Raymond Carr

Goings-on after sunset

issue 16 July 2005

After 20 years of hard labour Professor Ekirch has produced an absorbing social history of nighttime in pre-industrial society from the Balkans to the British colonies of North America. His vast accumulation of quotations from diverse sources — he has employed ‘a legion of translators’ — threatens, at times, to overwhelm the reader, but they are linked together in a narrative of clear prose.

Nighttime for our ancestors 300 years ago had a significance and an importance we have lost. ‘Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus,’ Ekirch writes, ‘nighttime in the early modern age instead embodies a distinct culture, with many of its own rituals and customs.’ Called ‘night season’ it was, as the poet John Gay put it, ‘an alternative reign’.

It was the reign of fears we do not experience.

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