People were thirsty in the Middle Ages. The food was salty due to preserving and most people carried out more heavy manual labour than they do today. Besides water and milk, the only other drinking alternatives in the Middle Ages were beer and wine. Beer was probably among the more popular drinks, but there were different types and the quest for intoxication was not the primary reason for consuming this beverage. In Erik Opsahl’s chapter from Food Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, the author describes Norwegians’ drinking habits in the Middle Ages, with sources testifying to a significant amount of drunkenness and subsequent fights and riots. However, Norwegians were hardly drunk all the time: wine seems to have been relatively difficult to obtain, and the domestic Norwegian beer had a weak alcohol content. It was German beer that was much stronger and higher in quality and had to be imported – so much so that in 1405 Queen Margrete carried out a royal intervention and advised King Erik that Norwegians must be served good quality German beer.

From milk to beer and water to wine, explore further by reading Erik Opsahl’s chapter "What Did the Norwegians Drink?" from Food Culture in Scandinavia.

How are the profound religious, political, and intellectual shifts that characterize the early modern period in Europe inextricably linked to cultural uses of alcohol in Europe and the Atlantic world? Combining recent work on the history of drink with innovative new research, the eight contributing scholars to Alcohol in the Early Modern World: A Cultural History explore themes such as identity, consumerism, gender, politics, colonialism, religion, state-building, and more through the revealing lens of the pervasive drinking cultures of early modern peoples. Alcohol had a place at nearly every European table and a role in much of early modern experience, from building personal bonds via social and ritual drinking to fuelling economies at both micro and macro levels. At the same time, drinking was also at the root of a host of personal tragedies, including domestic violence in the home and human trafficking across the Atlantic. Alcohol in the Early Modern World provides a fascinating re-examination of pre-modern beliefs about and experiences with intoxicating beverages.

Explore more by reading Phil Withington’s chapter "Consumption" from Alcohol in the Early Modern World.

Where did Temporary Sobriety Initiatives (TSIs) such as Dry January, FebFast, and Ocsober come from? And what is their role, if any, in prompting people to revisit their relationship with alcohol? These organized campaigns have flourished throughout the English-speaking world in the past decade. Collectively, they involve thousands of participants and raise substantial sums of money for medical research, as well as drug and alcohol related charities. In Julie Robert’s book Alcohol, Binge Sobriety and Exemplary Abstinence, the author considers these campaigns as part of a lifestyle movement that transcends single events and even singular national contexts. She uses case studies from Australia, the USA, and the UK to examine both the short history of TSIs as a response to problematic localized drinking cultures – including binge drinking – and their relationship to a much longer and transnational history of temperance activism. In taking TSIs as a case study of both embodied philanthropy and participatory health promotion, this book considers how TSIs are structured, promoted, and experienced as an embodied event to create imitable, and sometimes contradictory, examples to create a public pedagogy of ‘responsible drinking’.

Learn more by reading the chapter "Reimagining Temperance Cultures" from Julie Robert’s book Alcohol, Binge Sobriety and Exemplary Abstinence.

How does the production, consumption, regulation, and commerce of alcohol sit alongside the gendered, medical, religious, ideological, and cultural practices that surrounded it from 1850 to 1950? Through analyzing major changes in alcohol’s place in society, contributors to Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War demonstrate the important connections between industrialization, empire-building, and the growth of the nation-state.

Stella Moss’ chapter explores how gender and sexuality have long played a central role in drinking practices, both shaping and reflecting ideals and experiences of masculinity and femininity across different historical periods and geographical settings. Drinking is a cultural act, embedded in social codes, rules, and attitudes which are shaped by gender, as well as class, ethnicity, age, and nationality, among other influences. In this framework, Moss argues that drinking and drunkenness have been construed as manly behaviour, often condoned and sometimes valorized as evidence of individual masculinity. By contrast, women’s drinking has long been interpreted in relation to deeply rooted cultural norms equating idealized femininity with temperance and sobriety. In many social settings, female alcohol consumption has been considered unfeminine and unrespectable, with drunkenness in particular associated with physical degeneration and moral bankruptcy. While of course there are many examples of gendered drinking practices which sit outside this binary framework, the cultural impact and interpretive longevity of these archetypes should not be underestimated.

Explore more by reading Stella Moss’ chapter "Gender and Sexuality" from Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War.

How much wine did the Romans really produce and drink? The study of ancient Roman wine has been dominated until recently by traditional archaeological analyses focused upon production facilities and ceramic evidence related to transport. While such architecture and artefact-focused approaches provide a fundamental foundation for our understanding of this topic, they fail to provide the requisite nuance to answer other questions regarding grape cultivation and wine production, consumption, use, and trade. Bringing together a wide array of modern scientific techniques and interdisciplinary approaches, Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology: Scientific Approaches in Roman Contexts provides an accessible guide to the methods that form the current bedrock of research into Roman, and more broadly ancient, wine. Antoni Martín i Oliveras’ chapter on quantifying Roman wine production illuminates the different types, shapes, and extensions of vineyards documented by the Roman agrarian writers including diversity across the provinces. It also extends our knowledge regarding the processes, factors, and variables involved in the supply chain and production function of Roman viticulture to quantify its main economic values. These processes can be assessed, quantified, and yields obtained by applying different methods of calculation. From these yield ratios, and knowing the quantity of winemaking facilities, we can obtain an estimated scale of the vineyards managed, crop achieved, and wine made by a property.

Learn more by reading Antoni Martín i Oliveras’ chapter "Quantifying Roman Wine Production: New Approaches to Vineyard Sizes and Wine Yields in The Ager Barcinonensis" from the book Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology: Scientific Approaches in Roman Contexts.