What is this strange country called night? In Evening's Empire: A History of Night in Early Modern Europe, Craig Koslofsky offers his readers an anthropological history of this exotic land and its inhabitants. But there were many nights, which one does he choose to investigate: bourgeois nights, youthful nights, city nights, country nights, working class nights, aristocratic nights; nights filled with theater or nights populated by criminals and terrifying apparitions? Koslofsky solves this dilemma by directing our attention to a common theme running through them all, “nocturnalization”: “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night” (2). Evening's Empire thus navigates the mysteries of night by taking as its subject nocturnal imperialism, exploring in depth the ways in which its target—the “dark continent” of night—was enlisted by every possible side in the struggles between colonizers and colonized.

Night, in Northern Europe of the late middle ages was a land of fear and darkness. Its inhabitants were not only criminals and n'er-do-wells, but also witches and evil spirits. The labeling of night's inhabitants as diabolical was the work of many years. Punitive juridical expeditions against the devil and his minions by lay and ecclesiastical authorities were among the first in a long series of expeditions seeking to domesticate the night. At around the same time, intrepid explorers (such as John of the Cross and Jacob Bôhme) began to inflect this dark and troubling world positively as an expression of God's ineffable and transcendent power. The apophatic theology that resulted challenged “traditional associations of darkness and the night with evil” (14). Night so perceived became a resource not only for mystics and theologians, but also for kings, princes and courtiers who used it as a backdrop to display aristocratic power. From the fifteenth century civic rituals and court theatre shifted away from daytime celebrations to work their magic on publics focused on the light of spectacles choreographed by night. Courtiers in turn sought to sustain and augment their status and authority by participating in and emulating the luminous examples of monarchical splendor. These dramaturgical missions into darkness promulgated new forms of elite sociability and lent impetus to the nocturnalization of major urban centers by the well to do and upwardly mobile. The process was propelled forward through the overcoming and disciplining of the “native” resistance of the young, criminals, prostitutes and witches—whether juridically (through the expansion of policing), ideologically (through the diabolicization night's inhabitants by lay and ecclesiastical authorities), or technologically (with the implementation of street lighting in major urban centers). As night was pacified, townspeople began to flock in ever-greater numbers to coffee houses, taverns and theaters.

From monarchical ritual (“representative publicness” in Habermasian terms), to aristocratic leisure and display, to finally “middle class” respectability, the night, Koslofsky avers, had come to play a crucial role in the development of a new bourgeois public sphere where political debate and polite conversation could thrive (174ff). Paradoxically, this new, enlightened—and as we discover, ungrateful—bourgeois public did not hesitate to use the multivalent symbolism of night to interrogate the nature, extent, and legitimacy of the wide-ranging powers that made public nocturnal life possible in the first place. This “betrayal,” in turn, provoked an expansion of nocturnalism's policing of “respectable” conversation for signs of disorder and dissent. One can imagine—had Koslofsky chosen to pursue this line of thought more fully—the presentation of evidence regarding the relationship between nocturnalism and the rise of the clandestine press and its readers, or a discussion of sources documenting the proliferation of networks of spies, informants, and secret police. Be this as it may, the dialectic of repression and resistance that characterized nocturnalization played out on multiple levels. For example, nocturnalization was for the most part an urban phenomenon. For a variety of reasons, rural resistance could not be stamped-out. This resistance, however, could still be appropriated and used. Thus distinctions between the rational (the enlightened) and the ignorant, the respectable and the unworthy, the civilized and the savage were drawn not only from the presumed immorality and wickedness of the lower classes in the cities, but from the stubborn persistence of “native nocturnal traditions” in the countryside (234). These binaries must have strongly resonated with the urbane sophisticates of coffee houses, theatres and salons, implicating them not only in efforts of rural (and urban) pacification and conquest, but in parallel practices of exclusion, discipline, and control directed at indigenous peoples in Europe's new colonies. It would be interesting in this regard to pursue further Koslofsky's observation that it was in venues such as coffee houses and salons that Europeans showed-off their respectability through the consumption and use of such exotic commodities as chocolate, tea, coffee, and fine porcelain (176).

Evening's Empire is an ambitious book painted in broad-brush strokes. Much is absent that would have been welcome, astrology and dreams, for example. However, the night, for Koslofsky, is meant to be heuristic, not exhaustive (282). To the extent possible for a book aimed at a general scholarly audience, Koslofsky admirably presents a fascinating and richly sourced history of the colonization of the night in early modern Europe. For some specialists the book may be too schematic to entirely satisfy; but this does not detract from either the seriousness of the questions it poses or those that it provokes. In this sense, one might compare Evening's Empire to an early modern map of Africa or the New World. Coastlines appear in detail, but vast interiors remain unmapped and unexplored, waiting in the silent darkness for those who will continue Koslofsky's journey into the history of night.