Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (36 page)

These attempts to discipline the rural night faced sharp limits. The proliferation of laws, ordinances, and statutes focused on the night life of rural youth began in the first third of the seventeenth century. As many scholars have noted, this legislation remained in place, relatively unchanged, for 150 years or more.
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Spinning bees and similar nocturnal gatherings were forbidden everywhere, but with little effect. Scholars have documented their persistence through the eighteenth century in German-speaking Switzerland, in the Vorarlberg, in rural France, and across Germany.
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Disciplining night life in rural public houses was equally unsuccessful. These inns and taverns were too deeply rooted and performed too many acknowledged functions to be challenged directly. Specific complaints about late hours did not lead to any general restriction of opening times on paper or in practice.
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This failure to discipline the rural night is part of a key feature of the early modern state first discussed by Jürgen Schlumbohm in
1997
: countless laws and regulations promulgated but not enforced.
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Yet the limited effectiveness of early modern administration only partially explains the enormous gap between prescription and enforcement seen in these attempts to discipline the rural night. As
Schlumbohm has argued, early modern administrators valued laws, ordinances, and proclamations as symbols of the state’s authority. As symbols, these laws were not limited by modern-rational expectations of what could be enforced or effected in practice. The act of making or proclaiming law
in itself
showed the state to be Christian and benevolent.

For these laws to be more than symbols of state authority, local cooperation between rulers and subjects was essential. Church and state authorities proclaimed their baleful view of the moral and physical dangers of the night in countless laws and ordinances. But local support for limiting the night life of village youth was quite limited. Priests, pastors, and administrators noted that when pressed, heads of households sometimes defended spinning bees. One Lutheran pastor complained that “the fornication and license of the youth are made into a praiseworthy custom by parents [who claim that] from it many Christian marriages are made, as the nightly gatherings and noise bear witness.”
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Every spinning bee or
Heimgarten
had at least the tacit approval of the head of the household in which it was held, and the concluding verses of the Beham spinning bee print (
Figure 7.1
) explain: “how could it be finer for these servants / after all, the whole community of the village is with them / high and low alike. And so they like their fun at all hours / in the evening as in the morning.” With the whole village involved, who would prevent this night life? Village courts almost never prosecuted young men for nocturnal visits to court young women at their windows, or in their bedchambers. Indeed, these visits were not met with the sort of condoned violence seen above in cases of nocturnal intruders, suggesting some level of acceptance. In the specific case of Leonard Wheatcroft and Elizabeth Hawley, we know that her parents allowed them to spend the night together on many occasions once their courtship had begun. As long as spinning bees, late nights in taverns, nocturnal courtship customs, and similar night life received the tacit approval of village elders, neither church nor state could do much to discipline the rural night.

Alongside these widespread attempts to discipline the rural night and limit nocturnal activity, a more ambitious aspect of the colonization of the rural night unfolded in Catholic territories, driven by the baroque piety of Catholic reform. As we saw in
chapter 3
, pious laymen, Capuchin missionaries, and reforming bishops all sought new uses for the night in a program of spiritual renewal and ecclesiastical intensification. The spiritual uses of darkness discussed in
chapter 3
, ascetic and aesthetic, inspired new forms of nocturnal lay piety in Italy, France, and Catholic Germany.
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This interest in sanctifying the rural night went beyond the purely disciplinary aims shared by church and state. New practices, such as the devotion of the Forty Hours and nocturnal lay processions during Holy Week, played a major role in the public piety of the seventeenth century, urban and rural. The continuous veneration of the Host day and night, formalized in the Forty Hours’ Devotion, has been described as “an incomparable means to gather the faithful,” while the nocturnal processions of the lay penitent brotherhoods on Holy Thursday or Good Friday represented “Catholic ritual’s most massive venture into the night” in the early modern centuries.
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Here we will examine the rise and fall of rural nocturnal devotion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The devotion of the Forty Hours is a period of continual prayer before the Eucharist augmented with preaching, processions, and other displays of piety.
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From its origins in Milan in the 1520s and 1530s, the devotion spread with the reforms of Trent. As Pope Clement VIII explained in the Papal Constitution “Graves et diuturnae” of 1592: “We have determined to establish publicly in this Mother City of Rome an uninterrupted course of prayer in such wise that … there be observed the pious and salutary devotion of the Forty Hours … at every hour of the day and night.”
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The devotion was an ideal expression of the visual, emotional, and Eucharistic piety of the Catholic Reformation: performed in commemoration of the forty hours between the death and resurrection of the Christian savior, the penitential devotion served the missionary efforts of Capuchins, Jesuits, and Barnabites in the century after Trent.

The Forty Hours’ Devotion was practiced in French-speaking lands from the late sixteenth century on.
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In the duchy of Chablais, for example, the devotion played a vital role in missions to the Protestant region around Geneva in 1597–98, performed twice in the town of Thonon and once in the village of Annemasse. Held across France in episcopal cities and towns, the devotions were intended to draw the faithful from rural parishes and involved confraternities from nearby towns and villages.
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The literal span of forty hours meant prayer through at least one full night. Public prayers and processions in darkness served to “render the site [of the devotion] more venerated through this clear dark obscurity,” as one Catholic account explained in apophatic terms.
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The night served the emotional, penitential, and missionary goals of the Forty Hours’ Devotion.

