Over the past twenty-five years feminist historians have demonstrated the patriarchal nature of traditional European society. The precise nature of this patriarchy, including its methods and rhetoric, changed with the passage of time, but its primary purpose and its primary effect have always been the subordination of females.1 The subordination began at birth, when males often received better treatment than females, continued through marriage, when women passed from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands, and did not even end at death, when burial customs privileged men. In addition to documenting the nature, purpose and effects of patriarchal society feminist historians have also demonstrated that women were not passive bystanders in their subordination. In other words, women challenged patriarchy.2
One way that women could challenge the patriarchal order was through the phenomenon of the disorderly or unruly woman. In late medieval and early modern Europe women were considered prone to sedition and riot, to uncontrolled and uncontrollable behavior. Disorderly wives challenged their husbands’ authority and thereby the natural order of things in a patriarchal society. In the popular literature of the period, the unruly woman was primarily a male construction that reflected misogynistic attitudes and male fears of female insubordination. The unruly woman has been the subject of study by Natalie Zemon Davis in her article with the suggestive title, “Women on Top,”3 and by Joy Wiltenburg in her book, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany.4 According to Davis, the image of the unruly or disorderly woman took form in festive rites of inversion—the world turned upside — as the woman on top. Anthropologists argue that such rituals of status reversal function to reinforce the prevailing social order. Davis disagrees; the image of the disorderly woman could also undermine male authority by demonstrating behavioral options that promoted insubordination and confronted patriarchal privilege. Neither Davis nor Wiltenburg mention the role of alcohol in their analyses of disorderly women. However, an analysis of misogynistic popular literature from the Late Middle Ages reveals that alcohol and drinking, taverns and alehouses played fundamental roles in the male construction of the unruly, disorderly woman. A familiar theme in this literature was the group of women who gathered, often secretly, in a tavern or in an alehouse to gossip, to challenge their husbands’ authority, and, above all, to drink wine or ale. The consumption of alcoholic beverages was the cause of the unruliness of these women. This is evident from an examination of five works of popular literature, one French, one Italian and three English, that range chronologically from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.
The earliest and the funniest is the fourteenth-century poem Des III Dames de Paris (The Three Women of Paris) by Wautriquet Brassenel de Couvin.5 The setting for the poem was a feast day, perhaps Epiphany, at Paris in 1320. Margue, the wife of Adam de Gonnesse, and her niece, Marion, were on their way to purchase some tripe at a tavern, when they encountered Madame Tifaigne, a hairdresser:
Said she: “I know a wine so rare,
it’s like no other grown before.
Who drinks it, it will soon restore;
a brilliant, effervescent wine,
bold, fresh, smooth on the tongue and fine
and pleasant going down and mellow.”
She continued by assuring Margue and Marion that the tavern keeper would let them drink on credit. The three immediately headed for the tavern to try it. After drinking large amounts of this wine, Margue was not all that impressed; it made her mouth feel queer, so she ordered some grenache. The grenache went down well, too well, for they soon had to order more, so the waiter brought each a bucket. There they sat drinking from dawn until the dead of night. In the meantime, they wanted something special to eat with the wine—a goose with a bowl of garlic on the side and fresh hot rolls. When Margue ordered the grenache, she added:
Bring waffles and patisseries,
shelled almond meats, a round of cheese,
pears, spice, nuts.
As they drank and ate, they discussed the quality of the wine, and Margue advised her niece on the proper way to drink it:
if I were you I wouldn’t swill
all mine at such a rapid clip,
but drink it slowly, sip by sip,
and leave it on the tongue a spell;
you ought to take a breath as well,
just one, for every swig you savor,
thus prolonging all its flavor.
Even before the grenache arrived Margue’s behavior bordered on the unruly and the disorderly; she sang a drinking song with the words:
My dears, let’s have ourselves a spree;
the mug who puts it on the line
will never get to taste the wine.
Then in the dead of night she and her two companions decided to dance in street since no one would see them, but they wanted to keep their clothes clean, so they took them off. And so they danced completely nude, sang a love song, and gossiped about their gigolos. Someone stole their clothes, of course. They fell into an open sewer and met the dawn by lying together dead drunk, “like turds upon the avenue.” The townspeople were horrified to discover them, obvious murder victims, and buried them. When the three women of Paris revived in the cemetery late that night, well and truly hung over, they made their way back to the tavern for some more wine, collapsed again in the same place, and were found again by the terrified townspeople, who suspected the work of the Devil, but this time Madame Tifaigne woke up and shouted for the waiter, “Let’s have another round!” “Me too!” cried Margue. “And tripe—I want some if it’s not too ripe.”
