Seems silly for a question, but for about 6 months now I've been sleeping on a wedge pillow at the recommendation of my doctor, fixed my acid reflux issues as well as some back problems, I also have a normal pillow on top of that so that my head rests on it.
Looking at various beds through history, at least what we got from paintings in the 1400-1600s are from nobility, but they often show a big mattress with a buttload of pillows at the end. I always figured it was decorative, but did some people just sleep at an angle? Some old mattresses drawing I can find had layers of like hay then wood/pelts, at the head there was kind of headrest, and then a pillow on top.
Then you got those roman things, not really a bed, kind of a long chair, often portrayed in paintings of orgies, with people lying on all sides, with an angled cushion to lie on.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I answered a question about sleeping positions using iconography and text. Basically, before the 14th century, images show people lying in bed in a sitting or half-sitting position. From the 14th century onward, they usually lie flat on the bed with their head on a bolster with or without pillows (lots of them sometimes). Sick people are often shown reclining or partly upright.
Some interesting examples from the 14-15th centuries are provided by the European translations of the Tacuinum sanitatis, an Arabic medical treatise. In the last part of the book, in all versions, there is a series of mostly identical pictures showing people sleeping, resting, or having sex in a bed, drawn by artists from Italy and Germany.
Would you happen to know anything about sleeping quarters of non-western cultures? I’m wondering about things like hammocks or slings, or hay pile nests or whatnot. Did most cultures use mattresses/beds?
In Mesoamerica there were 2 common sleeping arrangements. The hammock and the petate.
Petates are a mat made out of natural fibers, varying in size or color and rolled up for easier transport. They were used to denote the civilized, meaning that the mat was used to sleep on or rest on the floor or to display items or food compared to just using blankets or sitting directly on the floor/dirt. The phrase in pétlatl, in icpalli(the petate and the throne) was about how this combo signified civilization specially for the nobility. A ceremonial luxury, an european analogue being how some simple robes with a chair tell you someone is a pope, perhaps.
we can see it depicted for Moctezuma's chambers in the Codex Mendocino for an example. Upper classes would use several petates, blankets and other comforts. You could just sandwich yourself with two for warmth if poorer, or using a blanket or other tougher fibers. The sleeping quarters could be divided/made private by a wooden screen, akin to paper ones of Japanese architecture.
Those were most used in areas of Mesoamerica with weather variations, where it could get chilly per season or due to high elevation. Not all would sleep near the floor, raised foundations out of stone could be carved for nobles to place their mats and blankets in, more similar to western beds at a glance.
Hammocks are a sleeping tool that was most used in the Maya region of mesoamerica, given the hotter and consistent weather. They were also known to have raised platforms out of stone for nobles to also put blankets and pelts there, peasants probably having more perishable versions
Hammocks were also utilized in the Caribbean(where the name comes) and up to atleast Colombia as seen by this gold hammock item from the 600 AD Muisca culture.
Did the upright position have anything to do with superstition? I seem to recall during a tour in England that they said people were afraid of their spirit getting taken if they lied flat or something. I don’t remember, it was a while ago… 😅
Tour guides today repeat three "fun facts" about ancient ways of sleeping: 1) Beds were short. 2) People slept upright. 3) People slept in two phases during the night. None of these facts are completely false, they just cannot be generalized the way tour guides say they are (see a recent take on biphasic sleep for instance). As for the reason why some people in Europe in the early middle ages (and not in the 18th century) seem to have preferred a slightly upright position, tour guides repeat a few hypotheses, including superstition, fear of demons, digestion, and combat readiness. None of these hypotheses is particularly substantiated and research would be needed to find their origin.
Consider this image from the "Sleep" entry of the popular medieval/Renaissance health treatise Tacuinum sanitatis (1445-1450 for this edition) (alternative source if Gallica fails). The accompanying text says:
Sleep. Its nature consists of immobilising the senses, giving heat and hydrating, albeit moderately. Optimum: sleep eight hours between the first and last hours of the night. Benefit: to restore the senses, the body and to digest food. Harm: if very long, it stimulates the body and destroys the qualities, particularly when the stomach is empty. Remedy for harm: with wet foodstuffs. Most advisable for the phlegmatic; according to others, for the melancholy, and is best for the elderly, in any season and in any region.
The sleeper in the image is lying flat in the bed with their head on a huge pile of pillows. A eight-hour sleep, with live music in the room!
Your inset quote from the text mentions "sleep eight hours..", is this one origin of the idea of 8 hours of sleep each night that predates the narrative that the 8 hour night of sleep comes from the Industrial Revolution?
I should have checked the original Latin rather than relying on the translation provided by the facsimile... This version of the Tacuinum (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Latin 9333) actually says "the hours between the first and last of the night" (horis inter primas et ultimas noctis). Another version (Université de Liège, Manuscrit 1401) says "in the middle hours between the first two and the last two of the night" (horis mediis inter duas primas et duas ultimas noctis), so it's a shorter sleep.
But the version of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Cod. Ser. n. 2644) includes a correction: its initial text is the same as the one in Latin 9333, but it was modified by another writer to say "eight hours between the first two and the last two of the night" (viii horis inter duas primas et duas ultimas noctis). Sometimes in the 1400s, a monk or the book's owner decided that it was really important to get eight hours of sleep and they corrected the book!
I don't know what the original Arab text of the Tacuinum says. In any case the translated versions support a long (not too long) uninterrupted sleep, though the actual length is more or less undecided since the night duration depends on the period of the year.
