Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One An early modern revolution
- Chapter Two Darkness and the Devil, 1450–1650
- Chapter Three Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530–1650
- Chapter Four Princes of darkness: the night at court, 1600–1750
- Chapter Five “An entirely new contrivance”: the rise of street lighting, 1660–1700
- Chapter Six Colonizing the urban night: resistance, gender, and the public sphere
- Chapter Seven Colonizing the rural night?
- Chapter Eight Darkness and Enlightenment
- Chapter Nine Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Two - Darkness and the Devil, 1450–1650
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One An early modern revolution
- Chapter Two Darkness and the Devil, 1450–1650
- Chapter Three Seeking the Lord in the night, 1530–1650
- Chapter Four Princes of darkness: the night at court, 1600–1750
- Chapter Five “An entirely new contrivance”: the rise of street lighting, 1660–1700
- Chapter Six Colonizing the urban night: resistance, gender, and the public sphere
- Chapter Seven Colonizing the rural night?
- Chapter Eight Darkness and Enlightenment
- Chapter Nine Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Early modern Europeans thought about the night directly and indirectly under a vast range of topics. More importantly for our discussion, early modern Europeans thought with the night, using its lived experience and traditional associations to articulate an extraordinary range of values and concepts. Paradoxically, their deepest engagement with the night and its darkness came in their discourses on witchcraft and the Devil, and in their understanding of “the dark night of the soul” as a path to God. Some of the most intense, transcendent, and threatening expressions of the diabolical and the Divine were understood in and through the night in this turbulent age.
The early modern authors discussed here inherited an ambiguous image of the night – sharply negative except within the rarified world of mystic expression. In this chapter I examine the associations of the night with evil across European Christian culture from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, focusing on the night as a site of diabolical temptation. In the following chapter, I turn to those who took up and developed the “divine darkness” of Denys the Areopagite by seeing the night, literal and figurative, as a pathway to the Divine. In darkness, whether divine or diabolical, the night create, evoke, and represent human isolation in solitary, individual encounters with God and with the Devil.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Evening's EmpireA History of the Night in Early Modern Europe, pp. 19 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011