Language, Settings, and Networks for Early Modern Private Conversations

Abstract

This chapter introduces the research area by proposing the angle of privacy to analyse the subject of everyday conversations in early modern Europe. Such conversations are especially hard to tackle, as they were very rarely recorded, either for being considered trivial exchanges or for dealing with issues that people preferred to keep out of public scrutiny. Nevertheless, through a careful exploration of diaries, court cases, art and material culture, as well as literary and intellectual developments, it is possible to peek through the veil of privacy in early modern conversations. Against this background, the chapter presents the overall aim of the volume to examine the language, settings, and networks of conversations perceived as private.

People in early modern Europe had various reasons to talk in private. From sharing personal matters to discussing delicate secrets, all layers of society had their motives for wanting to keep certain exchanges out of public ears and ways of trying to achieve this. Political, clerical, and domestic authorities made use of their position to monitor conversations. Men and women across the social strata sought to establish more informal contexts within which they could interact more freely, unfettered by political, religious, or cultural expectations. Both urban and rural dwellers strove to find places and circumstances which allowed them to talk without having their concerns revealed to the community, the neighbourhood, or the village. Viewed from this perspective, people of early modern society were entangled in numerous relations and networks that were developed and maintained by conversations conducted in private. The typically secluded character of these conversations implies that we are left largely unaware of the exchanges that took place, what role they played, and what was said. Nevertheless, this volume sets out to sift through a variety of sources in order to trace how people managed—or failed—to talk in private across early modern Europe. It offers new insights into how private conversations were created, conceptualised, and challenged in everyday life. It also discusses the extent to which such conversations form a part of what we could call early modern privacy.¹ We thereby address the angle of privacy not as a notion of solitude, but as engagement in conversations hidden or protected from authorities and communities.

The topic of early modern private conversations is scarcely covered by current scholarship. More attention has been paid to public conversations. Drawing on Habermas’s paradigmatic theory about how a shared public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) emerged in the eighteenth century, research has mainly focused on conversations and exchanges that took place in trading houses, coffee houses, salons, newspapers, periodicals, and various closed societies, and how these formed new networks for discussing public issues and criticising the state. The historical process at stake for such investigations has been how social engagements in these originally private circles received public attention and, ultimately, public recognition, thereby paving the way for a liberal society together with its respect for how people need privacy for developing opinions and publicity for sharing them. As a result, what has been deemed a noteworthy conversation in this field of research has often been limited to the historical agents who had active voices within these specific contexts.²

Another strand of research has offered new perspectives on what the people who participated in the expanding public spheres of early modern Europe understood and learned from these discussions. Particularly, research in early modern literature has paid much attention to the role of private conversations in the development of interior psychological processes fostering the (early modern) self. Private conversations have been understood in a multi-layered sense, as conversational structures in printed texts, as readerly experiences of these texts, and as interpersonal discussions about them.³ According to Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn, “conversation, as concept and practice, arrived at pivotal and unprecedented stages in its development during the historical period that has come to be known as the long eighteenth century”.⁴ To support their claim, they point to the fact that most definitions of “conversation” in the Oxford English Dictionary derive from the eighteenth century.⁵ Moreover, the concept of conversation was not only developed by influential thinkers and authors of the time. Instructions for conversation also figured in numerous handbooks directed to a wider audience aiming to stimulate—and simulate—conversational practices. The art of conversation presented to readers drew on instructions in renaissance manuals for private communication as well as social practices in seventeenth-century salons and it gained momentum in the expanding landscape of popular print during the eighteenth century.⁶