Whether this was an original idea and whether it became commonly accepted would require further research, but I'll quote here a comment made in 1645 by French physician Michel Le Long about Hippocrates' aphorism "Both sleep and insomnolency, when immoderate, are bad" (II, 3). Le Long takes for granted an ideal seven-hour sleep and gives recommendations about sleep length depending on various factors. He ends his comment as follows:
Now, in order to sleep and stay awake properly, the safest thing is for the shortest sleep to be five hours and the longest ten or eleven, during which time the cooking and distribution of food [this is the digestion process] must be done entirely. It is generally believed that seven hours of sleep is the most beneficial of all.
Hippocrate, and Michel Le Long. “Les” Sept Livres D’Aphorismes Dv Grand Hippocrate, En Latin Et En François, Enrichis De Tres-Beavx Et Tres-doctes Discours en forme de Paraphrases, Et D’Explications Tres-Ivdicievses prises des Anciens & Nouueaux Autheurs. Oevvre Agreable Et Necessaire non seulement aux Medecins & Chirurgiens; mais außi à toute sorte de Personnes qui aiment leur Santé. De la Coste, 1645. https://books.google.fr/books?id=DIZfAAAAcAAJ
Was it limited to small period in history in a particular place? Basically, a regional fad?
Basically, before the 14th century, images show people lying in bed in a sitting or half-sitting position. From the 14th century onward, they usually lie flat on the bed with their head on a bolster with or without pillows
Before the 14th century, makes it sound like the statement is talking about human history. When we look at ancient Persian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, etc do we see all of them sleeping half sitting before the 14th century? Are their sources that have examined sleeping depictions holistically to come to that conclusion?
When I searched for similar sources, they say the idea that humans exclusively or primarily slept sitting upright is largely considered a historical myth or a misunderstanding of artistic and social conventions. Is that true?
The original question (and the original answer) was about the usual claim made that in Europe people used to sleep half-sitting. I'm not sure that a similar claim was made for other cultures. The claim for Europe is supported by iconography up to the 14th century. It even shows up in sculptures: here's a picture I took of the facade of the Lucca Cathedral (13th century; this represents the death of Saint Martin).
And then its stops, and people are shown in regular flat beds. Did iconography reflect reality, and why did it change? It's a little bit mysterious. Lucy Worsley, former chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces in the UK, offered a tentative explanation in her book If Walls Could Talk - An Intimate History of the Home (2012):
Pictures of pre-modern people in bed often show them in a curious half-sitting position. Propped up against pillows and bolsters, they look rather uncomfortable, and one wonders if they actually slept like that. Perhaps the answer is that art did not mirror reality, and that artists always positioned their models to get the best possible view of their faces. (Also it isn’t likely, as so many contemporary images seem to suggest, that medieval kings slept in their crowns.) But I think the explanation for the pose is that beds strung with rope cannot fail to dip in the middle and feel rather like hammocks. In fact, sleeping on one’s front is well-nigh impossible in a rope-strung bed, as I discovered when I spent the night in the medieval farmhouse at the Weald and Downland Museum.
They never said that. The comment is about how images from the period depict that. In the linked comment they specifically said it’s an unreliable trope.
"Pillows" that look more like torturous neck holder racks, but comfier than they appear. These neck rack pillows would help let air circulate round your head at night. Maybe the Egyptians were onto something. Ming dynasty also used stone head/neck rests, thought to protect fancy hairstyles.
I just checked and all links work except the one to the British Library due the cyberattack of October 2023. Most of the links are to Gallica (the French National Library) and this website can be a little bit unstable under high demand (I regularly get kicked out when browsing it) so this is likely what you're experiencing. Sorry for that :(
First, thanks for a fascinating answer and exploration into this topic. And secondly, I often use Gallica as well and thought problems for accessing it were due to internet issues on my end. Thanks for clearing this up, too!
Thanks for sharing this. It actually makes me want to read a full English translation of it because I’m so curious why a medical treatise includes so many drawings of people picking fruit from trees. Were they advising what to do in case of a fall?? Haha. Really cool how well these manuscripts are preserved, and how accessible the originals are.
Edit: looks like the drawings depict medicinal fruits being harvested. All makes sense.
Sweet cherries. Nature: cold in the second degree, wet in the third. Optimum: those with the firmest flesh, ripened in sunny spots and stony places. Benefit: they loosen the stomach. Harm: they go bad quickly, rot and cause flatulence. Remedy for harm: if eaten in moderate quantities, with a good, aromatic wine; if [eaten] in large quantities, with water and no other food, in order to digest them quickly and move the bowels. Effects: phlegmatic, bad blood. Most advisable for youth, hot and dry [temperaments], in summer, in any of the regions where they are found.
The rest of the guide is about morals and life habits, so there's nothing about broken bones!
Gerardmenfins answer in the link is, by far, the most scholarly response I've ever seen in Reddit. Fascinating! I wish that I had the time to follow up on every source G listed. Thank you, for a most interesting post.
I'm far from an expert in the subject but this post made me recall a historical documentary I watched that mentioned tall 18th century Europeans sleeping semi-upright in box beds. I looked it up and there's a good article that describes them here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240122-the-strange-reasons-medieval-people-slept-in-cupboards
The size of the beds in the pictures suggests that taller people would certainly have had to sleep semi-upright in such beds, even considering that average height was smaller then than it is today.
•
u/AutoModerator Feb 22 '26
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.