The second example is a late medieval popular song from Bologna.6 It began with a woman calling to her friend:
Come now, drink wine, good woman, and don’t dilute it,
Since if the wine is strong it warms the head.
However, when they went to a tavern to drink, they drank weak wine, five barrels of it, as if it were nothing, and another quart just to enjoy the taste. After such a large amount of drink, one of them pissed so much that she exposed the roots of a tree. “For God’s sake, plug that hole,” said the other, “You could drown in your own lake.” Like the three women of Paris, food accompanied their drinking — eight capons, one of them stuffed, and 200 eggs. For their diversions they went to the public baths and bathed in the nude. When a boat arrived with wine, they rejoiced, but when a boat arrived with linen for them to process, they cursed the pilot and wished him dead. Instead of working they continued drinking, went together to a festival where they consumed seven plates of gnocchi and lasagne, and wished they never had to work again.
Next are two versions of an anonymous English carol, one from the late fifteenth century and the other from the early sixteenth century, which I prefer to discuss as one work. The two told the story of gossips or friends, named in the first version Elinor, Joan, Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily, who regularly gathered for food and drink at a tavern.7 They were determined to enjoy their outing without their husbands’ knowledge, so they arranged to meet without anyone seeing them, sneaking into the tavern two by two. As one of them exclaimed:
A stripe or two God might send me
If my husband might here see me.
The six women rejected weak drinks and searched for the tavern with the best and strongest wine, such as muscatel. They praised such wine for its good effects on their health and proclaimed that the only reason they came was for the good drink. Like the women of Paris and Bologna, they ate at the tavern, but they supplied their own special food:
And each of them will somewhat bring,
Goose, pig or capon’s wing,
Pasties of pigeons or some other thing.
Their conversation alternated between making merry and complaining about their husbands. One complained that her husband beat her “like the Devil of hell, and the more I cry, the less mercy.” Alice, who feared no man, proclaimed, “God give him short life!” and Margaret boasted:
I know no man that is alive
That gives me two strokes but he gets five!
I am not afeard, though I have no beard!
Despite the bravado of Alice and Margaret, when the women went home they all told their husbands that they had just returned from church. Their husbands might have suspected something, because instead of getting back to work the women, under the influence of the wine and the food, went to sleep.
The last example is The Tunnyng [Brewing] of Elynour Rummyng by John Skelton (1460?–1529), which supposedly described a real alewife who kept an alehouse near Henry VIII’s castle Nonsuch.8 Elynour was the archetypal keeper from hell — Skelton even called her the Devil’s sibling — whose ale contained chicken droppings but who nonetheless had a huge crowd of disorderly female customers eager to buy it. Skelton described the unruly horde of women who flocked to Elynour’s alehouse whenever she brewed ale:
Thither come Kate,
Cecily, and Sarah
With their legs bare,
And also their feet
Hardly full unsweet;
With their heals dagged,
Their girdles all to-jagged,
Their smocks all to-ragged...
With all their might running
To Elynour Rummyng ...
Some wenches come unlaced,
Some housewives come unbraced,
With their naked paps,
That flips and flaps,...
Such a lewd sort
To Elynour resort.
Some of her customers proclaimed that they did not care what men said about
them running to drink her ale, but:
Some, loathe to be espied,
Start in at the back side,
Over the hedge and pale,
And all for the good ale.
The customers were so desperate for a drink that they were willing to pawn anything for it, and many lines of Skelton’s poem formed a list of what the women offered, including a wedding ring, hose, girdle, ladle, cradle, saddle, hatchet, wedge, spinning wheel, spindle, thimble and needle, even their husband’s hat, cap and hood, and some brought food to exchange for their drink. The drinking women were so volatile that Elynour had to keep the peace by threatening to break their heads. Joan was testy, “angry as a wasp”; another was a “foul slut” who had a quick tongue. Alice was a drunk who “pissed where she stood” and gossiped endlessly; “she was full of tales” from everywhere. Another customer had a sinister reputation:
With the feathers of a quail
She could to Bordeaux sail;
And with good ale barm
She could make a charm
To help with a stitch:
She seemed to be a witch.