Yet another strand of research has investigated the role of private conversations in the domestic realm. The five-volume book project The History of Private Life (Histoire de la vie privée), led by the French historians Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby in the 1980s, focused on domestic activities as a longue durée history of the ancient classification of vita privata as opposed to vita publica. In the volume dealing with the early modern period, edited by Roger Chartier, conversations are included among social exercises conducted at home that influenced how people perceived and lived their private lives.⁷ The division into two separate spheres that structures A History of Private Life might give the impression of a strict opposition. According to most theories, however, both realms tended to replicate rather than oppose their inner logic.⁸ Michael McKeon’s work A Secret History of Domesticity came to add significant nuance to this opposition through a dialectical approach involving literary, architectural, artistic, intellectual, and political works. McKeon analyses processes of distinguishing public and private from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, arguing for how such distinctions slowly sedimented more apparent separations between public and private by the eighteenth century—even if such distinctions could already be felt tacitly before. Predating the existence of a normative public sphere in the Habermasian sense, McKeon points to multiple conceptualisations of public and private—and how these conflicted and competed with one another. The art of conversation frequently appears in McKeon’s account, straddling those conflicting notions of public and private. Conversations functioned not only as conveyers of secrets, but also as social tools of refinement. They contributed to shaping a domestic ‘ethos’, although not as an entirely private matter, but as something adjusted to public expectations, demonstrating a household’s private values to the public.⁹ In this light, domestic conversations were hardly the same as private conversations, if the latter refers to exchanges that people strove to keep private together with selected others, within or outside of the household. To take such a dimension of seclusion into account, it is crucial to consider the research field on early modern privacy.

Privacy has sometimes been hinted at as being an important factor that defined how early modern conversations would take place and be perceived by others. In her work Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Lena Cowen Orlin localises privacy to the confines of the home, particularly to the gallery where people could be seen conversing without being overheard. Orlin argues that “a great deal of early modern cultural anxiety also coalesced around the social privacy of confidential conversation” and that the private was generally considered to be a threat to the common good.¹⁰ While Orlin brings to our attention the threatening aura that privacy could assume in the period, others have drawn attention to the simultaneous desire for privacy in early modern Europe. Ronald Huebert has turned to literary sources to explore what privacy could mean to early modern writers and what that tells us about how people would seek privacy. Huebert observes that “while privacy was by no means equally available to everyone, it was a highly desirable objective (in different ways) for women and men, for Puritans and Anglo-Catholics, for aristocrats, merchants, and even servants”.¹¹

In her introduction to the study of early modern privacy, Mette Birkedal Bruun explores notions of privacy in the retirement of the French nobleman known as Le Grand Condé at the castle of Chantilly after the end of his military career. Bruun shows how the nobleman’s withdrawal could hardly be described as a case of privacy in the contemporary sense of the word, given that he was “neither alone nor enveloped in secrecy nor protected from prying gazes”.¹² However, she suggests that descriptions of his dying hours could be read as an early modern understanding of privacy whereby he relinquished his bonds of attachment to the world step by step until he was completely alone with God. Departing from this instance, Bruun has challenged research on early modern privacy to present other examples of when privacy was desired, asking “what is sought, what is shed, and what is gained as we enter privacy”.¹³

The present book offers a response to that intriguing question by studying social aspects of privacy in the form of conversations conducted in private. While previous research on early modern conversations has been focused primarily on establishing boundaries for what would constitute the public, the private, the domestic, or the self, less attention has been given to social-interactional dimensions of private conversations. How did people manage—and fail—to talk in private across early modern Europe? Further, how were private conversations created, conceptualised, and challenged in everyday life?

In this endeavour, the ten following chapters analyse a number of instances in which people were talking in private, focusing on how social interactions framed notions of private conversations. What can we learn about early modern private conversations from a pastor who discovered that his congregation kept certain exchanges private, from a married couple who struggled to solve their conflicts in private, and from a nobleman’s exchanges about delicate political and religious issues conducted in private with his close friends? What can we glean from a diarist’s annotations of what conversations he chose to conduct in private, from villagers’ efforts to keep their sexual activities private, or from a publisher’s astonishing decision to turn his study into a room for authorship through conversations? How can we trace private conversations in the captions of art prints discussing the topic of love with the viewer, in the depictions of everyday conversations involving disabled people on the streets, or in descriptions of a utopia in which everyday conversations were portrayed to be ideally conducted under an “effigy of silence”? Questions such as these are at the root of the ten case studies investigated in this volume.

Sources and Methods

The study of private conversations in early modern sources comes with several methodological challenges, which are partly shared with research on other aspects of everyday life. The attention to more informal practices typically calls for a complex pursuit of subtle references. However, conversations mentioned en passant can give us glimpses of how people talked in private. In reading against the grain, also unexpected sources can be revealing of what people aimed to protect from the scrutiny of others. The case studies of this volume demonstrate how letters, diaries, court records, fiction, treatises, art, and even songs can offer us hints about how private conversations took place and what they meant to people. Many times, both the absence and the selective presentation of information indicate practices of concealment, manipulation, or selective presentation of information from private interactions, either for personal safety or due to bonds of confidentiality shared by the interlocutors.¹⁴