In France this devotion, though “established and developed by the church, gained a popular character.”
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But the very popularity of the practice with clergy and lay people led to a nocturnal collision between the devotional and the disciplinary imperatives of Catholic reform. Clergy often scheduled the Forty Hours’ Devotion to counter the start of Carnival or on Mardi Gras, seeking to draw revelers away from the traditional masquerades and nocturnal revelry and into the churches for continual prayer before the consecrated host. But by the mid seventeenth century some churches chose to interrupt the devotion at night, arguing that it was better “to avoid unpleasant encounters … in the evening on the streets and to close the church and avoid the disorder that might be committed there later.”
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These concerns grew, and in 1686 the Capuchin order of France received official permission from Rome to interrupt the Forty Hours’ Devotion at night. Instead, the forty hours of prayer and preaching would occur only during daylight hours. But interrupting the “around-the-clock” veneration of the Eucharist robbed the practice of its unique theme and intensity, and surrendered the night back to the spinning bees, Carnival revelry, and tavern visits described above.
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By the end of the seventeenth century the Forty Hours’ Devotion was in decline.

Despite the popularity of the Forty Hours’ Devotion and the willingness of lay people to gather in churches for prayer and
veneration of the Eucharist at night, the French clergy of the age of Louis XIV were convinced that no good could come from a gathering of common people at night, no matter how pious the context. By the end of the seventeenth century, numerous episcopal ordinances and statutes prohibited all lay prayer in churches at night, as the synodal statutes of the diocese of Amiens of 1697 indicate: “we urge all parish priests in the countryside to make public in their churches an evening prayer (at least on holidays and Sundays) at the sound of the bell, at the time they deem most convenient,
and always before dark
.”
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The interruption of the Forty Hours’ Devotion at night and the statutes prohibiting public prayer in churches after dark reflect the deep suspicion of French clergy of the late seventeenth century toward popular nocturnal gatherings of any kind.

In the Catholic territories of the Holy Roman Empire the same pattern emerges. Forays into the night by the clergy and pious laypeople, reflecting the baroque piety of Catholic reform, were followed by a retreat from popular nocturnal piety at the end of the seventeenth century. In the Empire nocturnal penitential processions were the most salient aspect of this attempt to sanctify the rural night. The Jesuits introduced these processions in cities such as Augsburg and Würzburg, but confraternities and lay brotherhoods soon followed suit in small towns and villages in Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Austria, and Tirol.
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The drama of these nocturnal processions, with costumed participants and illuminated images of the Passion, put baroque devotion in motion. The Good Friday procession of the confraternity of the Holy Rosary in the town of St. Johann in Tirol is especially well documented. Between 1645 and 1756 the confraternity held seventy-nine processions. All seventeen processions held between 1667 and 1686 took place “in the evening,” but the practice was then moved permanently to the daytime.
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In the Bavarian city of Traunstein, the processions of the Corpus Christi confraternity were viewed with wonder by local peasants, but they showed “poor reverence and respect” for the evening spectacle (1667). In 1676, in hopes of a “more attractive” procession, the confraternity considered moving
its start from 7 p.m. to “the daytime, soon after matins … because people could see everything better, and it would be easier to maintain order than at night, and would also save on lights, and avoid the danger of fire.”
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The brotherhood decided to keep the spectacle at night, but in 1680 tried processing in the afternoon before returning again to nocturnal processions. In Mindelheim the Good Friday procession of the Corpus Christi brotherhood, documented as nocturnal in 1686, was moved to the early afternoon sometime in the early eighteenth century.
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The nocturnal processions of confraternities in France, usually held on the night of Holy Thursday, suffered the same relocation.
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The confident, Tridentine attempt to sanctify popular nocturnal customs and initiate new nocturnal rituals was overshadowed in the course of the seventeenth century by the defensive action described as an “obsessive denial of the night.”
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As a result, the Catholic church, like its Protestant relations, had little relationship with the rural night by the early eighteenth century. A 1671 ordinance of Antoine Godeau, bishop of Vence, sums up the Catholic withdrawal from the rural night:

Being advised that in our diocese every year many irreverences are committed on the night of Holy Thursday in the churches where the people linger under the pretext that the Blessed Sacrament is exposed, we have ordered as a remedy, first, that … the Blessed Sacrament will no longer be exposed after the Mass of Holy Thursday but … will be deposited in the chalice which will be covered by a white veil and placed upon the altar.

[Second,] We prohibit any sort of person from sleeping in the church under pain of excommunication, [and] order that it will close at ten o’clock precisely. The penitent brothers who are accustomed to come in procession to the church will have to come before nine o’clock to sing the litany of the Passion as they are accustomed and will then return to their chapels with modesty and without noise.
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By the end of the seventeenth century the church’s colonization of the night was in full retreat. The very practices curtailed by this bishop – prayer vigils before the Eucharist at night and nocturnal processions by confraternities – had been promoted by pious laymen and missionary clergy during the previous century.

The colonization of the rural night was less ambitious than that in the city. It was also less successful, even in its limited terms. By and large, attempts to rid the rural night of its courting couples and drunken tavern-goers failed. Attempts to sanctify certain rural nights during Holy Week or at Christmas also had little effect on rural youth and village culture.
¹³⁴
Most of the ordinances, statutes, and decrees aimed at clearing the rural night of its disorder were in place by the early seventeenth century; most of the goals described in these regulations, such as the elimination of women’s spinning bees or “alley-catting” by young men, were unmet at the end of the eighteenth century, with the ordinances and prohibitions repeated and reprinted through the end of the Old Regime.

The sources of this failure to colonize the rural night are easy to see. The colonization of the urban night was driven by the settlement of urban elites in the night, reflecting powerful forces of conspicuous consumption of goods and time, supported by the disciplinary efforts of the state. In the countryside, settlement was not a priority and village elites often winked at the nocturnal customs of their youth. The disciplinary reach of the state was notoriously limited.
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As a result, country life moved in traditional rhythms, creating a new contrast with the nocturnalized pulse of the better-policed and illuminated streets of the great cities of the eighteenth century.