Talk to God
Bedtime prayers were regarded as the best safeguard against the evils that stalked the night
It may have fallen out of fashion in our more secular age but, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, prayer was an integral part of most people’s bedtime routine. And there was a good reason why believers sought to speak to God before retiring to their beds: self-preservation.
To the early modern mind, the night was fraught with danger, a time when the body came perilously close to death. As the physician and clergyman Thomas Browne put it in his most famous work, Religio Medici (1643), sleep was “that death by which we may literally [be] said to dye daily… so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers”.
Browne feared for his body and soul during sleep since it was at night that the devil’s threat peaked. As the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe explained in The Terrors of the Night (1594): “The Night is the Divells Blacke booke, wherein hee recordeth all our transgressions.” The devil and his servants had the power to perform devastating acts during the night, from diabolical possession and terrifying nightmares to the infliction of bodily harm. He could even, it was widely believed, steal or deform men’s penises during the night, robbing them of their fertility and their masculinity.
Bedtime prayer may have been the best way to ward off these evils but it wasn’t the only one. People also surrounded their beds with amulets and charms that were invested with protective qualities. When it came to protecting children, they tended to employ more visceral objects, hanging wolves’ teeth around their necks, and suspending carving knives or scissors over their cradles.