Between Discipline and Distinction

This article deals with the history of sleep in Early Modern Europe. Focussed on the hour when most individuals went to bed and raised the following morning, sleep is discussed in two perspectives: as a subject of social control and discipline enforced by state authority, churches and moral discourses, and as means of distinction used first by the higher strata. The fact that the courts not only tried to regulate their subjects’ sleep, but also contributed with their nightly festivities to the shifting of time patterns, shows the ambiguous relation between discipline and distinction.