Beer, according to the editors of this welcome new collection, “powerfully undercuts the imagined divide between the modern world and the premodern” (5). Whilst it is an everyday product of western capitalism, it is also a drink with a conspicuous past, a past that, it is argued, places its modern consumers and producers in a dialogue with the Middle Ages. Putting these premises into effect, this volume takes as its subject both the cultures of beer production and consumption in the Middle Ages themselves and also the evocation, commemoration and elaboration of those cultures in the post-medieval period. In the foreground throughout and clearly acting as the book’s principal inspiration is the twenty-first century craft beer boom in North America that has re-enchanted the industry, challenging the big corporate manufacturers and offering an upstart alternative to them in the shape of new artisanal makers with a commitment to doing things differently. Both brewers and drinkers of craft ale, the editors say, understand it both as a refined taste and a pleasure in itself, but also as an ideological reaction against industrialised culture that consciously engages with beer’s history as it attempts to re-model and re-imagine the drink. Rather as William Morris looked to the medieval in championing good workmanship, artisan design and the Arts & Crafts movement, so craft beer culture has a strong predilection for a Middle Ages that it sees as wholly different from and superior to the commoditised creation of homogenised product that seems to characterise the large traditional brewers of the modern age.
To understand this medievalism in its fullness and complexity, the introductory chapter frames the volume’s arguments in terms of a number of dichotomies about the nature and culture of beer: firstly, that it enchants and disenchants; secondly, that it both builds communities and dismantles them; thirdly, that it includes and excludes; fourthly, that it dismantles hierarchy and rebuilds hierarchy; and lastly, that beer connects us to the past and also reminds us of our distance. Applying this theoretical apparatus, the editors suggest, is the best way to understand the “fraught, conflicted” meanings of beer and the way in which the real and imagined pasts of the craft inform the present (25). For sure, a great strength of the volume is in the multiplicity and complexity of the stories--both in the past and the present--that are told about beer.
Following the introduction, the book is divided into four sections. The first part, “Historical perspectives,” explores the practices of medieval beer and brewing through detailed analysis of the historical record. In its first chapter, Conan Doyle comprehensively sifts the linguistic, toponymic and physical evidence for the production and consumption of ale in pre-Conquest England. Under Doyle’s useful analysis, ale emerges as a drink for all classes, ages and genders, a staple and an essential part of the diet that was produced domestically to a variety of different recipes and far more widely available than wine or mead. Hops may occasionally have been added to some monastic brews under continental influence following the tenth-century reforms, but mostly ale was unhopped and flavoured instead with some combination of herbs.
Following up on this important theme, Susan Verberg’s chapter turns the focus more directly to the question of beer flavourings before the onset of widespread hopping. Herself a brewer, Verberg sets out to address the nature of “gruit,” the celebrated mixture of additives used as a flavouring in the Low Countries prior to the more common adoption of hops in the region in the fourteenth century. Divining gruit’s character has become somewhat of a cause célèbre for modern craft brewers eager to re-create “lost” unhopped beers as an alternative to the heavily-hopped IPAs that dominated in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Verberg, however, cautions against the mythic idea that there existed a heroic--and now unobtainable--herbal recipe and instead addresses the late medieval sources for evidence of likely ingredients. Bog myrtle, marsh rosemary and yarrow are all frequently-cited components by modern brewers trying to re-imagine the “lost” recipe, but Verberg concludes that what was fundamental to gruit was a malt or porridge that fortified the wort, together with botanicals that added flavour.
