At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

What a great book, absorbing, thought-provoking and totally unputdownable. I have been waiting for so long to read this book and when I finally picked it up I just couldn't put it down. It is amazing. Culturally, we still have a fear of night, of the dark, and of what might happen. It is what makes horror movies so successful. Yet previous centuries, without the benefit of electric lighting, had a far deeper cultural attitude to day and night, and this is ably explained by Ekirch. He explains just how pervasive night and dark was. Of people lost off dangerous roads, of streets hidden from daylight and moon light at night - and of falling into ditches, (or the kennels as they were then called) and having to chose the risk of falling into coal cellars on one side, or slipping into the kennels on the other. Of footpaths so ill formed that they were dangers in themselves. Of the distrust of anyone abroad at night, women not carrying candles were thought to be prostitutes and generally treated as thus. thefts at night were deemed burglaries and therefore viewed much more seriously than daylight thefts - indeed they were punishable by death. The cultural icons of night were the devil, witches, werewolves and other nasty images, and in Italy they had a saying that dusk was when you couldn't tell a hound from a wolf. Interesting imagery. The book suffers in some ways from not following a time line, or indeed a country, so quotes from the 14th century might easilyl follow a roman anecdote or something from 18th century England. thematically it works though. It follows the general concepts of how night affected human psyche, of fires that were lit, and how they threw light. Of the types of lighting available, of curfews to prevent people being abroad. Of gradual municipal responsibility. I found this book so good I read it through again to pick up what I missed the first time through. Truly extraodinary work and very enjoyable. My highest recommendation.

Most creation myths open with light dispelling the dark. Night and day are the most fundamental divisions of time in human experience, and so reflected in many myths. The lack of light brings thoughts on the unknown, usually fearful ones. We don't understand what we can't see and impart threatening purposes to shadowy shapes and subtle sounds. Ekirch, in an outstanding compendium of the history of night in Western Europe, describes the feelings about after-sunset hours and how people reacted to night. Night-time, Ekirch says, wasn't simply a reduction or hiatus in the sequence of daily activities. Night bred a distinct cultural milieu of its own. Many operated well in the dark hours, but not always for productive or socially acceptable purpose. Those who coped well with darkness, he suggests, did so because they needed to shun the light. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, a new social structure classified society in new ways. Attempting to cope with the changes, some found the night the best time for acitivities legal and otherwise. For the rising middle class, the onset of night was a threat and an opportunity. From their poverty-stricken ancestry, the new rich often turned to "bedfellows" to quell fears of burglars or arsonists. The poor still crowded beds for warmth, but the newer wealthy also turned to friends for common protection, conversation and security. When alone and not terrified, these new, educated aristocrats might use the night for thought, reflection and writing. The threats, however, were real. The new commercial and pre-industrial society fostered a new class of displaced or disadvantaged humanity. Women were particularly imposed upon as the need for income in poor households led them to assume extra tasks. Spinning and weaving, clothing manufacture, husking corn or boiling syrup, took place in countless households in the dark hours. The women competed in a highly variable market and the income was minimal. In frustration, many men took out their resentments in burning houses and barns of the landlords and entrepreneurs. Some burnings were simple animosity, while others used the distraction of fire to rob houses or wharves. The "highwayman" rose supreme in this age in men who knew intimately the patches of country to strike at the right time and place, then escaping easily. An interesting division in Ekirch's narrative is the distinction between religion and commerce in this period. The Roman Catholic church saw advantages in the night as the time for prayer and meditation in cloisters. Commerce, however, needed daylight for the proper transmission of goods and maintaining inventory security. In the early period of this era [17th and 18th Centuries], shops were usually banned from maintaining operations past "curfew". The shutting of city gates reduced trade opportunities. Threats to homes and shops after curfew led to the beginnings of city police forces. Ekirch's denies prostitution the pri

At Day's Close is a wonder of a book. Every page is full of dozens of interesting facts covering every aspect of the night. From fear of monsters to fear of fire to the actions of the night watch, the author leaves no aspect of the night, ahem, in the dark. His methodology is unique in that this book is really a mosaic of sources. Ekirch isn't so much an author as a compiler as every paragraph is full of quotes or paraphrases of some historic source speaking on a particular topic. While this makes him unimpeachable, its also lacks authoritative cohesion. Its as if thousands of snap shots have been taken of the topic and organized and categorized to tell the history of people dealing with night. This makes for entertaining reading yet I'm left with a slightly vacant feeling: there should have been something more, something to tie everything together. The book still deserves 5 stars. Its highly readable and packed with information. I've never read anything like it. Highly recommended.

I first heard about this book from Fritz Lanham's marvelous review of it in the Houston Chronicle some weeks back. As usual, Lanham makes you curious and excited about the books he likes and, though he had some reservations about Ekirch's prose style and sometimes cumbrous way of writing, he still made the book sound great. I have to agree, AT DAY'S CLOSE is one of those books which, once finished, you can't stop thinking about and which you want to tell all your friends about. For anyone who has thought much about the world before the modern era, it has a particularly magical touch, for it asks us to re-imagine what life was like before the electric and gas light came to be, when once the sun fell people were plunged into mostly inpenetrable darkness. No wonder they made such a cult of the moon! It must have been a blessing to them. "Ill met by moonlight" indeed. Ekirch reports that the ordinary householder spent more on his bed than on anything else in the house. People must have been confined pretty much to bed. It made me think of the way Shakespeare's will leaves his "second best bed" to his wife, a bequest biographers sometimes take to mean that they didn't have a very good marriage, but now that Ekirch's reportage is in, I think of it in a different way. In A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM, which takes place almost entirely during the night, the audience is allowed to "see" things it could never have seen even in moonlight and thus this must have contributed to the "magical" factor of the play for contemporary audience, a feeling we have long lost. For us moderns, day and night are pretty much the same. Perhaps that's why our belief in elves, fairies, trolls, etc., has diminished. Thanks to Freud even our dreams have become more understandable. Imagine living back then and feeling that the dreams were part of a larger, evil force that took control once the sun was down and that dreams were forced on you! The book has something startling on every page. How many other books can make that claim? Besides that, it brings the past to us in a nearly visceral way. I found myself looking at the sun, a-feared as I watched it near the earth.

This is a truly wonderful book. This well-researched look at the past is structured around the lives of ordinary men and women. It's possible to imagine oneself living in the times described. Ever since reading in Smithsonian Magazine about Ekirch's research, I've anxiously awaited the publication of this book. At last, it's here.