Play­ing video games, road-trip­ping across Amer­i­ca, binge-lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, chat­ting with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: these are a few of our mod­ern plea­sures not just unknown to, but unimag­in­able by, human­i­ty in the Mid­dle Ages. Yet medieval peo­ple were, after all, peo­ple, and as Ter­ence put it more than a mil­len­ni­um before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us mod­erns, it’s a com­mon blun­der to regard dis­tant eras through the lens of our own stan­dards and expec­ta­tions, which pre­vents us from tru­ly under­stand­ing how our lis­ten­ers lived and thought. But per­haps we can begin from a con­sid­er­able patch of com­mon ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.

Such are the points empha­sized by medieval his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga in these episodes of His­to­ry Hit, which exam­ine the more-than-age-old enjoy­ments in which peo­ple indulged between antiq­ui­ty and moder­ni­ty. Our received image of Europe in the Mid­dle Ages may be one of Church-dom­i­nat­ed, dankly plea­sure-free soci­eties, but Jane­ga and his­to­ri­an of sex­u­al­i­ty Kate Lis­ter point out that, strict though the reli­gious dic­tates may have been about sex­u­al activ­i­ty and oth­er mat­ters besides, many sim­ply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to dai­ly hot show­ers, we can rest assured that they were much more con­cerned with how they smelled than we might imag­ine.) In any case, repro­duc­tion was one thing, and court­ly love — or indeed com­mer­cial love — quite anoth­er.

As Bil­ly Crys­tal famous­ly joked, “Women need a rea­son to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Mid­dle Ages, the place was often a prob­lem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as com­mon­ers (though some roy­al­ty did enjoy the ben­e­fit of a cur­tain around their four-poster bed, which afford­ed at least the illu­sion of pri­va­cy). It seems to have been much eas­i­er to find some­where to drink, accord­ing to Jane­ga’s episode about alco­hol. In it, she vis­its a fine exam­ple of “the hum­ble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet hav­ing been invent­ed — and to tell their sto­ries, a prac­tice that would become so deeply ingrained in the cul­ture as to pro­vide a for­mal foun­da­tion for the Can­ter­bury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-own­er inter­vie­wee reminds us, invent­ed Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hard­ly began with Wife of Bath.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: His­to­ri­ans Look at How Peo­ple Got It On in the Dark Ages

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Image via Jour­nal of Archae­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Reports

Back in 2017, we fea­tured the old­est unopened bot­tle of wine in the world here on Open Cul­ture. Found in Spey­er, Ger­many, in 1867, it dates from 350 AD, mak­ing it a ven­er­a­ble vin­tage indeed, but one recent­ly out­done by a bot­tle first dis­cov­ered five years ago in Car­mona, near Seville, Spain. “At the bot­tom of a shaft found dur­ing con­struc­tion work,” an exca­va­tion team “uncov­ered a sealed bur­ial cham­ber from the ear­ly first cen­tu­ry C.E. — untouched for 2,000 years,” writes Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can’s Lars Fis­ch­er. Inside was “a glass urn placed in a lead case was filled to the brim with a red­dish liq­uid,” only recent­ly deter­mined to be wine — and there­fore wine about three cen­turies old­er than the Spey­er bot­tle.

You can read about the rel­e­vant research in this new paper pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Archae­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Reports by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebo­la and his team. “The wine from the Car­mona site was no longer suit­able for drink­ing, and it had nev­er been intend­ed for that pur­pose,” writes Fis­ch­er.

“The experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bot­tom of the glass ves­sel. The bur­ial cham­ber was the final rest­ing place for the remains of the deceased, who were cre­mat­ed accord­ing to Roman cus­tom.” Only through chem­i­cal analy­sis were the researchers final­ly able to deter­mine that the liq­uid was, in fact, wine, and thus to put togeth­er evi­dence of the arrange­men­t’s being an elab­o­rate send­off for a Roman-era oenophile.

