Keyword

This volume demonstrates a variety of ways of tracing private conversations in sources from early modern Europe. Private conversations turn up in journals and diaries (Reinburg, Péter, and Simon), annotations (Bardenheuer), court records (Horsley and Wiślicz), songs (Wiślicz), fiction (Benison), and theological treatises (Nørgaard). Sometimes they may be envisioned based on circumstantial evidence (Kaminska and Kocsis). Each of these genres abides by its own set of standardised norms and—occasionally—editorial processes. Aimed at different audiences and purposes, their representation of private conversations ranges from quasi-naturalistic renderings (Reinburg and Simon) to the more-or-less stylised formats of the grand didactic tradition of the dialogue (Benison), the prescriptive tone of religious manuals (Nørgaard), or the formulaic structures of court records, representing both the defence as well as the prosecution (Horsley and Wiślicz).

Different reasons, locations, and expectations connected to private conversations provide glimpses of people’s daily life, and the role played by conversation. People had several reasons to talk in private. Across this volume, we encounter private conversations concerning conflictual matters among family members or business partners (Reinburg, Péter, and Simon), issues that were religiously or politically controversial (Reinburg and Horsley), sexual matters (Wiślicz), social questions (Kaminska), consolation (Bardenheuer), and issues that could potentially cause shame, conflict, or loss of reputation if conducted in public (Péter and Simon). The conversations examined in this volume also contain particularly poignant reprimands directed at particular parishioners (Bardenheuer), moral issues fit for self-reflection (Kocsis), as well as thoughts and deeds appropriate for confession (Nørgaard).

These conversations take us to a wide array of locations. Privacy for conversations was sought outdoors, for instance, in forests, fields, and cemeteries. Often, interlocutors talked while doing other things, such as working in fields and forests (Bardenheuer), dining and drinking (Péter and Reinburg), or walking (Reinburg). Domestic space offered some protection from the prying ears of communities or authorities, although boundaries were porous, even in the residential house of a merchant family (Péter). These settings underline the privilege of having a space for privacy outside the town with a certain size and number of rooms (Simon). Yet another kind of space—outhouses such as barns or stables—could offer shelter for private conversations as well as activities (Wiślicz). A separate room in an inn might also demarcate a space providing some degree of privacy (Benison). Privacy within a conversation could be further protected and controlled through dissimulation (Benison), just as privacy could be created by consciously withholding particular information from particular people, such as the village pastor (Bardenheuer). Arguably, the most private locus examined in this volume is the mind or the heart—the site of contrition as opposed to public confession in the theological debate of penitence (Nørgaard).

Some of the chapters unfold divergent expectations of what a private conversation should be like. Social expectations were mirrored in many instructional texts on the art of conversation, and some of these guidelines take flesh when recounted in everyday situations, by a domestic authority (Péter), by a street-smart merchant (Benison), or by clergymen of different confessions (Bardenheuer and Nørgaard).

Private Conversations as a Danger—and as a Useful Tool

As several chapters show, the nature of the topics generally treated in private conversations meant that such conversations were often challenged or at least viewed with suspicion. Several chapters indicate that the privacy that shielded early modern private conversations was frail and vulnerable to several forms of threats. Sometimes, their content was conveyed to third parties by interlocutors (Horsley); sometimes, privacy was breached through eavesdropping, by the voices of the speakers, or when other people entered the place of conversation (Péter). In other instances, speakers might themselves cross over from a private to a public space, bringing with them traces of the conversation—such as when complaints communicated in private were announced on the street (Péter). Sometimes, such a change of space was part of a greater structure, such as when the confessional act conducted in private resulted in public penitence (Nørgaard).

The social fabric of early modern society brought together private persons on the one hand and communities on the other (Simon). In this entanglement, matters related to norms, obligations, and reputation led to inescapable connections between individuals and their social contexts. However, as Wiślicz notes, when it comes to early modern norms, there is a marked difference between legal and religious theory on the one hand and everyday practice on the other. The chapters also show how privacy could be offered by a household or a community through actual initiative or by ‘turning a blind eye’.

