In my meager free time, I’ve been re-reading At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch. It is an excellent cultural history of the nocturnal sphere, focusing primary from the early modern period into the 18th century. There are amazing tidbits scattered throughout, and even re-reading it I hardly go a page without being surprised.

Coincidentally, I came across this review in the Times Literary Supplement of Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe by Craig Koslovsky, a new scholarly work that tackles similar territory. The reviewer unfortunately misses the significance of Ekirch’s work, but a quick use of Amazon’s “Search Inside” function shows that Koslofsky does not. It looks like it might be a fitting companion to Ekirch’s text.