The material from these five examples might seem like harmless good fun, but they reveal male fears of unruly, disorderly women. In the first place, all of these women did their drinking in taverns or alehouses. In medieval Europe, alehouse and tavern space was male space, so much so that in the thirteenth century Siena forbade women to enter taverns.9 Taverns and alehouses elsewhere did serve women, and women of varying conditions had occasion to drink there. Some priests took Margery Kempe to a tavern in Rome and made her have a drink, even though they knew her tendency to weep and whoop uncontrollably during religious services, so much so that people considered her drunk.10 Women did not drink much wine at Montaillou in the early fourteenth century, but they did drink at taverns.11 Peasant women in medieval England were frequent visitors to the village alehouse during the day while their husbands were working in the fields, a practice that resulted in tales about a husband accusing his wife of spending her day gossiping in drinking establishments while he labored for their keep.12 However, the mere presence of women in taverns and alehouses was a sign of insubordination. A solitary woman drinking in an alehouse or a tavern was not a threat to patriarchal power, because she would have been subject to male domination, but a group of women would have been capable of maintaining their independence, especially if they withdrew to a separate room. Anthropological studies of modern drinking behavior have demonstrated the masculine exclusiveness of drinking establishments, where men flee from their insecure relationships with women and take refuge with their fellow escapees to engage in macho drinking. The English pub, the French tavern, and the Greek taverna have been centers of male sociability and male drinking rituals that have excluded females.13 The situation was the same in medieval Europe.
In addition to being male space, the medieval drinking establishment was an anti-church. The best expression of this opinion occurred in a fourteenth-century English devotional treatise: “You have heard of both lechery and gluttony. These sins arise most commonly at the tavern, which is a well of sin. It is the school of the Devil, where his disciples study, and the chapel of Satan, where men and women serve him. God does His miracles in His church; the Devil does his, which are the opposite, in the tavern.”14 Italian and French moralists had similar opinions. According to Italian authors, taverns were cellars of the Devil, fountains of sin and haunts of all corrupt and depraved youths.15 In France, moralists considered taverns to be cesspools of the Devil, the Devil’s churches and schools for mobs of delinquents.16
If the alehouse or tavern could represent an anti-church, the alehouse or tavern keeper could represent an anti-priest in league with the Devil. As already noted, Skelton called Elynour the Devil’s sibling. Some of the actual court cases of “anti-priests” involved female keepers, such as Jeanne de Baugie of Paris, who confessed in 1400 to abducting a young girl, keeping a disorderly house, procuring prostitutes, and stealing a piece of fur from a merchant who had stopped for some wine.17 Other cases of disorderly female keepers focused on their sexual behavior; in 1379 Juliana Fox of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, faced prosecution for receiving “priests and others into her house at illegal times, viz. around the middle of the night,”18 and in 1471 the alehouse of Joanna Skeppere of Brandon supposedly attracted “lecherous and suspicious” men.19 Sexual misbehavior had no role in some cases of disorderly female keepers. Alice Causton of London was convicted in 1364 for selling short measures in a manner that could have featured in Skelton’s depiction of Elynour Rummyng. She filled the bottom of a quart measure with pitch and then covered it with sprigs of rosemary, a crime for which she was sentenced “to play bo-peep through a pillory.”20 Such behavior by female keepers was reflected in works of fiction; the last scene of the mystery play from Chester entitled The Harrowing of Hell focused on an unscrupulous alewife:
Sometime I was a taverner,
A gentle gossip and a tapster,
Of wine and ale a trusty brewer,
Which woe hath me wrought.
Of cans I kept no true measure:
My cups I sold at my pleasure,
Deceiving many a creature,
Though my ale were naught.
As punishment for her bad ale and short measures the alewife went to hell, where a demon greeted her: “Welcome, dear lady, I shall thee wed!”21 In short, the church and the alehouse/tavern represented polar extremes. In contrast to God’s work in the church the alehouse/tavern was the venue for drunkenness, which was the gateway to all the other sins including swearing, blasphemy, fornication and murder. A respectable woman should never darken the threshold of such establishments.