One fundamental methodological challenge is that conversations encountered in the sources are often retrospectively tailored after the recounted events took place. Consequently, conversations that were either explicitly defined as private or described as taking place in a private setting must be evaluated in the light of the purposes served by such reconstructions. For example, diaries were often written for posterity, and the statements in court records were obviously formed in assessment of the accusations being made. However, those conditions do not necessarily cause problems for our endeavour here. On the contrary, such accounts tend to tell us more directly what, according to the speaker, made a conversation private. Directing attention to the claims expressed in such accounts resonates with a key point in research on privacy as an anthropological phenomenon: that arguments for privacy protection are typically formed in response to experiences of intrusion or exposure.¹⁵ Thus, there is good reason to investigate attempts to define certain conversations as creative interventions in an open-ended negotiation that shaped and reshaped what should be considered as talking in private.

These considerations prompt us to identify more precisely how people signalled that a certain conversation was meant to be private. What was the specific language used? Did it refer to words deriving from the Latin privatus or did it draw upon other—old or new—concepts? What hints can we read from preserved social communication and spatial practices? An interlinked challenge is to track the reasons why people preferred to keep certain exchanges private. Were conversations protected because of personal friendship or with reference to more or less formal bonds of confidentiality? Were they kept hidden in order to conceal something considered shameful, delicate, or intimate? Such motivations are only occasionally declared explicitly in sources. Mostly, they need to be teased out of the context. This enterprise also brings semiotic considerations to the fore. What was taken for granted in various forms of conversations? What did silence imply in different situations, relations, and places? What silent messages did bodies communicate?¹⁶ The chapters of this volume interpret and explore such signals and arguments in a variety of ways.

Another methodological challenge is to assess the relation between how private conversations were presented in print and practised in everyday life. Literary sources—such as manuals or fictive accounts—give us stylised evidence of conversations. However, as some chapters will discuss, they reveal norms as well as practices of private conversation. Scholarship has recognised that writers of instructional guides in the art of conversation did make efforts to use the language of everyday life to stage authenticity.¹⁷ Similarly, the design and material culture of buildings contributed to shaping private conversations. Rooms for guests and social activities in upper-class early modern houses were furnished to trigger conversations—for example, by offering topics of conversation through art serving as ‘conversation pieces’ and text on the walls serving as ‘conversation starters’.¹⁸ A more mobile artistic piece designed to trigger conversations was the art print which was provided with captions communicating with the beholder on various topics, not least those of a more private nature.¹⁹ Since private conversations shape and are shaped by architecture, artworks, manuals of style and conduct as well as cultural, religious, and juridical norms, we need to address them via in-depth analyses and from a wide range of disciplinary angles. As such, the chapters in this book focus on the practice of everyday life by devoting special attention to the shaping and reshaping of norms and models within art, literature, theology, and law.

Thus, this book offers a much-needed contribution to the research field on early modern privacy by putting focus on its generally neglected social aspects. Privacy has often been defined in terms of individual autonomy, as in the right to be let alone.²⁰ In contrast to such a point of departure, we aim to address the angle of privacy as social-interactional engagement in conversations protected from exposure to certain authorities or communities. Thereby, people are studied as parts of certain communities, or as nodes in social networks. We argue that such an approach is better adapted than the study of individual autonomy for research on notions of privacy before the modern era. As Dror Wahrman has argued in his seminal monograph on the emergence of modern identity, sources from the early modern period do not primarily point to the individual as an autonomous self, but rather to social dimensions of selfhood; how the self was connected to other people and objects.²¹ In a similar way, this book gives multiple examples of how notions of privacy were present in social life. More precisely, the case studies highlight a variety of ways in which private conversations became a tool for navigating multiple and sometimes conflicting forms of social interactions and familial, communal, and societal expectations.

Social-Interactional Aspects

Based on these research questions and methodological considerations, we have chosen to direct our attention to three social-interactional aspects: language, settings, and networks of private conversations in the early modern period. Each of these aspects helps us zoom in on a dimension of private conversations from the past. By focusing on how people communicated in private, in what contexts, and with whom, we are able to shed new light on how early modern privacy was created, conceptualised, and challenged in everyday life. The following section will knit together various branches of scholarship on early modern society with the ten case studies of this volume to discuss these three social-interactional aspects.

