At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime Book

AT DAY'S CLOSE will chart a fresh realm of Western culture, nocturnal life from the late medieval period to the Industrial revolution. The book will focus on th ecadneces of daily life, investigation nighttime in its own right and resurrecting a rich and complex universe in which persons passed nearly half of their lives - a world, long-lost to historians, of blanket fairs, night freaks, and curtain lectures, of sun-suckers, moon-cursers and night-kings. Not only has the vocabulary disappeared, AT DAY'S CLOSE will restitute many facts which have been either lost or forgotten (for example, that our ancestral sleepers slept in two phases during the night with an active waking period in-between). It will be a significant and newsorthy contribution to social history, filled with substantial research, stories and new discoveries. Ekirch uses a wide range of sources to reconstruct how the night was lived in the past : travel accounts, memoirs, letters, poems, plays, court records, coroner's reports, depositions and lasw dealing with curfews, crime and lighting. He has analysed working-class autobiographise, proverbs, nursery rhymes, ballads and sermons, and folklore, as well as consulting medical, psychological and anthropological papers.Read More