This statement echoes through time – who among us has not used chocolate as a temporary cure for the blues? – but it was written in 1687 by Anne Dormer (c. 1648–1695), in a letter to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull.
Dormer had every reason to feel “sad to death.” Her husband was extremely abusive and controlling, her beloved sister had left England to travel with her diplomat husband, and she suffered from insomnia and melancholy. She described her use of medicinals to treat these conditions throughout her correspondence, including multiple mentions of her use of chocolate and its beneficial impact on her health and her mood.
A Lady Pouring Chocolate by Jean-Étienne Liotard (1744). Wikimedia.
In September 1687 she wrote: “when I have great want of sleepe and no company but a sick maide and a most preverss unreasonable Husband, I then divert myself with my two sweete children, think of all my kind friends and take a dish of chocolate which I find the greatest cordiall and reviveing in the world.” Six months later, in April 1688, she even went as far as claiming that she drank chocolate every day during the winter, which she credited with the substantial improvement in her health.[1]
By the late seventeenth-century, chocolate was fairly well established in England. It had first been introduced around 1640, with efforts made to promote its medical benefits. By 1652 it was possible for a writer to claim (albeit with some exaggeration) that chocolate was “thirsted after by people of all Degrees (especially those of the Female sex) either for the Pleasure therein naturally Residing, to Cure, and divert Diseases.”[2]Initially, chocolate’s medicinal properties were questioned, as it didn’t fit well into the categories of Galenic medicine. By the late seventeenth-century, however, it was often described as a type of panacea.[3]
So it’s not very surprising that Anne Dormer, a gentlewoman with some ties to the Continent (where chocolate consumption had begun earlier), was drinking chocolate on a regular basis in the 1680s. What is more interesting is her juxtaposition of chocolate to another substance which was consumed for both medicine and pleasure: wine.
A silver wine cup, ca. 1660, made in Boston. Currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image on Open Access.
Wine was considered a standard medical substance in the early modern period, and while it was to be consumed in moderation, it was a part of most diets, certainly for the upper classes, and was also a key ingredient in many medical recipes. Even at the height of Puritan fervor in the mid-seventeenth-century, drunkenness was criticized but the moderate consumption of wine was not seen as moral problem and was taken for granted. Movements calling for complete abstinence from alcohol emerged much later. Yet for Dormer wine appeared to be a risk, and she used it with extreme caution.
Part of Dormer’s concern was the strength of the wine and its impact on her body, which had never properly recovered from childbirth. In the letter from September she noted that she was “weary of sack [cheaper wine from Spain, Portugal, and their Atlantic colonies]”, but she found French wine was “too rakeing for my carcase which grows still leaner.” Dormer rarely drank wine, and when she did the quantity “never exceeds six spoonfulls.” In a later letter she even mentioned that she had “a little dish” for the purpose of measuring drink, which “holds just three spoonfulls which is my usuall dosse”.
Silver chocolate pot made in 1697-98 by Isaac Dighton, London. Currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image on Open Access.
Beyond her concern about wine’s physical affects, however, Dormer was preoccupied with wine’s potential for addiction, and perhaps even for moral corruption. While not avoiding wine altogether, she felt wine drinking was risky, especially if done in solitude. “I am sure there is no danger I should ever love wine to sitt and sip by my self,” she wrote, “…w[h]ich is a greate content to my mind, for did I love it, I would never touch a dropp.” She also noted that she consumed her medicinal sherry in the presence of her husband, after dinner, echoing the advice that appeared much later in Benjamin Rush’s exploration of liquor and its effects published in 1790. Rush suggested that wine gave “cheerfulness and strength”, but only when consumed in moderation during mealtimes. Chocolate, on the other hand, was a safe alternative. It gave her “spirits and strength”, which she would never have gotten successfully from wine, since consuming it in any large quantities would have been “a continuall torment to my mind.”
It is unclear why Dormer was concerned about “loving” wine. It’s possible she had previous episodes of drunkenness, as she noted that drinking wine in front of her husband might lead to him almost believing “I may be trusted with it.” Given her husband’s general abusive control of her, however, it’s quite possible that he claimed he couldn’t trust her around wine with no relation to her own actions. Whatever the reason for her worries about wine, Dormer’s letters offer an interesting example of the everyday use of chocolate as a medication, as well as of the suggestion that chocolate might be a better alternative – morally as well as medically – to the consumption of alcohol.
[1] BL Add MS 72516, ff. 163-163v., 167v., 177-177v.
[2] Quoted in Kate Loveman, “The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers, 1640–1730,” Journal of Social History 47:1 (2013): 27-46.
[3] Ken Albala, “The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in 17th Century Medical Theory,” Food and Foodways, 15:1-2 (2007): 53-74.
