Alcohol, Violence, and Disorder in Traditional Europe (review)

In many ways this book is a sequel to the author’s Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2001). In both books Martin has sought to understand the relationship between drinking alcohol and other human behavior—sex in his earlier book and violence in the current volume under review—and in both books he draws on a wide range of sources as well as anthropological models to help him form conclusions. The result is a social history of drinking that treats both drinking alcohol and violent behavior as culturally mediated human activities. Martin starts with the premise that there is a clear link between the consumption of alcohol and crimes of violence in the modern world, and he wonders if the same was true in the pre-modern world, what he calls traditional Europe, from roughly 1300 to 1800. Plenty of contemporaries believed that there was such a link, and Martin also points out that western Europeans before 1800 generally drank more alcohol and experienced more violence than in the world today. The main argument of the book, however, is that despite the rhetoric of moralizers and clergy of all stripes linking drinking to violence, there is very little evidence to suggest that one was inevitably and mechanically linked to the other in pre-modern Europe.

Martin begins with a very nice summary of the criminal statistics linking drinking and violence in today’s world. He notes rightly that alcohol does not cause aggression, nor does aggression necessarily lead to heavy drinking. But drinking alcohol and aggressive behavior do share some common causes. To be sure, a majority of western Europeans in pre-modern Europe, just as today, drank alcohol regularly, many of them daily, without ever becoming aggressive or violent. And drunken comportment varies widely across both space and time. But there is a correlation between drinking and violent behavior when the population is broken down by social cohort. Among young males drinking and violence have always been more closely linked than in any other social group. And Martin also points out that the link between drinking and violence was not uniform across all social classes. Chapter 2 is an analysis of all those many pre-modern writers who railed against the overuse and abuse of alcohol, from well-known puritans such as Samuel Ward and Phillip Stubbes, to town councilors and other magistrates, as well as writers and journalists such as Daniel Defoe. All of these “moralists,” as Martin collectively refers to them, condemned the excess drinking of alcohol as the primary cause of violence and disorder.

But as Martin shows, however, the patterns of consumption of alcohol did not mirror the pattern of condemnations of the moralists. While daily consumption of alcohol was higher in Italy than in France and England in the period, the French and English moralists were much more vociferous in their complaints about excessive drinking than their Italian counterparts. Moreover, consumption of alcohol appears to have actually declined in rural parts of England and France between 1500 and 1700, hardly matching the rising chorus of condemnations by moralists of the period. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is Martin’s analysis of the many roles alcohol played in Europeans’ daily life that did not result in violence, from a source of calories at mealtimes to recreational and social rituals of fellowship. Alcohol was consumed in a variety of settings both public and private, and the stereotypical drunken brawls that often did occur in many alehouses and taverns should not lead us to assume a link between alcohol and violence as cause and effect. Indeed, one of Martin’s main goals is to persuade us that both drunkenness and violence were—and still are—culturally mediated terms that defy simple stereotypes and superficial conclusions. And in this he has succeeded.

Martin is also successful in demonstrating that the various models of the reform of popular culture are too...