Fernando Guerrero’s chapter concludes this part, exploring the distinctly unorthodox usage of beer (rather than the canonical wine) in administering Christian sacraments in Norway and Iceland in the thirteenth century. Wine, Guerrero acknowledges, was costly and sometimes hard to obtain in western Scandinavia in the early centuries after Christian conversion, but on top of the logistical issues that militated against its use, he also argues for local culturally-embedded norms that meant that beer could be seen as an appropriate substitute when other drinks were unavailable or too expensive. Using saga evidence, Guerrero suggests a continuity from the toasts drunk in the course of ritual to pagan deities into the Christian period, pointing to an ambiguity or elision of the significance of consumption of wine in Christian communion. To the inhabitants of western Scandinavia in the early centuries after Conversion and before complete Christianisation it was, he suggests, “the act of drinking that was meaningful and symbolic, not the nature of the drink” (103-4).
In the second section, “Nostalgias,” four chapters examine various contexts in which the beer culture of the Middle Ages has become a focus for antiquarian interest. Two concentrate on early modern England, and particularly upon ways in which the memory of the change from unhopped ale to hopped beer was used metaphorically to discuss political and social change: Mary Bateman undertakes an enjoyable and very detailed study of the Ex-Ale-ation of Ale, an English civil war-era song that articulates conservative royalism through a nostalgic and nationalistic discussion of the merits of English ale, which are favourably contrasted with hopped beer, which is portrayed as a recent and undesirable continental innovation. Donovan Tann addresses similar questions in a survey of historical treatments of unhopped ale, hopped beer and cider between 1550 and 1700, a period in which wine, distilled liquors and eventually coffee--all imports from the continent--began to compete for the English palate. The picture presented by these texts is diverse and shifts over the period, generating, as Tann says, “cultural frameworks that could...both affirm national identity and meet consumer desire for foreign products” (221).
The other two chapters in this part address historicising in contemporary craft brewing culture. John A. Geck traces medievalism in the Anglo- and Franco-Canadian brewing scenes, each with their own beer-making traditions that look to their respective European predecessors. Both indulge in nostalgic medievalisms refracted through the romanticised images of nineteenth-century popular culture: Geck explores a number of case-studies of individual breweries in Ontario and Quebec, reflecting on the colonialist thinking and indigenous erasure that is the frequent, if normally unconscious, counterpart of “restorative” nostalgia (120) for the beer of a European medieval world remote in both time and place. Alongside this, though, are more ironic and playful deployments of the “medieval” that self-consciously refuse to engage with its more toxic elements: Geck sees these as models for a more critical and more inclusive engagement with the medieval brewing pasts evoked.
The final chapter of the “Nostalgias” section departs the Anglosphere entirely: Robert A. Saunders focuses on the Labietis Beer Workshop of Riga, Latvia, and on the play which it makes with Latvian paganism. As one of the last regions in Europe to be converted and Christianised, the supposed pagan identity of Latvia was activated as a key component of its distinctiveness and separate identity by romantic nationalist intellectuals in the nineteenth century and during its initial period of independence from Russia in the 1920s. This even saw the creation of a “revived” Latvian ethnic religion, Dievturība. Though actively suppressed under Soviet rule, Dievturība remains significant to Latvian self-conception and now provides both a source of inspiration for Labietis’s brews and a symbolic vocabulary for their marketing.
The third part, “Gender,” starts with Noelle Phillips’s chapter on the extensive use made of the Vikings in branding by breweries around the world, exploiting the extraordinary presence that they maintain in popular culture. Viking medievalism comes all too often, of course, with a considerable burden of noxious baggage, in the form of misogyny and white supremacism, but it is Phillips’s contention that--without minimising these deeply problematic aspects--the playful, ironic and parodic deployment of Vikings by craft brewers successfully undercuts the hypermasculine, ultraviolent figures of popular culture fantasy and forces a questioning of the way in which they have been received and perpetuated. Viking-branded beers and pubs invite consumers from all parts of society to identify with the Vikings through a recognition and enjoyment of the absurd and fantastic qualities attributed to them, creating new communities and reappropriating “the powerful cultural symbol of the Viking in way that opposes its adoption by white nationalist or misogynist groups” (259).