“The fower quarters of the yeare: Autumne,” (London, 1643) ART 232- 608.3, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Ars longa, vita brevis, as you hear every day in the tearoom at the Folger Shakespeare Library. This Christmas at the Folger I made a discovery which made me feel young: Erasmus’s favourite wine! The thought had been with me since I heard a disputation at the British Academy, years ago, between Eamon Duffy and Diarmaid MacCulloch. All of a sudden, for once they agreed on something: that the Reformation was essentially a quarrel between beer-drinkers and wine-drinkers. You will be glad to know that the new Encyclopaedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation (New York, 2017) has a learned entry on Beer. And as Duffy and MacCulloch wound down into post-symposium revelries, already an Erasmian colloquium was forming in my mind, on whether Erasmus was a beer-drinker or a wine-drinker. After all, he was born in Holland, one of the great beer-drinking countries of the world, which even invented the world’s best drinking snack, bitterballen, precisely to go with monastic ales.
Frans Huys, Magnus ille Erasmus Roterodamus… (n.d.) ART Vol. a11 no.105, Folger Shakespeare Library.
On the other hand, I felt sure that Erasmus preferred wine, just as, despite espousing reform, and flirting with the young Luther, he remained a life-long Catholic. Familiaria colloquia (1522) – where else – provides a definitive answer. It comes in the Convivium profanum, a dialogue between a variety of characters (chiefly Augustinus, Christianus, and Erasmius), who vie with each other in gluttony, and in describing foods and wines beloved of gourmets (or else people who just eat a lot). There are jokes at the expense of Stoics and other moralists, and worst of all, Diogenes the Cynic, who lived off raw vegetables and clear water. Kale, quinoa, and mesclun, are definitely off the menu at this particular feast.
Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum… (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy of the author.
At this point, Christianus asks what his friend likes to drink with a meal: does he prefer red or white (rubrum an candidum)? Augustinus replies: “The colour’s no hindrance provided the taste’s agreeable” (a classic wino’s quip). But something else is going on: how do we use words to describe sensory things? Verbal discrimination is deliberately elided by Erasmus into distinctions of taste, since food – and especially wine – is famously hard to put into apt words, at least without resorting to absurd metaphor. Christianus comments: “Yet there are famous gourmets who deny that wine deserves approval unless it pleases the four senses: the eyes by its colour, the nostrils by its fragrance, the palate by its taste, the ears by its name and fame.” Now he drops his foodie bombshell: Tantum, ut multi non stupidi palati vehementer probarint villum Louanio vernaculum quum crederent, esse Belnense. Many people with “not stupid palates” can’t tell a wine from Louvain from one of Beaune in Burgundy.
Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum… (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy of the author.
This is the joke that got me salivating. At first I thought it was a beer gag: because in Louvain these days you will not find Belgian wine (the very idea is an oxymoron) but plenty of Belgian beer, including Bourgogne de Flandres (which sounds like an Erasmian trope). But in the fifteenth century, the Dukes of Burgundy planted vines in their territories at Brussels, Namur, Mons, and Louvain. Still, the thought brings a sneer to the nose of Erasmus: who could make such a terrible mistake? And there is a theological joke, too: Louvain is home to the nastiest scholastics.
[Guide gastronomique [3]:Le troubadour, Louvain (nr. KU) – mussels with Bourgogne de Flandres]
So, is Beaune Erasmus’s favourite wine? Here I digress into a visite du vignoble via P.S. Allen’s great edition of Erasmus’s letters. Epistola 1342 to Marcus Laurinus is one of the most extraordinary in the 3000 letters that survive. Half of it is a defence of his position on the Luther affair, which was convulsing Europe; the other half is an itinerary of his odyssey around Europe in 1521, especially an uncomfortable stay in Constance and a long convalescence in Basel. In Constance he was very ill with fever and the gallstone, and nearly died (before we feel too sorry, remember that Erasmus is always nearly dying of something). But on return to Basel he is sent a half-cask of red Burgundy by Nikolaus von Diesbach, dean and bishop-designate. Erasmus makes a miraculous recovery: he felt reborn, renatus in alium hominem. Is this a sly dig at Luther, in a letter which is all about Luther’s evangelical doctrines, and how they are worse than any disease? Especially when he now claims that red Burgundy has had a direct medicinal benefit observed by the doctors, who say that his stone has disappeared. Happy is the name of Burgundy, he raptures: O felicem vel hoc nomine Burgundiam! In another letter he calls the wine a deus ex machina. He might move to France tomorrow, except that with fresh supplies he will not need to, as he reports in Ep. 1510, a year later: “I have done a deal with the vintner for three half-casks, one of old wine and two of new”.
