In the early modern period Europe underwent what the author of this rich and instructive book calls “nocturnalization”: “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night” (p. 2). Dubbed “a revolution” by the author, this process encompassed a set of profound changes that together formed part of the passage from a premodern to modern society. The beginning was inauspicious: in the sixteenth century the night was literally demonized; nocturnal folk beliefs and activities previously deemed benign were recast as evil. The night came to be associated with sin and diabolical temptation. This rebranding cost the lives of countless women who were accused of witchcraft. In learned and official opinion, the women succumbed to the Prince of Darkness. The crucial witches' sabbath was generally admitted to have been a nocturnal event.

Other forces were at work, however, that counteracted the diabolization of the night. Koslofsky stresses the role of confessional strife in bringing about the nocturnalization that would in time undermine the association of night with witchcraft and supernatural forces. The pervasiveness and ferocity of religious conflict, within as well as between confessions, forced persecuted groups such as the Anabaptists to worship in the shelter of darkness. This led to a positive revaluation of the night. Another quarter in which an intensified relationship with the night was forged was that of spiritual writers. In this case, too, (intra-)confessional persecution sometimes played a part in the discovery of night and darkness as the path to God. The turmoil of confessional conflict lent the night new meanings that supplemented or even supplanted the sixteenth-century “Manichean” dichotomy between light and darkness.

Confessional strife proved no less creative in the political realm. Koslofsky concentrates here on two arenas and two strategies used by authorities to enhance their power. One arena was the court, the other was the city. Following Richard Alewyn, Koslofsky notes that over the early modern period princely spectacles and festivals shifted spatially and temporally: from the street to the court, and from day to night. He suggests that the sources of this change were “new demands on the representation of power, majesty, and hierarchy” (p. 118), generated by the challenges confronting rulers in the wake of confessional dissension. Rulers responded to these challenges by manipulating the night: staging theater, ballet, masques, and spectacles that played on the contrast between darkness and light, they sought to project power and glory. The second strategy that “absolute” rulers and self-governing cities used to display and consolidate their power was streetlighting, established first in Paris in 1667 and then in quick succession in other European cities. Thus, whereas at the princely courts it was darkness that was manipulated, in the cities it was light. The effect, though, was quite similar in both arenas: the rhythm of daily life changed significantly. By 1800 the English, for instance, went to bed about seven hours later than their forefathers did around 1500. The day was extended into the night, and the night became a time for pleasure and respectable sociability. While the source of this momentous transformation was the quest for political power and public safety, it had a critical social dimension as well: nocturnalization created new social spaces and distinctions that differentiated between an elite that could afford the luxury of respectable sociability after sunset and the common people who could not. The expensive use of light, whether in court spectacle or in streets and coffeehouses, served as a refined marker of social status. Urban nocturnalization was propelled by the state and an emerging consumer culture. In the countryside, on the other hand, this “powerful combination of discipline and distinction” (p. 230) was largely absent, which accounts for the failure of the campaign to “colonize” and discipline the rural night. Unlike the urban sophisticates, village elders did not disown the traditional practices of their communities and did not support the endeavor to redefine them as deviant.

In the final analysis, the beneficiaries of nocturnalization were a minority; excluded from the new, respectable nightlife were not only the common people, the urban youth, and other elements that had previously dominated the late hours, but also upper-class women. But the minority was exceedingly influential, socially and intellectually. Indeed, Koslofsky argues that nocturnalization was not simply a reflection of ideas associated with the Enlightenment, but rather that it played a role in shaping them. The most nocturnalized social spaces in the most nocturnalized regions of Europe were the quintessential sites of the emerging public sphere. Those who were prone to denying reality to invisible forces were those who, thanks to nocturnalization, were at home in the night and did not fear its darkness. But Koslofsky's is not all a story of light. Having conquered the night, Europeans took to believing in their enlightened superiority over other cultures. They devised new hierarchies of race and religion. In other words, those who “colonized” the night in Europe colonized the rest of the world.

These are far-reaching claims. Thought provoking as they are, they are not all equally substantiated. Indeed, they seem partly to rest on questionable ideological assumptions. Thus, is “colonization” an appropriate concept to apply to the (successful) bid to impose order on the urban night and to the (abortive) one to impose order on the rural night? If one accepts Koslofsky's rationale (p. 158) for choosing “colonization,” then one is bound to judge any increase in authority, even one supported by the general public, as tantamount to violent oppression. One also wonders whether this usage of “colonization” implies that the European “civilizing process” and Enlightenment were at the root of so much misery and injustice in the wider world. The transferal of a fashionable concept from one domain to another and its application to a complex range of developments can only do disservice to an otherwise penetrating analysis. And indeed this ambitious book is a remarkable achievement, illuminating early modern European history from a new and original perspective.