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7 Drinking and Gender Identity W     ? The seventeenth-century German legalist Matthias von Abele listed forty-five good reasons, among them friendship , honor, virtue, bravery, virility, business and trade, and good taste and fine company; equally compelling were malice and ill humor, roguishness, envy, defiance, boredom and idleness, as well as “prospective thirst.”1 While Abele’s language was grammatically non-gendered, his vocabulary was clearly male—besides virility and business, he included knighthood and manliness as reasons to drink. Abele’s list makes clear that the drinks men shared in the company of their fellows had cultural uses that went beyond physical thirst. For men, social drinking was inseparable from social identity, which was a key element in early modern notions of honor and status. Although immoderate alcohol consumption often led to quarrels, excess expenditure, and other violations of behavioral norms, there is no evidence of disagreement among different segments of society about how these norms were defined . Drinking bouts, rounds of gambling, and even tavern brawls could be viewed as acceptable behavior by the authorities as well as the participants as long as everyone played by the rules. Women, too, had a significant, although carefully proscribed role in the tavern company. Within certain bounds, women were a legitimate part of society in the tavern, and women at home, as its natural adversary, actively participated in defining the ground rules for norms of drinking behavior. Drinking was frequently a major issue in the disputes that occurred between men and women over household responsibility. Using the topic of drink as a starting point, we are able to open windows on spaces that normally remain hidden to historians of the early modern period, allowing a rare glimpse not only into the public tavern but also the private household. Through these windows we witness the negotiations for power that defined relationships between men and women, alcohol consumption and work discipline , and political order and family structure. Women do not emerge as 115 Tlusty FINAL 07 (115-146) 6/6/01 7:53 PM Page 115 passive spectators or victims in this process of negotiation but as active participants , who were able and willing to take action to protect their interests. Legitimacy for women ended, however, when they crossed the line that defined male drinking behaviors. According to Elisabeth Koch, early modern theorists saw men as the norm in all social relations and at all levels of belief, and women were regarded as the deviation from that norm.2 In this view, what was the norm for men would become the deviation for women, and what reinforced the honor of a man could taint the honor of a woman, whether it was tavern space, immoderate alcohol consumption, or power. Immoderate drinking by individual women was nearly always associated with either suspicious sexual behavior or a disorderly household. In its more extreme forms, particularly in the case of group drinking bouts by women that community norms did not sanction, drunkenness among women came to be identified with the sexual power of the prostitute or even the magic power of the witch. Both of these characterizations represented inversions of the natural order and the ultimate perversions of early modern notions of female honor—and both inversions were aided, contemporaries believed, by the consumption of alcohol. The fact that the rules for men and women differed to such a degree served to delineate more firmly the boundaries between the sexes. Drinking and Household Relations The early modern German city was a patriarchal society, in theory as well as practice. Civic government especially after the Reformation was based on an image of paternal discipline and control, with the city council acting in the role of municipal fathers. The new legal institutions created at the onset of Augsburg’s Reformation process—the marriage court (Ehegericht) and the Discipline Lords (Zuchtherren)—were aimed at perfecting a godly community based on the model of an orderly household.3 At the head of the household was the house father (Hausvater), a label that implied not only husband and father but also master of a functioning economic unit consisting of a hierarchy of subordinates including wife, children, journeymen, apprentices, and servants. The master of this household was charged with certain responsibilities . At base, he was responsible for stable and continuous economic production, in urban society usually the practice of a craft; on a higher plane, 116 The Culture of Drink in the Early Modern German City Tlusty FINAL 07 (115-146) 6...

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