HEA Workshop: Teaching Alcohol Studies in History

Exploring the early modern ‘World of the Tavern’

Year 3 Advanced Option

Beat KüminHistory

Bartel Beham, ‘Village Fair’ (c. 1530)

Aims

Trade card of the ‘Yellow House’inn at Stuttgart (late 18thC)

• Use drinking in principal hubs of face-to-face and long-distance communication to

• Obtain ‘windows’ onto pre-modern society and culture more generally

Coverage, Themes & Approaches

• English, French and Germanic contexts c. 1400-1800

• Publicans, patrons, catering, cultural services, gender relations, crime, change over time, interactions with community / church / state …

• Social & cultural history; food studies; gender relations; art history; literature; anthropology; spatial theory …

Teaching & Learning

• Impulse lectures• Seminar discussion• Group presentations• Individual reviews• Module forum• 2 field trips• Short essay, book review

& mock exam• Dissertation and/or

written examFranz Niklaus König,

‘Waitress in Bernese Costume’ (coloured etching, 1806)

ResourcingLarge module website provides:

• Written evidence– esp. excerpts from Voices from the Tavern

(4 vol./2000 pp. source collection, P&C, 2011)• Visual records

– woodcuts, art databases, maps & ground plans …• Material culture

– buildings, signs, bottles, glasses, tables … • Musical samples

– harmonia mundi: ‘Trinkt und singt’ (drink & sing)• Access to yet limited, but fast-growing specialist literature

Adriaen Brouwer, ‘Peasant Brawl’

(oil on oak, c. 1630)

… AND NOW ALSO …

The Burford Experience

• Ideal• Walkabout

• ‘School trip’, bonding• Student perspectives gained

Gastro-Seminar

• Recapitulation of walkabout: topography, locations, dimensions, features, layout …

• Relation to wider sociological, architectural and spatial debates (container vs social construction)

• Experience of: - ‘place’ - drinking - sociability - meal rituals

Pre-modern ‘alcohol’ studies enhance student learning by…

• … utilizing numerous types of evidence and approaches,

each with specific opportunities and challenges

• … illuminating complex cultural roles of key commodity,

highlighting both social benefits and costs

• … sharpening awareness of diachronic change by focusing

on long-term evolution of a principal social site

• … combining classroom discussion with field trips

and personal experience

• … being (still) unusual and (hopefully) fun

… but not without problems …

• … asking a lot of pre-modern sources

• … generalizing from personal impressions

• … getting seduced by colourful cases and/or

frustrated by sheer complexity of phenomenon

• … running behind debates in other disciplines

• … taking students with little/no period experience

• … alcohol consumption as part of curriculum

Collaborative / comparative potential?Warwick Drinking Studies Network

• Interdisciplinary• All periods• Workshops • Collaborative projects• Teaching initiatives?

Thanks !

Looking forward to your comments