Though the funer­ary rit­u­al “involved two men and two women,” says CBS News, the remains in the wine came from only one of the men. This makes sense, as, “accord­ing to the study, women in ancient Rome were pro­hib­it­ed from drink­ing wine.” What a dif­fer­ence a cou­ple of mil­len­nia make: today the cul­tur­al image slants some­what female, espe­cial­ly in the case of white wine, which, despite hav­ing “acquired a red­dish hue,” the liq­uid unearthed in Car­mona was chem­i­cal­ly deter­mined to be. With the sum­mer now get­ting into full swing, this sto­ry might inspire us to beat the heat by putting a bot­tle of our favorite Chardon­nay, Ries­ling, or Pinot Gri­gio in the refrig­er­a­tor — a con­ve­nience unimag­ined by even the wealth­i­est wine-lov­ing cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire.

via Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bars, Beer & Wine in Ancient Rome: An Intro­duc­tion to Roman Nightlife and Spir­its

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Glass Bowl in Per­fect Con­di­tion

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

The Wine Win­dows of Renais­sance Flo­rence Dis­pense Wine Safe­ly Again Dur­ing COVID-19

The Old­est Unopened Bot­tle of Wine in the World (Cir­ca 350 AD)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Amer­i­cans doing “e‑mail jobs” and work­ing in the “lap­top class” tend to make much of the quan­ti­ty of cof­fee they require to keep going, or even to get start­ed. In that sense alone, they have some­thing in com­mon with Civ­il War sol­diers. “Union sol­diers were giv­en 36 pounds of cof­fee a year by the gov­ern­ment, and they made their dai­ly brew every­where and with every­thing: with water from can­teens and pud­dles, brack­ish bays and Mis­sis­sip­pi mud,” write NPR’s Kitchen Sis­ters. “The Con­fed­er­a­cy, on the oth­er hand, was decid­ed­ly less caf­feinat­ed. As soon as the war began, the Union block­ad­ed South­ern ports and cut off the South’s access to cof­fee.”

Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry cura­tor Jon Grinspan tells of how “des­per­ate Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers would invent makeshift cof­fees,” roast­ing “rye, rice, sweet pota­toes or beets until they were dark, choco­laty and caramelized. The result­ing brew con­tained no caf­feine, but at least it was some­thing warm and brown and con­sol­ing.” (See video at bot­tom of the post.) The stark caf­feina­tion dif­fer­en­tial that result­ed must count as one of many fac­tors that led to the Union’s ulti­mate vic­to­ry. Part of what kept their cof­fee sup­plies robust was imports from Liberia, the African repub­lic that had been estab­lished ear­li­er in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry by freed Amer­i­can slaves.

“The Union’s abil­i­ty to pur­chase and dis­trib­ute cof­fee from Liberia, along­side oth­er sources, was help­ing the army’s morale,” writes Bron­wen Ever­ill at Smithsonian.com. “In Decem­ber 1862, one sol­dier wrote that ‘what keeps me alive must be the cof­fee.’ ” Mean­while, a north­ern gen­er­al famous­ly gave this advice to oth­er gen­er­als: “If your men get their cof­fee ear­ly in the morn­ing, you can hold.” Many har­row­ing bat­tles lat­er, “at the Con­fed­er­ate sur­ren­der at Appo­mat­tox in April 1865, Michi­gan sol­dier William Smith not­ed that the Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers present were lick­ing their lips hope­ful­ly, with ‘a keen rel­ish for a cup of Yan­kee cof­fee.’ ” (John­ny Reb had pre­sum­ably acquired this taste between those bat­tles, when sol­diers from both sides would meet and exchange goods.)

The Civ­il War in Four Min­utes video above explains the cof­fee-drink­ing Yan­kee’s habits in more detail. “If there was an ear­ly morn­ing march, the first order of busi­ness was to boil water and make cof­fee,” says actor-his­to­ri­an Dou­glas Ull­man Jr. “If there was a halt along the march, the first order of busi­ness when the march stopped was to get that hot water going to drink more cof­fee.” Sol­diers would keep their cof­fee and mea­ger sug­ar rations in the same bag in order to ensure “the tini­est hint of sug­ar in every drop. Think about that the next time you order your caramel soy mac­chi­a­to.” But such bev­er­ages were still a long way off after the Civ­il War, which gave way to the era of what we now call the Wild West — and with it, the hey­day of cow­boy cof­fee.

via Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

Watch an Exquis­ite 19th Cen­tu­ry Cof­fee Mak­er in Action

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.