Language—Concepts and Other Means of Communication

While much research has focused on how the art of conversation developed in handbooks and other sites of public debate, we extend the scope to how diarists, authors, secretaries, or material objects expressed or signalled that an everyday conversation was private. What indications do we get of how individuals kept things private through discretion, dissimulation, omission, or silence?

Everyday conversations were not restricted to the utterance of words. With reference to the literature of the early modern era, Katherine Larson has observed that “[c]onversation was an embodied act, signifying social intimacy, cohabitation, and even sexual intercourse”.²² In the chapter “‘Unnecessary Conversations’: Talking About Sex in the Early Modern Polish Village”, Tomasz Wiślicz shows that the act of having a private conversation between a woman and a man would be considered potential evidence of sexual misconduct and labelled ‘unnecessary conversation’ in court to mark out its illicit nature. Here, the perception of private conversations referred to both talk and sex, as the act of talking in private was seen as a potential step towards sexual acts. However, it was not only the authorities who defined private conversations in this context. Intriguingly, Wiślicz also demonstrates how common women and men spoke about sex to each other with the aid of witty sayings. By using language creatively to make fun of official norms and church authorities, they managed to initiate private conversations with lower risks of retribution.

Another demonstration of how the creative use of language is crucial to how these past conversations have reached us today is given in Virginia Reinburg’s contribution “Talking About Religion during Religious War: Gilles de Gouberville, Normandy, 1562”. Reinburg describes how contentious conversations between friends of different confessions were recorded in a diary at a time when wars between religious factions made it complicated to talk about certain issues. She notices how controversial topics were commented in cipher, silence, or—in at least one instance—via a poetic license by the diarist. This example also demonstrates that even when sources describe alleged conversations that happened in person, they might sound unreliable or staged. When put in writing, conversations had to be adapted to another genre of communication.

Liam Benison’s chapter provides a case study of how descriptions of conversations in literature can be revealing of actual early modern ideals of talking in private. In his chapter “Talking Privately in Utopia: Ideals of Silence and Dissimulation in Smeek’s Krinke Kesmes (1708)”, Benison shows how dissimulation could be considered a useful conversational attribute in the sensitive political climate of “the age of secrecy”.²³ His contribution explores how instructions for conversation informed early modern utopias while also taking into account how modulations of language could conduct social interactions, both in the literary world and among European nobility. Benison argues that early modern utopias could be read by contemporaries not only as provoking thought experiments, but also as teaching social codes for everyday life. Keeping silent was a key value in that regard.

Gestures, physical positioning, and silences can be as expressive as the words themselves. Non-verbal conversations took place not only among hearing-impaired people or within a vow of silence, but as a continuous engagement with peoples, landmarks, and art.²⁴ Looking at art could function as an intimate discourse between the piece and the viewer as well as instigate conversations among beholders through the medium of what already in the early modern period was referred to as ‘conversation pieces’.²⁵ In her chapter entitled “Multimedia Conversations: Love and Lovesickness in Sixteenth-Century Italian Single-Sheet Prints”, Alexandra Kocsis demonstrates how sixteenth-century prints on love and lovesickness had a conversational potential to guide viewers into reflecting on their own relationships, showing how inscriptions became a direct interlocutor with the spectator—a practice that gained force in the sixteenth century when such intimate conversations became a part of a fashionable ‘social game’ among courtiers.

Thus, the language of talking in private extends over different media, tones, gestures, and silences shared between people in different settings. As the contributions in this volume show, we need to pay heed to how people expressed themselves in private conversations beyond the mere words being exchanged to include pauses, concealments, gesticulations, motions, and the very positioning of the bodies of the interlocutors, all of which communicated just as much as direct utterances.

Settings—Social and Material Conditions

Some conversations in early modern sources were explicitly defined as private while others were described as taking place in some kind of private setting. What was considered to be a private setting? How did spaces, gender, and social status enable or curb private conversations? How did spaces and social relations become sites of privacy?

