Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History

Extract

The goal of this volume is to outline the broadest transformations in drinking patterns among Europeans and their colonial counterparts over the past five centuries. This includes changes in the alcoholic beverages imbibed, the sites where they were consumed, as well as the way in which drink functioned to delineate and define various social phenomena, especially religion, class, politics, or health and disease.

Organised into three parts, the volume's first section concerns morality and health. Ken Alba traces the anxieties that faced sixteenth-century Italian wine drinkers in their attempts to negotiate the rival claims of health, morality and pleasure. Of great importance to this debate in an age before chemical and mechanical theories were the vested interests of commentators, many coming from wine-growing regions. National affiliation was important as drunkenness, in the eyes of many Italian commentators, was associated with ‘vulgar Germans’ rather than the inhabitants of Tuscany. Europe was very clearly divided when it came to drink, a point that Mack Holt's chapter underlines. In general, historians of drink divide Europe into a beer-drinking north and a wine-drinking south. Taken a step further, one might equally link Catholicism with wine and Protestantism with beer. While Catholic reformers eventually became equally committed to the fight against drunkenness, efforts to eliminate drunkenness were most apparent among radical Protestants in continental Europe and Puritans in early modern England.