Can we locate what particular wine might have brought such magical results? Here we encounter a great aporia in epicurean history, which is that the technological revolutions of the eighteenth century – in bottling and especially in corks – mean that we judge wine by completely different standards. Beaune, with its beautiful coloured rooftops, is now the commercial centre of a multi-million-Euro industry. Wine is a science (oenology, a word Erasmus surely must have invented) which went from France to California and back again, transforming an everyday drink into the wine-tasting superlatives of today. Red Burgundy, some connoisseurs say, has typical aromas of horseshit [sic] and blackberry jam. What would Erasmus have made of that? I think he would have loved it, and cited it in De copia, his great book which makes a philosophical marriage between all the possible words, and all possible things in the world. But what did he taste? There are three references in the letters to a wine from Beaune, which seems to be the one he liked best; it “was of a most agreeable colour – you might call it ruby-red”; the taste was “neither sweet nor dry”, “neither cold nor fiery”, and so kind to the digestion that “it did very little harm” – even when taken in quantity.
Thomas Trevilian, Detail of grapes from the Trevelyon Miscellany (1608), V.b.232, Folger Shakespeare Library.
The mythology of French wine is based on a holy trinity of values: the grape; the vintage; and most mystical of all, leterroir. This untranslateable word means something like “all the best wine comes from France”. White wine in Burgundy is now dominated by the Chardonnay grape, which in unoaked form is still perhaps the most opulently elegant white in the world; but in Erasmus’s time almost certainly the whites of Burgundy were made from the Fromenteau grape, perhaps equivalent to Pinot Gris. As for reds, on the other hand, we have documentation: on 6 August 1395, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, made the political decision of his life in banning the “vile and disloyal Gamay”, and giving precedence to the Noirien, a less high-yielding grape. This is the ancestor of the modern Pinot Noir, that most quixotic and awkward of grapes. For those who love it, it is the cutest grape in history, but it is very hard to grow in abundance, and likes poor soil, cool climates, and fairly steep hills. Since these are also the conditions that wipe out harvests in bad years, the Pinot Noir is a cruel mistress, although it has found renewed success in chillier areas such as Oregon, New Zealand, and Alpine Italy, as well as its native Burgundy. However, good red Burgundy also needs a bit of age in the bottle to develop its flavours, and nothing about wine storage in Erasmus’s time was much suited to ageing. He describes liking wine with a bit of age (perhaps two years), but after four he says most of the flavour has disappeared.
We are left with terroir. The intensity of the modern wine trade is such that individual parcels of land perhaps 30 metres wide are prized as having such a particularity of flavour that they are considered quite distinct from others only a hundred metres away. It is possible that for Erasmus “Beaune” meant nothing like that. Belnense might be a generic name for wine of the whole region, somewhat like “Bordeaux” or “Sonoma”. But it is also possible that Erasmus does mean the name of this particular village. So could we find his wine on a map? It got me thinking, and indeed googling, looking at wine maps, which have always given me a special kind of pleasure. There is something cartographically exciting about a wine map: all of those tiny parcels of land, and weird names, coloured in crimson for red wine, or yellow-green for white; in the case of Burgundy, with darker shading, the better the wine. So I googled this.
Screen capture courtesy of https://burgmap.com/regions/beaune/.
And it got me thinking: if any of these vineyards are really old, they will be close to the town but not part of it; for instance, those near the cemetery. The cemetery will always have been in the same place. And here I was excited, because there on the map, at just that point, were some vineyards I knew the names of: “Toussaints”, “les Bressandes”, “les Cent Vignes”. Not really expensive wines – but of a price which a father, shall we say my own father, might buy his son for his 40th birthday.
The last bottle from my father’s gift. Image courtesy of the author.
For here the strands of my story had become personal. My father, who was a complicated man, was always happiest when opening a bottle of red Burgundy with his own family. He discovered Burgundy, place and wine, when I was in my teens. We used to stay at an unpretentious hotel in one of the smaller villages, Fixin – Beaune even then was hopelessly expensive and chic. The hôtel was called (as almost all nice Logis de France are, at least in the memory) Chez Jeannette, and we would stay for a week, and each night my father would buy a slightly better wine. He wasn’t buying the most expensive stuff, and Burgundy was then still quite a backwater for most travellers, nothing like the Côte d’Azur. In memory of these trips, when I was 40, he did indeed buy me 12 bottles of Beaune, “Les Cent Vignes”, made by Albert Morot, an extremely traditional negociant.
How did these vineyards get such beautiful names? Originally, the story goes, it was “Sans Vignes”, because no wine was made there; then they planted vines and changed the name. “Les Bressandes” is either named after the 13th century canon, Johannis Bressand – or else after the women of Bresse. “Les Marconnets” perhaps refers to an ancient gallic tribe conquered by the Romans.