Life in the early modern household took place in a collective space which might not seem to allow for much privacy in terms of opportunities for withdrawal or control of private information. Scholarship has also established that early modern houses were open spaces both in a material and in a social sense, easily accessible to neighbours, authorities, and outsiders.²⁶ Even though those who could afford to reserve some rooms for personal use increasingly did so during the early modern period, most people did not have such opportunities. In the countryside, families generally cohabited in the rooms available.²⁷ In city houses, stairs were rarely separated from people’s living space, thereby necessitating movement across the rooms. Closets and studies were even rarer. Not until the eighteenth century do we see a broad development towards common installations of inner doors, locks, hallways, and backstairs separated from the living spaces—a tendency that can be traced in both larger and smaller cities of Europe.²⁸ This means that having access to a space of one’s own at home behind a closed door during the period covered by this book was an unusual privilege.

Despite these conditions, scholarship has showed how people from all social strata were concerned with finding a personal space. Amanda Vickery has highlighted the importance of lockable boxes and Ariane Fennetaux has demonstrated the utility of portable pockets as material sites of spatial privacy, including for women of lower status.²⁹ Julie Hardwick has extended the angle of privacy to social encounters, unfolding how private conversations could be a gateway for young adults into intimate relationships and their path towards marriage.³⁰ Hardwick shows that these encounters were often supervised by peers and identifies the somewhat paradoxical condition that they actually had to be observed in order to be considered licit within the family, neighbourhood, and community. In this way, seeing could be combined with not overhearing, as in Orlin’s aforementioned observations of Tudor London. On the other hand, Hardwick’s findings reveal that young adults tended to successfully avoid supervision altogether by changing the site of their meeting to either their place of work or outside the city.³¹

Moving out of one’s usual milieu was also a common strategy for maintaining private conversation among the elites. As explored by Hélène Merlin-Kajman, the French marquise Madame de Sévigné stressed that she preferred conversations with her gardener than with other courtiers. For her, having a private conversation with someone of a different status was a comfortable retreat from the extreme culture of visibility at court.³² Moreover, research has pointed to ‘liminal spaces’ such as gardens, doorsteps, or balconies as accessible stages for women to engage in conversation, since they remained at the threshold between a domestic and public setting.³³ Bedrooms at inns were another liminal space where people of different status would be sheltered in the same household with its everyday evening routines and protection for the night and where—depending upon the conditions at hand—they might need to share a room or bed with a stranger. These arrangements would normally follow gender categories and social hierarchies, but, as noted by Sasha Handley, people also prized bedfellows for qualities that cut across social divisions, such as “by the quality of their conversation and their behaviour in bed”.³⁴ According to her investigation of diaries and travel journals, such ‘pillow talk’ could range from eloquent discussions to comforting prayers, serving the purpose of bringing a sense of ease and security for the night.

Normally, however, social status had a crucial impact on the norms of how different sorts of conversations should be conducted. The officially recognised categories of secrecy were reserved for political, clerical, and domestic authorities. Here, private admonition was a formal category for a talk that was meant to remain private. This notion was based on biblical models for conflict regulation which stipulated a chain of steps from private to public reprimands, where the last step included public exposure of the sin followed by an act of reconciliation between the sinner, God, and the congregation.³⁵ This path was institutionalised in monastic traditions, developed in the increasing practice of penitence in medieval theology, codified in church laws of both Reformed and Lutheran traditions, and deeply cherished in pious circles across the Western Christian confessions in the seventeenth century.³⁶ Thus, private admonitions offered a formal setting not only for clergymen but also for housefathers and various local authorities to talk privately with parishioners, household members, and local subjects. Even though this sort of conversation was hierarchical, the official secrecy of these talks did also equip the subordinated party with legitimacy to keep what had been said private. For instance, within Sweden’s harsh Pietist investigations in the 1720s, people who were accused of being Pietists emphatically complained about how their soul carers exposed their conversations to the investigative commissions.³⁷

In this volume, both Markus Bardenheuer and Lars Cyril Nørgaard offer case studies on different facets of monitoring conversations between clergymen and parishioners from the perspectives of different confessions. In his chapter “‘So that I never fail to warn and admonish’: Pastoral Care and Private Conversation in a Seventeenth-Century Reformed Village”, Bardenheuer explores a Reformed pastor’s efforts to employ the tool of private admonition in his parish to solve crises of melancholy and drinking. Reading through the pastor’s own annotations reveals that inhabitants of the parish kept certain exchanges—as well as things considered common knowledge in the village—out of the pastor’s eyes and ears, and Bardenheuer analyses how the pastor tried to navigate the networks of the village using private conversations as his tool. Anchored in the same domain, Nørgaard’s chapter “’The secret sins that one commits by thought alone’: Confession as Private and Public in Seventeenth-Century France” follows a debate between two Catholic clerics discussing the modalities of private confession, a debate which centred on whether the penitence should be undertaken in public or in private. The focus is particularly on the ‘Jansenist’ theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) who argued that Christians should practice public penitence like the ancient church fathers, thereby bringing these old and important distinctions for the history of keeping private conversations officially secret into the public debate of seventeenth-century France and the Catholic world at large.

