[HN Gopher] Shebeen Queens: Review of "A World History of Women ...
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Shebeen Queens: Review of "A World History of Women and Alcohol"
Author : diodorus
Score : 21 points
Date : 2021-11-12 22:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lrb.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lrb.co.uk)
| aliswe wrote:
| Uh, are all these things really accurate though?
|
| "The persecution of Europe's witches, by this account, becomes in
| part a way of disciplining a class of semi-autonomous beer
| producers into accepting the work and gender order of the
| domestic household."
|
| "female brewers, bartenders and, most importantly, drinkers (...)
| have always been there, not just alongside men but usually one
| step ahead of them"
|
| "The word bridal comes from bride-ale: an English tradition of
| raising money for a wedding whereby 'a bride-to-be brewed a bunch
| of ale and threw a big party.'" (unsure if the bride herself was
| actually intended to brew this)
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| The bride-ale thing is at least partly true- it does come from
| bride-ale, but in Old English the word "ale" didn't only mean
| beer, but also a feast or party at which people drank it. There
| were other similar occasions, including the "church-ale" to
| raise money for repair of a church.
|
| AFAIK the only survival of this term is the "Morris ale", which
| is a gathering of Morris dancers (who do tend to drink a lot of
| ale).
|
| In terms of female brewers, it is interesting that the surname
| "Brewster" exists and specifically refers to an ancestor who
| was a female brewer. The "-ster" suffix in English used to be
| the female equivalent of "-er" (as it still is in Dutch).
|
| The only regular English word in which "-ster" survives is
| spinster, but it also survives in other occupational surnames
| like Webster (a female weaver) and Baxter (a female baker).
|
| Most things about witches and their persecution tend to owe
| more to myth than history, though...
| MrJagil wrote:
| I'm quite fascinated by these literary magazines... London
| review, paris review... I never understand what's going on. I
| never know _what_ I'm reading. Is it an actual review? A short
| story? An article? I find being in this state as a reader quite
| interesting. It's what drew me to HN in the first place --
| programming seemed like a wondrous, mysterious new thing to me, a
| new frontier, and it's quite clear the makers are very
| intelligent, just as the writers of these magazines seem like a
| notch over news journalists.
| pmyteh wrote:
| It's a fascinating form, isn't it? I mean, nominally they're
| book reviews. And they will at least mention and comment on the
| book. But the best of them are really a special kind of
| literary essay written by someone who knows the subject (of the
| book and of the essay) very well and is _making their own
| argument_. Sometimes the books 'reviewed' are merely a
| parenthetical jumping-off point.
|
| So the LRB, for instance, might publish a review by Hilary
| Mantel of a book about Danton [0] which is actually a
| meditation on what it means to be a revolutionary and how place
| might fit into that. Mantel, having researched and written _A
| Place of Greater Safety_ [1], is not exactly a historian but
| does have some fascinating things to say.
|
| I subscribe to the LRB. I don't know tons about most of what is
| written, but having smart people who can write well pitching
| engaging pieces about all kinds of randomiana is, as you say, a
| wondrous thing.
|
| [0]: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n15/hilary-mantel/he-
| roa...
|
| [1]: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/A-Place-of-
| Greater...
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably fair to say that they're very _different_ than
| news journalists. The journalist who is on the ground at
| whatever the interesting foreign bureau is at the moment (or
| even just covers domestic agricultural policy or whatever) and
| writes about it straightforwardly is very different from the
| person writing with flair about topics of historical or
| literary importance even if both doubtless involve significant
| research.
|
| And I will say the latter often leads to people on sites such
| as this bemoaning the lack of the bullet points version.
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(page generated 2021-11-14 23:01 UTC)