Early modern privacy: sources and approaches

Abstract

The website for the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies informs users in a pop-up window that their actions will be shared with third parties to ‘keep improving our service’, and offers the opportunity to opt out of information-sharing via cookies. This near-universal web-browsing experience is, perhaps, one of the quotidian modern surrenders of privacy that motivates the work of the Centre for Privacy, and this volume of essays, to better define the roots of our ideas about privacy in the early modern age. Lars Cyril Nørgaard’s introduction asserts that examining the sources of the notion of privacy ‘allows us better to understand our current condition, where we seem of our own volition to give up on our right to privacy’ (3). The problem, of course, is how to bridge the distance between a period, 1500-1800, in which privacy was neither protected by law nor considered a universal aspect of the human condition, and our own, which often views privacy both as a human right increasingly threatened by technology, and as a commodity that may be casually forfeited at a price as low as dismissing an intrusive pop-up. The early modern period of 1500–1800 in Europe has been seen as crucial in the development of modern notions of privacy by many theorists, notably Jürgen Habermas, Norbert Elias, Philippe Ariès, and Georges Duby. For these thinkers, a new division between a private sphere linked to the home and the body, associated with emotion and intimacy, and a public sphere of surveillance linked to