The three women of Paris drank wine by the bucket, the women from Bologna consumed five barrels and a quart, and the English women had drink after drink. Another popular song from late medieval Bologna described a woman who kept seven buckets of the best wine at her side “to be able to guzzle well.”22 In marked contrast to such gargantuan drinking is the view expressed in a late sixteenth-century poem Le monologue du bon vigneron; the patriarchal “good vine-grower” drank only his own wine and left water for his wife to drink.23 Despite such comments on the consumption of alcohol by women, because of the important role of alcoholic beverages in most people’s diets during the Middle Ages, even women could drink substantial amounts of ale or wine as a matter of course. Between 1410 and 1412 the women in the entourage of the aristocratic Marguerite de Latour, prioress of Toul, consumed 0.75 liters of wine a day.24 The household accounts for a Pisan notary reveal that his family, including the notary, his mother, wife and young male servant, consumed 1820 liters of wine in 1428, or 455 liters each. In the same year members of the household, including slaves and servants, of a wealthy Pisan merchant each consumed 683 liters.25 One source that illustrates the consumption of alcohol by women is the maintenance agreement between one peasant family and another in return for the surrender of land. In return for the land the agreements stipulated that the recipient provide a stated amount of food. In 1291 Margaret atte Green of Girton, Cambridgeshire, received enough barley for 2.6 pints of strong ale a day,26 which is the same amount promised to Emma del Rood of Cranfield, Bedfordshire, in 1438.27 Wills also indicate that women drank; in 1441 at Barjols in Provence Jean Quinson left his widow an annual supply of 360 liters of wine.28 When a fourteenth-century citizen of Paris wrote a set of instructions for his young wife, he compared the sin of gluttony to, significantly, a woman who had trouble rising in the morning in time for church as a result of a hangover:
When she has with some difficulty risen, know you what be her hours? Her matins are: “Ha! what shall we drink? Is there nought left over from last night?” Then she says her lauds, thus: “Ha! we drank good wine yestreen.” Afterwards she says her orisons, thus: “My head aches; I shall not be at ease until I have had a drink.”29
In short, women of all classes drank alcoholic beverages regardless of patriarchal constraints.
On the other hand, to preserve her honor a woman should never become drunk. According to the ancient Roman author Valerius Maximus, Roman women were forbidden to drink wine so they would not commit adultery.30 Drunk women were considered promiscuous since alcohol supposedly made them sexually permeable.31 Medieval moralists often linked the immoderate consumption of alcoholic beverages to adultery and fornication. For example, the early sixteenth-century Ship of Fools by the Benedictine Alexander Barclay warned that drunks gave themselves to “bawdy ribaldry.”32 Some authors directed their warnings to women, as did Robert de Bois in Le chastoiement des dames (Advice to Ladies), composed in the thirteenth century:
And she who gluts more than her fill
Of food and wine, soon finds a taste
For bold excess below the waist!
No worthy man will pay his court
To lady of such lowly sort.33
Chaucer noted the connection between sexuality and alcohol in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” This woman with attitude complained that lechers knew from experience that a drinking woman had no defense against their advances.34 So women drank alcoholic beverages, but they were expected to avoid drunkenness and thereby maintain their chastity.