Merchants constitute another group of actors who increasingly favoured conversations conducted in private. From the sixteenth century onwards, they tended to move their activities from the public square to indoor facilities in order to enable more private conversations regarding their sensitive business. They acquired trading houses with a detailed inner structure or rented rooms in proximity to the outdoor market spaces in order to secure the seclusion needed for protecting trade secrets. In rural areas, inner rooms of taverns—the so-called secret corners—served a similar function for local tradesmen.³⁸ In Krisztina Péter’s chapter for this volume, “‘Alone amongst ourselves’: How to Talk in Private According to the Cologne Diarist Hermann von Weinsberg (1518–97)”, we are introduced to what matters a Cologne merchant of the sixteenth century preferred to discuss in private. Besides debts and expenses, these matters included conversations about inheritance and other private settlements within the family which were handled in indoor and outdoor spaces where the conversation would not be overheard or disrupted. Barbara A. Kaminska’s chapter “‘We take care of our own’: Talking about ‘Disability’ in Early Modern Netherlandish Households” also directs our attention to movements from the streets and squares into wealthy trade houses by investigating a particular element of their interiors: conversation pieces of art depicting disabled people’s social interactions in the urban landscape. Kaminska examines what such portrayals can tell us about how people visiting these trading houses were talking about ‘disability’.

These efforts to establish private conversations were made in a culture in which most normative activities would take place openly, in sight of others. The relative lack of material conditions for and social acceptance of private conversations point to the oft-reiterated characterisation of early modern society as a culture of visibility.³⁹ However, as we have seen, there were also many ways of talking in private, both formally and informally, that were generally accepted. The relative limitations did not stop people from meeting in private. As Katie Barclay astutely states, early modern people navigated an environment where privacy could often be “an act of will, rather than a result of material conditions”.⁴⁰

Networks—Agency in Community with Others

Studying human interaction within these social and spatial settings leads us to address the function of conversation in networks. While conversations were a social networking tool in the early modern period, we need to take into account what kind of historical agents were doing the talking and in what kind of environment.⁴¹ Research has assiduously and broadly demonstrated the role of the neighbourhood or wider community in maintaining social control and, as a consequence, the importance of keeping certain matters private.⁴² The significance of honour, the fear of gossip, and the threat of scandals were critical factors in deciding what could be shared widely and what should remain a secret.⁴³ However, there were different strategies to keep information private, and these manoeuvres were highly dependent on local interactions, conflicts, and suspicions.⁴⁴

Secrets were a social endeavour, confined to inner circles of knowingness.⁴⁵ Without a clearly defined ‘right to privacy’—which would be formulated for the first time in the latter half of the nineteenth century—people living in the early modern period resorted to establishing their own unique bonds of trust to keep their affairs within selected groups. Different modes of confidentiality could be established between people in ways that require a bottom-up approach.⁴⁶ Studies on merchant networks have revealed how this could be sealed through mutual agreements which occasionally took the form of forced pacts of secrecy due to business circumstances.⁴⁷ Being attentive to the bonds created by friendships has been another approach to studying local networks. As articulated by Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin in their introduction to a volume about men and women making friends in early modern France, “intimate disclosure to the friend was a matter of ethical and social obligation as well as of self-expression”.⁴⁸ In his contribution to the same volume, Peter Shoemaker examines the discourse of confidence or the ethics of confidentiality among friends in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France which, according to his analysis, “occupied a nebulous borderland between private and public, sentiment and the law”.⁴⁹ All these various relations and arrangements could be broken, either to gain some perceived advantage or to deal with conflicts within the community. By default, these bonds of confidentiality had to be malleable in order to adapt to the shifting circumstances of early modern life, and conversations had the power to reveal and conceal information that could shift allegiances.

