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| “That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” |
Imagine
a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public
dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and
sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities
of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered
directly to your table. The thread tying it all together is a new drug from the
Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching—called “coffee.”
The seventeenth-century coffee shop was an experimental social space whose closest correlate in the modern world is not a place at all: it's the Internet. The main characteristic of seventeenth-century coffee houses was the diversity of experiences and activities they harbored. As Steve Shapin once put it, a visitor to an early modern coffee house could “witness the dissection of a dolphin, the display of an elephant or a rhinoceros, or an exhibition of a child with three penises and a woman with three breasts,” then proceed to take a bath, purchase life insurance, and “buy books, paintings, or whale oil at a candle auction.”
Also like
the Internet, the early modern coffee shop was deeply paradoxical. It was a haven
for free speech but also a target for the nascent surveillance state. It was a
place where different social classes mixed but also one that enforced rigid
gender rules: if they weren’t serving drinks or working as prostitutes, women typically weren’t
allowed.
At
the center of the paradox stood coffee itself, a drink that today seems utterly
benign (and perhaps even beneficial), but which many early modern Europeans
looked on with deep suspicion. For one thing, it was a drug with deep roots in
the Muslim world. It was spread in large part by Jewish or Armenian immigrants from
the Ottoman Empire. And it had distinctive sensory and psychoactive characteristics
which many Europeans—familiar with alcohol but not such much with stimulants—found bewildering.
Perhaps the most famous objection to coffee came from an anonymous
source. “The Womens Petition Against Coffee,” a pamphlet issued in London in
1674, is among the most entertaining and vividly-written historical texts that
I know of. Like The School of Venus,
a 1680 sex manual whose cover displays a group of women crowded
around a dildo-merchant, there is something jarringly frank about the petition
that I find both funny and illuminating. The basic argument is that coffee was
making the men of London unable to satisfy their wives in bed. Here’s a sample
of the language it uses:
We have read, how a Prince of Spain
was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand
Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times a night; but Alas! Alas!
Those forwards Days are gone… For the continual flipping of this pitiful drink
is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-points without
a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as
Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus.
They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses,
nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but
their Ears.
In the end, the petition calls for a ban
on coffee among men below the age of “three score” (sixty) and encourages the
drinking of “lusty” beer, “Cock-Ale,” and chocolate instead of “that Newfangled,
Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE,” which, in the pamphlet’s
memorable phrasing, has made London’s men “run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's.”
To
me, the “Womens Petition” is one of the representative texts of the era that
historians call the Restoration, the three decades of experimentation with sex, drugs,
social relations and literary forms that followed the religious fanaticism and warfare
of Cromwell’s Interregnum. Among other things, this is the period when women
were finally allowed to act on public theater stages (previously, as Shakespeare in Love depicts, women’s
roles in plays were performed by adolescent boys in drag). It is also the
period when female writers like Aphra Behn began to win widespread recognition
in print, and when the earliest multinational corporations, like the English
East India Company, became militarized and pseudo-governmental forces in
regions like coastal India and West Africa, driving the dark side of global
capitalism with their booming trade in drugs, textiles, and slaves.
In
other words, it was a time not unlike our own, marked by globalization, debates
about human rights, political upheaval, new drugs, new technologies, and new
experiences. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that a place like the coffee
house and a drink like coffee elicited some serious backlash. What is
surprising, to me, is that the backlash was itself so experimental, raucous,
and ultimately light-hearted. The petition (which many scholars suspect was
actually written by a man, although this is impossible to prove) is basically a
work of humor, even though it does present an exaggerated version of a position
that many early opponents of coffee actually believed in.
In
the end, the Streisand effect was in play in the 17th century just
like the 21st: the public outcry against coffee’s “heathen” Turkish
origins and its strange physical effects also served to increase public
interest in it. In fact, as Brian Cowan points out, the joking tone of these
pamphlets may have aided the spread of coffee: “by self-consciously exaggerating
the sober warnings of contemporary medical opinion, the texts actually deflated
the gravity of those concerns.”
One
is reminded here of the gently mocking tone used by the natural philosopher
Robert Hooke in his report to the Royal Society on the effects of a (to him)
exotic drug known as bangue or Indian hemp, better known today as Cannabis indica: “there is no Cause of
Fear, tho' possibly there may be of Laughter.”
But
why, if both drugs were available to English consumers and both escaped
outright condemnation, did coffee triumph whereas cannabis remained obscure in
Europe until the 19th century? More on that soon.
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| Painting of a London coffee house signed "A.S. 1668," via Wikimedia Commons. |
Here's the full
text of the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee”:
THE
WOMENS PETITION AGAINST COFFEE
Representing
to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from
the Excessive Use of that drying, Enfeebling Liquor. Presented to the Right
Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of Venus. By a Well-willer
London,
Printed 1674.
To the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberties of
Venus; The Worshipful Court of Female Assistants, &c.
The Humble Petitions and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women,
Languishing in Extremity of Want.