As already noted, women had occasion to visit alehouses and taverns in medieval Europe, but the male clientele of these establishments usually regarded such women, especially if they were alone, as morally dissolute if not prostitutes.The connection between drinking establishments and prostitution was almost as strong as their connection to the sale of drink. Prostitutes searched for clients at alehouses and taverns, while men in search of prostitutes knew their best chance of finding them would be in alehouses and taverns. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries authorities in Venice vacillated between policies that prohibited prostitutes from using taverns and, when these proved difficult to enforce, less repressive policies designed to exclude them from taverns in areas such as the Piazza di San Marco.35 Authorities in London issued decrees in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries against prostitutes using alehouses and taverns, to little apparent effect.36 The unsavory reputation of taverns and alehouses as anti-churches combined with the view that drinking women were sexually permeable to create an assumption that a woman consuming alcohol at a drinking establishment was sexually available. A group of women enjoying each other’s company not only disturbed these assumptions but also represented unruly behavior. Men feared female sexuality, which they considered permeable when women were sober; the fears increased when women were drinking and increased yet more when they were drinking at taverns and alehouses. Nonetheless, the sexual exploits of the unruly women in popular literature were restrained to say the least — no adulterous liaisons, no orgies. The three ladies of Paris talked about their gigolos and danced naked in the street in the middle of the night, the women from Bologna bathed nude, and Elinor, Joan, Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily as well as Elynour Rummyng’s customers were asexual. All of this is hardly indicative of moral depravity, but it was still threatening as a result of prevailing attitudes regarding the connection between alcohol and sex and regarding the alehouse/tavern as an anti-church:
A late fifteenth-century poem proclaimed that wives,
To the tavern they will not go,
Nor to the alehouse never the more,
For, God knows, their hearts would be woe
To spend their husbands’ money so.37
This was misogynist satire. The spending of their husbands’ money was another male concern that was a common theme in the male construction of drinking unruly women. In the five examples all the women spent considerable amounts of money either as a result of the quality of the drink—muscatel and grenache — or the quantity of their drink—buckets, barrels, drink after drink. In addition to the expense of the drink was the expense of the fine food that they consumed in enormous quantities—goose, a bowl of garlic, fresh hot rolls, waffles, patisseries, almonds, cheese, pears, spice, capons, eggs, gnocchi, lasagne, pig, and pigeon pasties. If unruly wives did not have any money to pay their shot, they found other ways of buying the food and drink. The three ladies of Paris drank and ate on credit, and Elynour Rummying’s customers bartered their personal belongings. What was worse, they bartered items that were important for the domestic economy of the household, such as the hatchet, wedge, spinning wheel, spindle, thimble and needle. Not only were unruly wives spending money on drink and food and bartering away items that helped supply their families with the necessities of life but they were also wasting their time in drinking establishments when they could have been contributing to the household economy. The Bolognesi never wanted to return to work. This aspect of the male construction of drinking unruly women refutes those historians who argue that in the early modern period a shift occurred in attitudes toward drunkenness as it became an economic sin according to the ideology of nascent capitalism.38 The message in the early fifteenth century English poem entitled How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter also stressed the economic consequences of immoderate drinking; when offered good ale:
Moderately take you thereof that no blame befalls you,
For if you are often drunk, it reduces you to shame.
For those that be often drunk,
Prosperity is taken away from them.39
Another theme in the male construction of drinking unruly women was their insubordination and threat to patriarchal power. The three women of Paris gossiped about their gigolos, Elinor, Joan, Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily about their husbands, and of Elynour Rummyng’s customers Jane was testy and “angry as a wasp,” another was a “foul slut” with a quick tongue, and Alice never stopped gossiping. One of the few weapons that women could use in their struggle with patriarchal domination was their tongues, and many drinking women were ferocious scolds or malicious gossips. Marguine la Faucharde from the small village of Lesches near Meaux was such a scold when drunk that on one occasion in 1354 she left her sleeping husband and shouted abuse and attempted to start a quarrel in the street even though no one was there to hear her.40 Gossips could be more threatening than scolds. Men considered unruly women as threats to masculine control because unruly women were gossiping women. Hence, another reason why a solitary woman in a tavern or an alehouse was not threatening was because she had no gossips with whom to gossip. In addition to their gossip, unruly women posed a challenge to their husbands’ authority by secretly gathering for drinks in an alehouse/tavern with their friends when they were supposed to be home working. Some of Elynour Rummyng’s customers brazenly and openly entered her alehouse, but others snuck in the back door, and the deception of Elinor, Joan, Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily continued when they returned home and told their husbands they had been to church. The challenges to patriarchal authority continued in the drinking establishments, although some of them were surreptitious rather than direct, all talk and no show, as best indicated by the bravado of Alice and Margaret’s comments. The customers of Elynour Rummyng pawned their husbands’ hoods, caps and hats. The symbolism of selling the garments that covered a husband’s head indicated a challenge to their authority, but the challenge again was surreptitious and not direct.
