Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500-1800 (review)

Thomas Brennan, general editor of this four-volume collection, opens his introductory essay with a question: Why did the historian go into the bar? But this is not intended as a joke. Taverns, and the drinking that took place inside them, were serious enterprises that offer historians an entrée into the most important sites of sociability in the early modern world. As the multiple editors explain, after the Reformation, when profane activities were banned from the church, public houses emerged as the main locus of social life. Thus taverns provide a view into a broad range of cultural and economic practices; they offer insight into how society gathered, did business, sorted itself out by status and gender, and consumed. And because public drinking took place inside the tavern, sociologists and anthropologists use it as a laboratory in which to study the role of alcohol. The ranting of religious and political leaders about the dangers of drink presents yet another vantage point: What values did the public house threaten? Whom did they fear abused drink? What were the social consequences of too much alcohol? Finally, the editors suggest that the efforts to regulate and tax drinking constituted some of the initial steps toward state building, thus enabling us to glean insights into rulers' views and agendas for their populations.

The documents in these volumes focus on taverns and drinking in early modern France (volume one), the Holy Roman Empire of the German nations (volumes two and three), and the North American colonies (volume four). (For unexplained reasons, a proposed volume on England was dropped.) Each volume reflects editorial decisions about what to include. The collection is intended for multiple audiences; for scholars who are working on taverns or topics related to the public house and drinking, it provides convenient access to texts from a variety of locations. These volumes are also a valuable addition to an undergraduate library, as they allow students to work with primary sources and tackle research projects, especially from a comparative perspective.

Broadly, this collection is intended to illuminate the character, function, and significance of drinking establishments. Because of the size and complexity of the task, the editors did not set out to include every possible manuscript source related to the public house. Rather, their explicit guiding rule was to collect exemplary documents from the places where the most recent research has occurred on taverns and from which studies have been published.

What this collection does best is to reveal that taverns and drinking contributed to their respective societies in remarkably congruent ways. For example, in each region the largest administrative unit produced materials. In the Holy Roman Empire, laws, taxation, surveys, registers, and legal theory emerged from the level of the empire and territories. In France, these documents originated on the national level, and in North America from the individual colonies.

The laws regulating public houses and their patrons were also remarkably consistent, as were their critics. By the sixteenth century, a standard set of rules regulated public houses and drinking throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In each region, as well, theologians and pastors created documents lamenting tavern abuses, supplemented with occasional choruses by local magistrates. These tirades pointed most directly at the potential economic disaster that accompanied too much time spent inside the public house, as well as the possibilities for debauchery. Variations did occur within the realm of enforcement, waxing and waning based on the shrillness of the critics or the role of local political influence. However, legal sources reveal that authorities in each locale worried most about maintaining moral order and economic stability. Thus local and regional ordinances were linked inextricably with fears about tavern abuse and public drunkenness.

In each of the areas covered, anxiety over social control was tied to status; authorities pointed their collective fingers at the misuse of the tavern by the laboring classes and the poor, since these...