The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious
Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty,
we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled,
Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her
Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical
Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Cripple our
more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as
Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is
said to be brought.
For the continual flipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men
of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-points without a
Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as
Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus.
They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses,
nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but
their Ears: They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by
scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it. A
Betrothed Queen might trust her self a bed with one of them,
without the nice Caution of a sword between them: nor can call
all the Art we use revive them from this Lethargy, so unfit they are for
Action, that like young Train-band-men when called upon Duty, their Ammunition is
wanting; peradventure they Present, but cannot give Fire,
or at least do but flash in the Pan, instead of doing executions.
Nor let any Doating, Superstitious Catos shake their
Goatish Beards, and task us of Immodesty for this
Declaration, since 'tis a publick Grievance, and cries alound for Reformation. Weight and Measure,
'tis well known, should go throughout the world, and there is no torment like
Famishment. Experience witnesses our Damage, and Necessity (which easily
supersedes all the Laws of Decency) justifies our complaints: For can any Woman
of Sense or Spirit endure with Patience, that
when priviledg'd by Legal Ceremonies, she approaches the Nuptial Bed, expecting
a Man that with Sprightly Embraces, should Answer the Vigour of her
Flames, she on the contrary should only meat A Bedful of Bones, and
hug a meager useless Corpse rendred as sapless as a Kixe,
and dryer than a Pumice-Stone, by the perpetual Fumes of Tobacco,
and bewitching effects of this most pernitious COFFEE, where by Nature is
Enfeebled, the Off-spring of our Mighty Ancestors Dwindled into
a Succession of Apes and Pigmies: and
---The Age of Man
Now Cramp't into an Inch, that was a
Span.
Nor is this (though more than enough!) All the ground of
our Complaint: For besides, we have reason to apprehend and grow Jealous, That
Men by frequenting these Stygian Tap-houses will usurp on our
Prerogative of tattling, and soon learn to exceed us in Talkativeness:
a Quality wherein our Sex has ever Claimed preheminence: For here like so many Frogs in
a puddle, they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes till
half a dozen of them out-babble an equal number of us at a Gossipping,
talking all at once in Confusion, and running from point to point as
insensibly, and swiftly, as ever the Ingenous Pole-wheel could
run divisions on the Base-viol; yet in all their prattle every one abounds in
his own sense, as stiffly as a Quaker at the late Barbican Dispute,
and submits to the Reasons of no other mortal: so that there being neither Moderator nor Rules observ'd,
you mas as soon fill a Quart pot with Syllogismes, as profit by
their Discourses.
Certainly our Countrymens pallates are become as Fantastical as
their Brains; how ellse is't possible they should Apostatize from
the good old primitve way of Ale-drinking, to run a whoring after
such variety of distructive Foreign Liquors, to trifle away
their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all
for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water:
Yet (as all Witches have their Charms) so this ugly Turskish Enchantress
by certain Invisible Wyres attracts both Rich and Poor; so
that those that have scarece Twopence to buy their Children Bread,
must spend a penny each evening in this Insipid Stuff: Nor can
we send one of our Husbands to Call a Midwife, or borrow a Glister-pipe,
but he must stay an hour by the way drinking his two Dishes, &
two Pipes.
At these Houses (as at the Springs in Afric) meet all sorts of
Animals, whence follows the production of a thousand Monster Opinions and
Absurdities; yet for being dangerous to Government, we dare to be their
Compurgators, as well knowing them to be too tame and too talkative to make any
desperate Politicians: For though they may now and then destroy a Fleet, or
kill ten thousand of the French, more than all the Confederates can
do, yet this is still in their politick Capacities, for by their personal
valour they are scarce fit to be of the Life-guard to a Cherry-tree: and
therefore, though they frequently have hot Contests about most Important
Subjects; as what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great Turk be a
Lutheran or a Calvinist; who Cain's Father in Law was, &c.,
yet they never fight about them with any other save our Weapon, the Tongue.
Tom Farthing, Tom Farthing,
where has
thou been, Tom Farthing?
Twelve a Clock e're you come in,
Two a
clock ere you begin
Wherefore the Premises considered, and to the end that our
Just Rights may be restored, and all the Ancient Priviledges of
our Sex preserved inviolable; That our Husbands may give us some other Testimonial of
their being Men, besides their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons:
That they no more run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's:
But returning to the good old strengthening Liquors of our Forefathers; that
Natures Exchequer may once again be replenisht, and a Race of
Lusty Here's begot, able by their Atchievements, to equal the Glories of our
Ancesters.
We Humbly Pray, That you our Trusty Patrons would improve your
Interest, that henceforth the Drinking COFFEE may on severe
penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore;
and that instead thereof, Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries,
Restoring Malago's, and Back-recruiting Chochole be
Recommended to General Use, throughout the Utopian Territories.
In hopes of which Glorious Reformation,
your Petitioners shall readily Prostrate themselves,
and ever Pray, &c.
FINIS.
