Res Obscura

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Kriegsspiel
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Res Obscura

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:13 pm

Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered directly to your table. The thread tying it all together is a new drug from the Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching—called “coffee.”
Perhaps the most famous objection to coffee came from an anonymous source. “The Womens Petition Against Coffee,” a pamphlet issued in London in 1674, is among the most entertaining and vividly-written historical texts that I know of. Like The School of Venus, a 1680 sex manual whose cover displays a group of women crowded around a dildo-merchant, there is something jarringly frank about the petition that I find both funny and illuminating. The basic argument is that coffee was making the men of London unable to satisfy their wives in bed. Here’s a sample of the language it uses:

We have read, how a Prince of Spain was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times a night; but Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone… For the continual flipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-points without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.
This cool website
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