Gefährlicher Genuss? (eBook)

In a satirical commentary on the drinking rituals of his contemporaries, moralist Dirck Pieterszoon Pers lists a couple of »strange quirks [orig.: vreemde grillen] invented […] to make people drunk«.59 Among them is a »a mill that one blows and shall not put down«.60 This is one of the few contemporary textual references found to so-called windmill cups (fig. 1).61

Despite the lack of a paper trail, the high number of surviving mill cups suggest that they were relatively popular in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The Rijksmuseum, for instance, possesses a total of nine windmill cups, of which three are partially made of Venetian glass. For an exhibition on these peculiar vessels, art historian Wim Nys traced more than a hundred windmill cups.62 The cups are spread over museums and private collections all over Europe, yet most originate from the Netherlands and Belgium.

Mill cups are puzzling objects to both museum visitors and (art) historians. Instead of a foot, the drinking vessels have small, silver mills at the bottom, so they can only rest upside-down (fig. 1). They were expensive to produce, richly decorated, and most of all: impractical. At least, if they are regarded as mere drinking vessels. When situated in the contexts of their use, the design of the mill cups makes sense. Mill cups were drinking games. When the drinker blew on the tube next to the mill’s stairs, the sails started to rotate, and participants had to finish the drink before the sail stopped turning. The combination of this seemingly silly activity and the expensive, richly-decorated drinking vessels capture early modern drinking bouts and the performance of inebriated manhood at the time.

Drinking was an important aspect of early modern life. Alcohol was part of people’s diets and was used in medicine.63 Besides that, it functioned as a social lubricant.64 There were many occasions at which alcohol consumption was required. Drinking marked important rites of passage such as birth, marriage, and death, but also the sealing of a contract between merchants.65 Everyone drank, but the amount and type of alcohol consumed differed for people according to social class, age, and gender. Women were discouraged to drink large quantities of alcohol. For men, in contrast, the attitude towards excessive alcohol consumption was far more complex.

There was a paradoxical connection between manhood and binge drinking in early modern discourse.66 As art historian Tom Nichols put it aptly, people had a »double vision« in this regard.67 On the one hand, drinking was regarded as a threat to a characteristic that was deemed exclusively male: rationality. On the other hand, binge drinking was seen as proof of masculine bravura.68 By consuming large quantities of beer or wine, men could prove their perseverance.

In this context, literary scholar Gina Bloom argues that the mill cup tapped into »fantasies of ideal patriarchal manhood«.69 The mill, she contends, connected »the drinker’s labour with that of the workers who produced the beverage being consumed«. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation of the cups. First, I argue that the mill cups were filled with wine, and not necessarily with beer. The latter was produced with grains that had to be grinded in mills before the fermentation process, while wine was made of grapes. The production of wine did not require a mill. Second, the manhood performed during drinking rituals is the opposite of »patriarchal manhood«, i.e. the manhood of the rational, strong, and moderate householder.70 Actually, the mill cup created an occasion at the drinking table which »liberated« men from their rationality and moderation. Only then, the men could temporarily perform a mode of manhood that historian Jennifer Spinks dubbed »immoderate« or »excessive masculinity«.71

The concept of occasionalism, coined by the historian Peter Burke, entails the simple idea that »on different occasions (moments, locales) or in different situations (in the presence of different people) the same person behaves in different ways«.72 Anthropological studies show that this principle still holds true when people consume alcohol.73 The situation in which people drink influences their experience and comportment. When the mill cup was set on the drinking table, it thus created a very specific occasion that invited the participants to perform certain acts. These acts would not be allowed in day-to-day-life. The occasion the users created in cooperation with the mill cup was carnivalesque.

Literary scholar Mikael Bakthin argued that premodern Europeans inhabited a dual realm of existence.74 Their official, serious life, dominated by suffering, work, and worship, was contrasted with an unofficial, unserious life, marked by folly, laziness, and the profane. The latter realm – the carnivalesque, topsy-turvy world – manifested itself during festivities and stage plays, and in literature and art. Bakthin’s concept has been used in the context of drinking studies before. Social scientists apply the term to the modern-day night-time economy, for instance.75 Literary scholar Stella Achilleos argues convincingly that early modern drinking bouts could also be characterised as carnivalesque.76 However, in these studies, the framework of the carnivalesque is understood on a more conceptual, universal level. In this paper, I argue that mill cups referenced very explicitly to the iconography of premodern carnival.

The argument presented here consists of three parts. In the first part, I will discuss the drinking bouts during which the mill cups played their role. After that, I elaborate on the interaction between cup and drinker. During this interaction, the mill cup had agency through its design. In the final and longest part, I will argue that the mill cup combined contrasting connotations: the sacred ritual of the communion and the profane folly and transgression of the mill.