambitious … a valuable study, and a genuinely supranational one, of the way in which nightlife in the modern sense was created, as the essentially urban phenomenon it remains. It was, as the author clearly shows, one expression of the increasing self-confidence and aggression of early modern European humanity.'

Ronald Hutton Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘Sometimes the most obvious and important historical subjects are among the least explored … Craig Koslofsky’s thoughtful and imaginative study of the experience of the night for early modern people goes some way towards redressing that balance. It is, in a word, enlightening.’

Source: Literary Review

'Craig Koslofsky has given so much in this consistently stimulating, cogently argued and elegantly written book.'

Tim Blanning Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'This is a tremendous read, full of human stories and suggestive argument. Like many of the best history books it makes one pause for thought not only about the past but about the present too.'

Source: BBC History Magazine

‘Evening’s Empire offers a fertile and richly European account of deep and sometimes unexpected cultural associations … This is a valuable contribution to the history of the everyday and, especially, of the experience of temporality.’

Source: History Today

‘Any book worthy of the Longman/History Today prize should be elegantly written, exhaustively researched, profoundly original and methodologically bold. Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire is all of these … [it] is worthy of the widest possible audience, a work that stands alongside that of Jurgen Habermas in the light it sheds on our understanding of the transformation of the public sphere and the origins of modernity.’

Source: History Today

'… a triumph of detailed, patient scholarship, clearly and enthusiastically communicated. It imparts considerable subtlety of texture to the fresco of the pre-industrial night so vividly painted by Ekirch in particular. Consequently, it should remain authoritative for decades to come, influencing scholars of literature as well as history.'

Source: H-France Review (h-france.net)

'… learned and imaginative …'

Keith Thomas Source: Common Knowledge

'… this ambitious book is a remarkable achievement, illuminating early modern European history from a new and original perspective …'

Source: Central European History

'Koslofsky’s work is impressive for its elegant model, a clear depiction of change over time and in the great variety of sources used.'

Elizabeth Tingle Source: European History Quarterly

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