The two other chapters explore the presence and absence of women in beer culture, in each case looking both to the later Middle Ages and to the present day. Carissa M. Harris considers how tapsters--women who sold ale in later medieval alehouses--are stereotyped in English and Scottish literature and law from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries as involved in “sex work, transgression, public harm, and dangerous agency over men” (266). These women were expected not just to serve alcohol cheerfully and promptly, but to give emotional support to their male customers and “to remain sexually accessible even as they face[d] vilification for their sexuality” (271). Turning to the present day, Harris notes that exactly the same misogyny is reproduced in the role defined for serving “wenches” in the North American medievalist restaurant and entertainment chain Medieval Times, and more widely in “breastaurants” (such as the Hooters chain) across the world. Rosemary O’Neill’s chapter also examines the role of women in serving beer as portrayed in late medieval/early modern texts, this time in the character of an alewife in the Harrowing of Hell pageant presented by the Cooks, Innkeepers and Taverners guild in sixteenth-century Chester. Following O’Neill’s analysis, the pageant captures the gradual displacement of women and growing domination of the industry by men as it became more profitable and gained status in the wake of the adoption of hopped beer. Although the alewife is condemned to hell, O’Neill sees her as an equivocal figure of transgressive resistance, and the play as an invitation to join her and her demonic allies in a carnivalesque bacchanal. O’Neill finds parallels in the contemporary beer scene, in the anarchic and playfully diabolical branding of Stone Brewing’s “Arrogant Bastard” ale, and hopes that in its anarchic irreverence, craft brewing can open up more inclusive spaces that can challenge, dismantle and reform the gender categories that have seemed natural to post-medieval beer culture.
In the fourth and final part, “Communities,” three chapters are devoted to beer in its role as a literary device in the making and disrupting of communities. Richard Fahey considers the interestingly mixed treatment of beer and drunkenness in Old English riddles and Anglo-Latin enigmata: rather than a binary of religious, Latin-language condemnation on one hand, and hearty vernacular celebration on the other, Fahey elegantly demonstrates that both bodies of texts offer a more complex balanced treatment of beer that could both eulogise its joys and deplore its drawbacks. Randy Schiff examines the subtle complexities of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s choice of ale as his preferred drink rather than wine, which Schiff interprets as a populist gambit on the character’s part but also as a specific strategy to align and ingratiate himself with the powerful figure of the Host, Harry; in the event it proves vehemently unwanted. Moving to contemporary literature, Anna Czarnowus’s chapter rounds out the section with an examination of the way in which drunkenness and alcohol-related violence are used by the writer Adam Thorpe as a mechanism to alienate and distance a modern audience from a brutal and emphatically un-Disneyfied medieval past in his 2009 revisionist Robin Hood novel, Hodd.
The book is completed by an afterword by Ren Navarro, a craft beer insider and diversity consultant to the Canadian brewing industry, who reviews what has been learnt about both medieval and modern cultures of beer brewing and drinking, looking to the creation of more diverse and inclusive craft brewing communities. A nice feature, this re-iterates the close connections between scholarship, practice, and communities which is a central principle of the collection. Better understanding of the diversity and complexity of cultures of brewing and beer consumption in the past goes hand-in-hand with a more inclusive and welcoming beer and pub industry in the present.
Overall, this is a wide-ranging and absorbing volume that succeeds in the aims it has set itself and forms a useful contribution to understandings of how both beer and the Middle Ages are produced and consumed. The focus on the North American craft beer renaissance that mostly (although not exclusively) prevails gives it a particular coherence and interest as a snapshot of an enthusiastic and exuberant nostalgic medievalism in a very specific place and context: on the other hand, Saunders’s chapter on the medievalism of Latvian brewing hints that North America is only a part of the story: it would be fascinating to see how the picture in the US and Canada compares with beer medievalism in the rather different circumstances of Europe, Latin America and, indeed, the rest of the world. But it seems certain that this collection will excite much research and scholarship to come on beer cultures both past and present; upon that both the editors and contributors are to be warmly congratulated (and perhaps bought a pint?).