LIQUID KNOWLEDGE: René Descartes was a drunken fart, and just as sloshed as Schlegel, or so some very wise men have proposed, so it is little wonder that intoxicants fascinate academics. But contemporary attitudes toward inebriation mean that “it’s hard for people to take the study of alcohol consumption seriously,” says Richard W. Unger, a professor of history at the University of British Columbia and the author of Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press).
Mr. Unger says such attitudes stem from a failure to realize that brewed beverages were a necessity before the advent of dependable, clean water supplies or soft drinks.
In early modern Europe, “beer was a normal part of daily life,” says Mr. Unger. With food often scarce, it was a nutritional godsend. It was also an all-purpose social lubricant, regarded with “neither suspicion nor awe,” he says. Consumption per person far exceeded today’s levels. For children as young as 4 years old, too, beer was a staple. Presumably they were fed weak brews, says Mr. Unger, but not too weak: “If the alcohol levels are low, the nutrition level is low, too.”
So was medieval life like living in a college fraternity today? Perhaps so, for beer was brewed in one in 10 houses, all by trial and error, as modern methods of chemistry had not yet been developed.
“You couldn’t walk down the street without smelling beer,” says Mr. Unger.
The historical sources on beer are vast, Mr. Unger says, because “governments have regulated the production of alcohol since at least 3500 BC, and governments keep records.”
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INSPIRED INTOXICANTS: Two other alcoholic beverages -- tequila and absinthe -- have also afforded today’s scholars a vast quantity of material for study.
The rich place of tequila in the culture and economy of Mexico is explored in Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History (University of Arizona Press), by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata, a professor of botany at the University of Guadalajara, and Gary Paul Nabhan, director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. Mexico is home to 80 percent of the world’s agave plants, from which tequila has been made for 9,000 years for its nutritional, material, and medicinal properties.
The book’s authors distilled the testimony and tall tales of agave cultivators and brewers of the heady, pungent liquor. They found that tequila-making culture is puro mestizo; its mixed indigenous and Hispanic practices settled into place only well after the Spanish Conquest of 1519-21, with contributions from everyone from botanists to bootleggers to sailors.
By the 1870s, the indigenous people of Mexico had so refined their cultivation practices that physiological ecologists of today have barely bettered them. Sadly, the dozens of varieties of agave plants from which tequila was traditionally made have been reduced to a monoculture of blue agaves.
Absinthe, too, has been watered down, in a sense. Once celebrated by artists and banned by governments, the bitter green liqueur acquired a notorious reputation. In the 20th century, the United States and most of Europe banned it from sale, but the “green fairy” is now making a comeback in Europe’s club culture, albeit in less potent formulas.
Publishing houses also see a market in the liqueur, as such volumes as The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History, by Phil Baker (Grove Press, 2003), and Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), by Jad Adams, demonstrate.
The story of la fée verte that these books tell focuses on artists: Absinthe’s key ingredient, wormwood, has been implicated in inducing delirium, mania, and even death in renowned dissolutes like Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, August Strindberg, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. They, and many others, bought the notion that absinthe, once a mere herbal tonic, could impart insights as clear as the drink itself is murky.
And perhaps it did -- before today’s wormwood-reduced versions appeared.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 8, Page A17