Considering Privacy
Abstract: Privacy in this context 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. Written evidence can be found in correspondence – assumptions expressed in personal letters and in the manner of transmitting diplomatic dispatches.
Contemporary memoirs reveal that the memorialist interacted with numbers of others in potentially intimate settings. Contemporary advice concerning the layout of a manor house so the master might see all—and be seen by all, insights garnered from by realistic fiction, and architectural choices visible in floorplans, all lead to the conclusion that being alone in early modern Europe was rare, rarely desired, and might be dangerous.
The sources of my work include the correspondence of Catherine de' Medici, Henri II of France, François I of France, Marguerite de Navarre; the literary works of Marguerite de Navarre and Michel de Montaigne, the memoires of Marguerite de Valois, and the works of Olivier de Serres, Philibert de Lorme as well as modern historians' accounts.
