Considering Privacy
Privacy as I will be considering it means being able to control access to one's person, having the right to be alone, to choose not to be seen. Expectations of privacy tend to be taken as self-evident; rarely is or was it felt they needed to be rendered explicit; this silence merits revisiting. The evidence needs to be coaxed out of the cracks in the past. My paper examines a broad range of sources to show that, taken in our modern sense, broadly speaking, privacy did not exist in sixteenth-century France. With minor variations, this can be projected across Western Europe. Examining these assumptions offers modern historians a different understanding of the reality-on-the-ground of the objects of our study. In this talk I will be focusing primarily on evidence to be found in architecture, realistic fiction, and glimpses from contemporary letters and modern historians' work in the archives. They all invite the conclusion that being alone in early modern Europe was rare, rarely desired, and might be dangerous.