Studies of male drinking behavior in modern societies note that one of the reasons men drink is because of the feeling of power that alcohol gives them. In his article entitled “Drinking as a Manifestation of Power Concerns,” Richard A. Boyatzis states, “men drink alcoholic beverages to attain, or regain, a feeling of strength.” Drinking empowers men; it makes them feel strong and important, and it makes them feel that they can dominate or influence others. What about women? According to Boyatzis, alcohol does not work that way for women. Drinking makes women feel more feminine, less assertive and aggressive, and less concerned with power.41 In short, drinking does not empower women. I doubt if this is true today, and I doubt that it was true in medieval Europe. Alcohol made women assertive and aggressive, and it made them challenge patriarchal power. Women drank to escape subordination. At least that was how men perceived drinking women, and that was the male construction of unruly and disorderly women in the popular literature of the period. The best illustration of this is the early sixteenth-century farce entitled “A Merry Play Between Johan the Husband, Tyb His Wife, and Sir Johan the Priest,” attributed to John Heywood. The first part of the farce is a chanson de mal marié, that is, a husband’s lament. Johan the husband languished at home while Tyb drank at a tavern and ignored her housework. He debated with himself whether to beat her or not, and when he finally told himself, yes, he would beat her, Tyb returned from the tavern, overheard him, and confronted him, “Why whom wilt thou beat, I say, thou knave?” Whereupon the husband meekly claimed that he was talking about beating some dried fish to make it tender.42 Tyb’s challenge was not surreptitious and indirect. In popular literature dominating women were often drinking women. The late fifteenth century French farce Le cuvier (The Washtub) told the story of Jaquinot the husband who decided to assert his authority over his wife after a year of marriage; he began by telling her, significantly, “You are only a drunk.”43
Oddly enough, the male construction of drinking, unruly women contributed to the empowerment of women. Modern cross-cultural studies of drinking behavior and drunken comportment indicate that this behavior and this comportment are socially mediated; they are learned. The consumption of alcohol causes physiological changes that are scientifically verifiable, but much of what passes for drinking behavior and drunken comportment varies from one society to the next. What is typical for a drunk in one society is not typical in another. In some societies drunks are violent and aggressive, in others they are peaceful and passive, in some alcohol arouses sexual passions, in others it dampens them.44 In other words, people learn what the effects of drinking will have on their behavior and their comportment. The misogynistic fears evident in the male construction of female drinking created a cultural script. This cultural script taught women that drinking could help them challenge patriarchal power and help them escape subordination.
To return to Natalie Zemon Davis, the male construction of the disorderly woman could undermine male authority by demonstrating behavioral options that promoted insubordination and confronted patriarchal privilege. In other words, drinking empowered women. The male construction of unruly women in popular literature could teach women this lesson.
Notes
1. See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
2. The output of feminist historians has become so huge that, according to Merry Weisner-Hanks, it is no longer possible to keep abreast of it. See her “Reflections on a Quarter Century of Research on Women and the Reformation,” in History Has Many Voices, ed. Lee Palmer Wandel (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 2003), 93–111.
3. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124–51.
4. Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia,1992).
5. Wautriquet Brassenel de Couvin, Des iii dames de Paris, in Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux Translated from the Old French, trans. Robert Harrison (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1974), 398–417.
6. Guido Davico Bonino, ed., Il tesoro della poesia italiana (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1982), 1: 99–100.
7. Richard Leighton Greene, ed., The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 280–4; a slightly modernized version of the later carol is in G. G. Coulton, ed. and trans., Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 3: 141–4. Here and elsewhere I have modernized the spelling.
8. John Skelton, “A Sixteenth-Century English Alewife and Her Customers—Skelton’s Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” ed. E. M. Jellinek, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 6 (1945): 102–10. For a literary analysis of Skelton’s poem see Deborah Baker Wyrick, “‘Withinne that Develes Temple:’ An Examination of Skelton’s The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980):239–54.
9. William Heywood, The “Ensamples” of Fra Filippo: A Study of Medieval Siena (Siena: Enrico Torrini, 1901), 194.
10. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 105, 186.
11. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 264.
12. Barbara A. Hanawalt, “At the Margin of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe,” in Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, eds Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 9–10.
13. Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, “Introduction: Alcohol Commensality, Identity Transformations and Transcendence,” in Alcohol, Gender and Culture, ed. Dimitra Gefou-Madianou (London: Routledge, 1992), 7–11. For other studies see: Pierre Mayol, “Les euils de l’alcoolisme,” in Actes de la Rencontre Internationale: Cultures, Manières de Boire et Alcoolisme, eds Guy Caro and Jean-François Lemoine (Rennes: Bretagne, Alcool et Santé, 1984), 36; Robert E. Popham, “The Social History of the Tavern,” in Research Advances in Alcohol and Drug Problems, eds Yedy Israel, Frederick B. Glaser, Harold Kalant, Robert E. Popham, Wolfgang Schmidt and Reginald G. Smart (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), 4: 226–7; Lucienne Roubin, “Male Space and Female Space within the Provençal Community,” in Rural Society in France, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 153.