Times of crises seem to offer sources that are particularly fruitful for detecting modes of private conversations. Such crises could be related to major societal shifts, such as escalating religious wars (Reinburg) or increasing investigations of illicit texts (Horsley). Crises covered by this volume also include more mundane matters, such as familial disputes (Simon) or health concerns related to the affliction of melancholy (Bardenheuer). Conversations were the driving forces of both conflicts and conflict management. Some of the case studies allow us to follow the process whereby the subject of conversations that were meant to remain private leaked from a smaller network of speakers to a broader web of people (Horsley and Bardenheuer). In the course of these different kinds of crises, private conversations were initiated or altered, a fact which allows us to follow conversations as they were changing form. Admonitions were conveyed not only from people of authority (Péter, Bardenheuer, and Nørgaard) but also via agreements negotiated in parallel to the official system, such as oaths within communities (Horsley), a ‘peace testimony’ between spouses (Simon), or circumscribed arrangements where language served to create social room for private conversations. Poetic phrases (Reinburg), jokes (Wiślicz), and songs (Wiślicz) were used to talk about sensitive matters. In some cases, the people studied in these chapters managed to solve crises by talking in private (Péter, Benison, and Simon), whereas in other cases they either failed to do so (Bardenheuer) or chose the path of silence (Reinburg and Benison).

Despite the dark clouds of suspicion surrounding private conversations, the chapters also show a more accommodating view of private conversations. When we comb our sources to find mentions of everyday conversations, we find diarists signalling that they had been talking in private (Reinburg and Péter), the lustful references to private conversations in tavern songs (Wiślicz), the intimate rooms or prints that supported private conversations (Kaminska and Kocsis), and the preference for private confession and contrition of the heart instead of public shaming advocated by some speakers in religious debate (Nørgaard). The example of the community around Jean Fontanier reveals to what extent private conversations were key to the creation and future dissemination of intellectual production (Horsley). Many things were gained in such conversations: reflection, intellectual exchange, close friendship, and avoidance of involuntary exposure to a wider community. These values of private conversations were much desired, and they form a blunt contrast to how early modern authorities generally declared activities undertaken in private as a threat to society. Furthermore, while it is often stressed that chattering and gossiping were disliked in early modern society, it should also be taken into account that the inability to conduct a conversation—be it public or private—was considered equally problematic, and a well-functioning private life—including peaceful private conversations—was deemed a sign of status and social solidity (Péter).

Thus, although research on early modern notions of privacy tends to stress the overall suspicion of authorities towards activities in private, this volume brings to the fore the many ways in which privacy was desired in everyday life. This wish for privacy in certain everyday instances had to be negotiated and reiterated through people’s interactions, but the contributions demonstrate that, in contrast to official positions which deemed privacy as a threat to the social order, people assessed the valence of private conversations depending on their daily needs. Seen from the broader perspective of early modern notions of privacy, conversations appear as situations in which such positively valued notions can be traced.

Private Conversations as a Form of Boundary Drawing

The privacy surrounding the conversations studied in this volume is secured by way of multiple forms of boundary drawing. The remoteness of a house may offer seclusion from neighbours and the wider community (Simon), a walk may take interlocutors away from crammed spaces (Reinburg), a domestic location may offer some protection because the owner might to some extent control who has access (Horsley), and a particular room within a public space—such as an inn—can be set up for private usage (Benison). The tacit or explicit limitation of a circle of interlocutors may also create a boundary, creating variant situations where the community is either so wide as to exclude only one person (Bardenheuer) or where it involves the fairly delineated social unit of the household (Péter) or a married couple (Simon). Finally, the material confines of the journal may protect a conversation among generations (Péter).

The sources studied in these chapters distinguish private conversations from other forms of communication. Private conversation is thus described as being something vastly different from private writing or writing that is made publicly available through clandestine and open publishing (Horsley). It is also distinguished from conversations carried out in public or the public declaration made before, for instance, a court (Horsley). The private conversation in casu with the pastor could be considered a breach of village loyalties and thus be defined by parishioners in distinction to conversations taking place within the community while, as Bardenheuer shows, the pastor might view the private conversations as a crucial element in his pastoral care that differed from the conversations in the consistory or from public admonitions. Private conversation between a couple in conflict is distinguished from the invitation into conflict by an outside mediator (Simon). The formalised private conversation related to confession is identified as something different from inner contrition on the one hand and public penitence on the other (Nørgaard). Kocsis separates the private conversations that could transpire in front of a print hanging on the wall of a studiolo from the even more intimate exchanges that spectators might have had while bending over a smaller print. Finally, Wiślicz reminds us that sexually charged private conversation is at once distinct from and semantically aligned with the ditties sung in public.

