| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £6.50
Trade in Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (New Studies in European History) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £6.50, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'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, Times Higher Education
'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.' Literary Review
'Craig Koslofsky has given so much in this consistently stimulating, cogently argued and elegantly written book.' Tim Blanning, 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.' 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.' History Today
'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, Times Higher Education
'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.' Literary Review
'Craig Koslofsky has given so much in this consistently stimulating, cogently argued and elegantly written book.' Tim Blanning, 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.' 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.' History Today
Product 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.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Some Fascinating Stuff
18 Oct 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I heard this author speak on NPR years ago, and at the time his book had not been published. I waited for years, and when I finally found it I was not disappointed. He made me think about night and how it affected the people in the early Middle Ages in ways I never had before. Well researched and great use of historical material, but overly wordy and written in an awkward academic style. There's no need to say "In the following chapter I will show that..." just DO it! But if you can push past this the information contained in the book will fascinate.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
An interesting subject, but a bit of a slog
28 April 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The book is well researched: that said, it is not that fun a read. It's rather funny that a book about the development of nightlife keeps putting me to sleep. I thought the book would be less scholarly, I am a bit disappointed.
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Lots of interesting facts
14 Oct 2011
Format:Hardcover
Lots of interesting facts, with a slightly clunking interpretational frame and style. Mr. Koslofsky has been reasonably well trained in grad-school prose and thinking - enough that he is probably safe from any career-threatening denunciations of 'feuilltonism', but not so well that he is so unpleasant as to be unreadable. I suspect that Tim Blanning probably got it right in his review with his magnificent (in the old-fashioned sense) observation that a major virtue of the book is the amount of empirical stuff it delivers as support for the not terribly empirically outfitted Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit - I suspect, but I can't actually be sure, since I still haven't read the copy of the latter I acquired five years ago. I suppose I should, now.
As far as interpretation goes, all the usual foucauldian suspects are here: power, gender, race, etc., The only one that flows naturally from the material is probably power/control but it, together with the development of sociability, is more than enough. Also, for me, there was too little discussion of the economic and technological developments that drove what Koslofsky calls 'Nocturnalisation' (there is some cursory discussion of street lamp technology, but nothing deep and nothing about economic drivers - culture just happened - but really culture doesn't just happen - people had more photons to play with, and I wanted to know in more detail how and why), and things do get a bit fuzzy in the final chapter's discussion of (radical) enlightenment culture, which seems to be straining very hard to say something - anything - and not really succeeding (what I really wanted to know was what time dinner was served chez Paul d'Holbach; but that - actually somewhat important - fact is not provided*).
Anyway, if you are already interested in early modern European cultural history, this is definitely worth a look.
P.S., Oh yeah, and somebody could, in fact really should, have advised against the triumphant final citation, in the final paragraph, of something called - and I kid you not - 'Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression'. It doesn't help!
P.P.S. The most interesting, not to mention unnerving, fact of all, however, is that on the 'customers who bought this' list on the page for this, I count seven books that I own.
* [14/2/2012: Ha! Dinner started at 2 in the afternoon, and continued often until 7 or 8 - Andre Morellet]
As far as interpretation goes, all the usual foucauldian suspects are here: power, gender, race, etc., The only one that flows naturally from the material is probably power/control but it, together with the development of sociability, is more than enough. Also, for me, there was too little discussion of the economic and technological developments that drove what Koslofsky calls 'Nocturnalisation' (there is some cursory discussion of street lamp technology, but nothing deep and nothing about economic drivers - culture just happened - but really culture doesn't just happen - people had more photons to play with, and I wanted to know in more detail how and why), and things do get a bit fuzzy in the final chapter's discussion of (radical) enlightenment culture, which seems to be straining very hard to say something - anything - and not really succeeding (what I really wanted to know was what time dinner was served chez Paul d'Holbach; but that - actually somewhat important - fact is not provided*).
Anyway, if you are already interested in early modern European cultural history, this is definitely worth a look.
P.S., Oh yeah, and somebody could, in fact really should, have advised against the triumphant final citation, in the final paragraph, of something called - and I kid you not - 'Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression'. It doesn't help!
P.P.S. The most interesting, not to mention unnerving, fact of all, however, is that on the 'customers who bought this' list on the page for this, I count seven books that I own.
* [14/2/2012: Ha! Dinner started at 2 in the afternoon, and continued often until 7 or 8 - Andre Morellet]
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