14. Ayenbite of Inwyt, an English translation of Friar Laurent’s Somme le roy, summarized in Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansinmi: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 183.
15. Rosa Maria Dentici Buccellato, “Produzione, commercio e consumo del vino nella Sicilia medievale,” in Il vino nell’economia e nella società italiana Medioevale Moderna (Florence: Accademia economico-agraria dei Georgofili, 1988), 166; Francesco Guicciardini, Storie Fiorentine, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, eds James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York: Viking, 1953), 649.
16. Edmond Faral, La vie quotidienne au temps de Saint Louis (Paris: Hachette, 1938), 76; Eileen Power, ed. and trans., The Goodman of Paris (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (c.1393) (London:George Routledge and Sons, 1928), 84; Jean-Michel Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 248.
17. Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 236 and n. 141.
18. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76.
19. Mark Bailey, A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 169. See the comments on the unruly sexuality of female keepers in Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 140–1.
20. Louis F. Salzman, English Industries of the Middle Ages (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923), 289.
21. Arthur C. Cawley, ed., Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), 168–9. See Robert M. Lumiansky, “Comedy and Theme in the Chester Harrowing of Hell,” Tulane Studies in English, 10 (1960): 5–12.
22. Bonino, Il tesoro della poesia italiana, I, 101.
23. Mack P. Holt, “Wine, Community and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy,” Past and Present, 138 (February 1993): 84.
24. Pierre Charbonnier, Une autre France: La seigneurie rurale en Basse Auvergne du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’Études du Massif Central, 1980), 131.
25. Antonio Ivan Pini, Vite e vino nel medioevo (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1989), 135, n. 316.
26. Christopher Dyer, “English Diet in the Later Middle Ages,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, eds Trevor H. Aston, Peter R. Coss, Christopher Dyer and Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 202.
27. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 153.
28. Louis Stouff, Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 230.
29. Power, Goodman of Paris, 84.
30. Valerius Maximus, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, ed. John Briscoe (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1998), 2, 1, 5.
31. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 153. I develop this point in my book Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
32. Alexander Barclay, The Ship of Fools, in The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose, ed. Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 361.
33. Robert de Blois, Le chastoiement des dames, in The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love, trans. Norman R. Shapiro, ed. James B. Wadsworth (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 74.
34. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Nevill Coghill (Baltimore MD:Penguin, 1958), 287.
35. Elisabeth Pavan, “Police des moeurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue historique, 264 (1980): 243–4, 248, 250, 253–4.
36. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15–16, 72.
37. P. J. P. Goldberg, trans. and ed., Women in England, c.1275–1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 265.
38. Gregory A. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800: A Chronological History (Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO, 1985), 129–30.
39. Goldberg, Women in England, 99.
40. Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), I, 210–11.
41. Richard E. Boyatzis, “Drinking as a Manifestation of Power Concerns,” in Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Study of Alcohol: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds Michael W. Everett, Jack O. Waddell and Dwight B. Heath (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1976), 265, 284. See also: Henk Driessen, “Drinking on Masculinity: Alcohol and Gender in Andalusia,” in Alcohol, Gender and Culture, ed. Dimitra Gefou-Madianou (London: Routledge, 1992), 77; E. M. Jellinek, “The Symbolism of Drinking: A Culture-Historical Approach,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 38 (1977): 862.
42. John Heywood, Johan the Husband [1533], in Medieval Mystery Plays, Morality Plays, and Interludes, eds Vincent F. Hopper and Gerald B. Lahey (New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 1962), 233–7. See Barbara D. Palmer, “‘To Speke of Wo that Is in Mariage’: The Marital Arts in Medieval Literature,” in Human Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (Pittsburgh PA: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1978), 12.
43. Le cuvier, in Recueil de farces (1450–1550), ed. André Tissier (Geneva: Droz, 1988), III, 64–5.
44. Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (London: Nelson, 1970); see also the comments by Thomas Brennan, “Towards the Cultural History of Alcohol in France,” Journal of Social History, 23 (1989): 83.
By A. Lynn Martin in "Medieval Sexuality", edited by April Harper and Caroline Proctor, Routledge, New York/London, 2008, excerpts pp. 98-112. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.