In these ways, we can study private conversations in order to discover how social boundaries functioned in early modern society—to see, that is, how people talking in private shaped boundaries and how private conversations taking place within formal and informal networks gave the historical agents different degrees of agency.

Private Conversations—by Terminology and by Circumstances

Private conversations were defined in different ways. Most of the conversations studied in this volume are defined as private by their circumstances rather than any direct identification with the word ‘private’ or with related terms. As Benison and Péter show, sometimes it is relevant to look at early modern terminologies related to privacy and the private and consider forms of overlap between early modern words deriving from the Latin privatus and their meanings as well as factors affording conditions that we would see as a form of privacy. Péter thus turns, among other sources, to Roman law as a provider of terminologies related to private and public.

Wiślicz astutely argues that the terminology regarding conversation (a term that might denote both talk and conduct) is of interest because it underlines the connection between private conversation and private, in casu illicit, sexual conduct. This insight points to the generally significant point that often private conversation is considered not simply an exchange of words, but also a meeting of minds, opinions, and interests that might readily lead to action.

Bardenheuer’s case features an explicit distinction between ‘public’ (the term employed is publicus) and ‘private’ (privatus) conversations pertaining to his pastoral work where the latter denotes individual conversations with his parishioners. Further, the theological treatises studied by Nørgaard contain terminology related to such distinctions—that is, the Latin privatus or secretus or the French particulier and secret which were deployed to describe inner or personal contrition.

However, there are many instances beyond terminology which do not always lend themselves to categorisation as private or public. The case studies demonstrate how ‘private’ and ‘public’ are not stable and objective categories, neither empirically, nor analytically. They also show how the way in which a situation comes to be considered as private or public tells us something about how private conversations were both conducted and conceptualised. Several contributions to this volume prompt a critical (re)consideration of the perspectives from which such definitions are formulated. For example, the explicit definitions of public and private documents in Bardenheuer’s chapter are the pastor’s, but obviously not those of the parishioners who sought each other for conversations shielded from the pastor. It is also important to take notice of the agent who allows something to become private rather than public. For example, Simon discusses that servants in the household of the struggling couple probably heard the couple fighting but let them keep this private. Generally, as stated by Simon, the relationship between public and private is not an either/or construct but one which inhabits a spectrum, and several forms of material, culturally codified, or implicit forms of boundary drawing created the privacy needed for conversations to be protected from unwanted listeners.

Thus, early modern private conversations do not always appear in binary opposition to public exchanges. They are to be found on a spectrum where a singular conversation could move along a scale, shifting gears from general talk to something more private depending upon the interlocutors and the circumstances. Studying how and why such scales switched—both at the micro and macro levels—will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the conditions for privacy in these societies.

Towards Further Studies

As individuals living in the age of information, we are constantly aware of technological eavesdropping on our private conversations. We tend to lose a sense of who could be privy to our online communication—from companies to governments or hackers—even when messages are meant only for a few people. The fear that third parties listen in on private conversations may appear to be a peculiarly contemporary concern, but it has long historical roots. People of the past were also concerned that unintended audiences might get a hold of what they chose to talk about in private. Understanding how people dealt with the challenges of their time and navigated their need for privacy in the early modern period, at a time when the notion was mostly seen as suspicious and threatening to social order, can be revealing of the human need to select who they want to communicate with and how such an interaction can take place in order to protect the exchange.

There is certainly a need for further studies that follow private conversations within a broader array of sources, why not through periods of crises and their aftermaths, in order to tell us more about the implications of talking in private in early modern Europe. Furthermore, research on private conversations from other contexts and periods can expand how the need for talking in private was transformed, reinvented, or formulated as a response to other social circumstances. The lens of this volume is directed on early modern Europe, but the approaches and findings will hopefully also contribute to broader conversations on what it means to talk in private.