Researching private conversations involves asking how people managed to share their private matters and secrets with selected others in the early modern period. This includes looking at consolidation of bonds, maintenance of relationships, and the creation or resolution of conflict by means of conversation. In her chapter “Marital Conversations: Using privacy to negotiate marital conflicts in Adam Eyre’s diary, 1647–49”, Katharina Simon offers an intriguing example of a private settlement between the strong-minded spouses Adam and Suzannah Eyre as their marriage remained in perpetual tension, demonstrating the ways in which their struggles could be kept out of public knowledge even when their disagreements were unavoidable. Within their household, they managed the multiple connections they had with relatives, friends, servants, and professional affiliates to their advantage in settling things in private while simultaneously avoiding scandal and interference.

Such arrangements between people were essential to a harmonious life in society. However, under increasing influence from absolutist statecraft and fear of revolts, any settlements that did not involve the state risked being considered as a challenge to authorities. This had broader consequences for people’s opportunities to convene. Authorities declared only certain spaces open for peasants, local merchants, and others to discuss local issues collectively. Such spaces—for example taverns—were categorised as public as opposed to being private in the sense of being secret to authorities, consequently becoming hotspots of surveillance.⁵⁰ As noted by B. Ann Tlusty, local authorities took to the taverns to pick up rumours, and tavern keepers “could be held partially responsible […] even [for] the conversations that took place” not only during meetings but also in general.⁵¹ These circumstances affected everyday life at large. Any conversation that was floating around in the nebulous borderland between ‘private’ in the everyday sense and ‘private’ as the legal category that criminalised activities as secret to authorities risked causing conflict between state and subjects. Different networks—governmental authorities, peasant villagers, and officers in between—intermingled, demonstrating the porosity of private and public in conversation and making even everyday exchanges among the population a matter of state security. Therefore, managing one’s position within social networks was crucial in order to avoid friction with the authorities. Knowing who to share information with, what kind of information, when, and in what manner was an important skill not only for sociability but also to create and share knowledge and guarantee one’s safety when sharing challenging opinions.

This takes us, finally, to the writers of the period. Writers whose work ended up on the public scene typically performed the writing in their private home, in their studiolo or cabinet. The expanding printing industry as well as the tightened censorship generated a greater divide between the private intellectual sphere of the home and the publicness of the act of publication.⁵² In Adam Horsley’s contribution to this volume, “When Private Speech goes Public: Libertinage, Crypto-Judaic Conversations, and the Private Literary World of Jean Fontanier (1621)”, we get an extraordinarily closer look at how private conversation played an unusual and controversial role in a court case against a Libertine author, Jean Fontanier, who had made his home into a site for private conversations. The judges ignored the conversations and focused on the process regarding Fontanier’s production of illegal literature. Intriguingly, however, the case reveals dynamics of private conversations in the context of writing which would have otherwise passed by unrecorded. To safeguard their collective authorship of controversial pieces, Fontanier required an oath to God, promising to keep their discussions private. This is a telling example of one of the ways in which early modern people created their circles of ‘people in the know’ and developed a sense of belonging within particular networks in their best attempts at protecting their privacy.

Structure of the Book

The ten case studies in this volume are divided into three parts. All these parts analyse the multifaceted ways in which language, settings, and networks factored in early modern conversations. The first part, “Between silence and talking”, highlights the interstitial space between silence and talking. The chapters of this section illustrate both the needs and benefits of talking in private, but also the danger of doing so. The second part, “Navigating hierarchical conversations”, centres on how domestic and clerical authorities made arrangements to talk in private and how they navigated distinctions between private and public conversations. It reveals to us how authorities exercised their social responsibilities in words and practice and how the population reacted to their overseeing. The third part, entitled “Intimate conversations”, explores three types of exchanges: between spouses equipped with various agencies to conduct conversations in private, within non-marital relations among the rural population, and in upper-class trends to ponder the topics of love and lovesickness via commented images.

This volume is first and foremost an explorative endeavour. We invite the reader into a variety of environments where people were talking in private in early modern Europe. The collection of case studies covers a wide geographical scope, including France, the Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, and England. This range balances the emphasis in previous scholarship on urban milieus of the eighteenth century with a focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including rural areas. In contrast to most previous scholarship, these case studies pinpoint everyday dimensions of how private conversations were created, conceptualised, and challenged.

Our main goal is that sources, methods, and hypotheses presented throughout this volume—which are interlinked and further discussed in the last chapter of this book—will prompt further studies into the little-explored terrain of how people of the early modern period talked in private.