“There is no evil quality in nightfall air,” declared French physician Laurent Joubert in On Nightfall, What It Is, and Whether It Falls on Us (1578). And yet, despite his empirical observations, he could not dispute his era’s prevailing representations of the night. For darkness, according to medieval cosmology, fell from the sky every night with the descent of noxious fumes that infiltrated the skin’s pores and caused rheumatic illnesses. So ingrained were these beliefs in premodern worldviews that families barred their doors and bolted their shutters at sunset hoping to evade the pestilential vapors. By shutting their windows, however, they turned their ventilated chambers into airless environments where a single cough is now known to have wiped out entire families. As such, people were not killed by darkness, but by their efforts to avoid it. They were murdered, not by the night, but by their representation of it.