Such etymologies are very Erasmian. It would be nice to believe in an Erasmian vineyard. It is not impossible – for it was the Benedictines from Cluny who first began cultivating wines on a large scale, and the Cistercians who first walled off individual vineyards and prized the difference between small parcels of terroir. They were doing this in the 14th century. But the oldest map of Burgundian wine, to my knowledge, is 18th century. It offers nothing at this level of detail, consisting of a range of small mountains and the names of the main villages.
Claude Arnoux, “Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne…” (London, 1728). Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon.
It is appended to the first ever book on Burgundy, by Claude Arnoux: Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne, et sur les vins qu’elle produit (1728). He mentions four vineyards in Beaune, St Desiré, la Montée, les Grèves, and la Fontaine de Marconney. Traces of all these can still be found – the last is now Les Marconnets, above. Arnoux favours even more the wines of Volnet (now Volnay) and Pommard. Wines from Beaune, he says, much as Erasmus does, do not do well after two years of age. Volnay, he says, has the colour of l’oeil de perdrix – the eye of a partridge – and goes on: “il est plein de feu, de montant, & de legereté; il est presque tout esprit” (“it is full of fire, of flavour, and of lightness; it is almost all spirit”). Just like in Erasmus, Arnoux presents us with the problem of copia: how to represent things in words. Word is added to word, to express through variety of language the abundance of matter. Wine, like language, is a cornucopia. And so, as we continue to try, and fail, to give expression to sense perception through metaphor, there is nothing for it but to open another bottle, and wonder if it might be, as for Erasmus, a cure for life’s ills or even a deus ex machina.
Brian Cummings FBA is Anniversary Professor at the University of York in the Department of English and Related Literature. His books include Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (OUP, 2013), and an edition of The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, which appeared in Oxford Worlds Classics in 2013. In 2012 he gave the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University on ‘Bibliophobia’, and in 2014 the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Library, coinciding with a NEH-sponsored conference on Shakespeare’s Biography. With Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) he is leading the project “Remembering the Reformation”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2016 to 2019. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
A well-known fresco from the household shrine of the House of the Centenary at Pompeii shows Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, standing at the foot of Vesuvius. This, in conjunction with the substantial amount of archaeological evidence for viticulture in the Campania region, gives us an insight into the importance of wine in ancient Roman culture and society, not to mention the ancient Roman economy. For those in possession of agricultural estates, wine was relatively easy to make and store, and for those who were not, it was readily available to buy. Wine could be drunk at all hours of the day and night, and depending on the occasion could be mixed with honey (mulsum) or spices (conditum), or diluted (either with water or with snow, depending on your budget). However, the Roman appreciation of wine went beyond its role as a beverage, whether taken in conjunction with a meal, or on its own.
Pliny the Elder, writing shortly before his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, stated that ‘grapes hold such an important place among [medicines] that they act as remedies in themselves, merely by supplying wine’ (Natural History 14.3.19). Recipes for wine that survive from the ancient world indicate that certain types were specifically designed to serve as medicaments, whether taken internally as potions, and externally as lotions, and, interestingly, these recipes are not only found in straightforwardly medical treatises, such as Oribasius’ Medical Collections (c. 325-400 CE).
Cato the Elder’s On Agriculture (c. 160 BCE) makes the importance of viticulture in the Italian economy clear, going so far as to state that, in Cato’s opinion, a vineyard was the best sort of agricultural estate to possess (1.7). It contains a number of recipes for different types of wine, and many of these are explicitly medicinal, designed to deal with common medical problems that might arise on an isolated farmstead, such as constipation, retention of urine, indigestion, colic, and internal parasites, by utilising accessible plants as ingredients, such as hellebore, juniper, and myrtle.
Columella’s On Agriculture (first century CE) also recommends myrtle wine for a wide range of complaints, and states that, in Columella’s opinion, it is the type of wine most beneficial to health (12.38.7). Additionally, horehound, squill, and pennyroyal wines are recommended for coughs (12.32, 33, 35) – in fact, an amphora once containing horehound wine has been recovered from the Roman fort at Carpow in Scotland, and it was perhaps used by soldiers for its medicinal properties in order to treat the colds they acquired while serving in the damp province.
Drunken old woman statue, a first century CE Roman copy of a third century BCE Hellenistic original. Credit: Bockschuss, Flickr.
However, while the Romans appreciated that certain types of wine could be beneficial to health, they also recognised that too much of any type of wine could be detrimental to health. Lucretius asked: ‘why, when the sharp power of wine has penetrated into a man … does heaviness come upon the limbs, do his legs impede him as he staggers, does his speech become slurred, his mind become soaked, his eyes swim?’ (On the Nature of Things 3.476-82, early first century BCE). Excessive drinking and drunkenness were frowned upon in both men and women, and just as hellebore could be added to wine to make a purgative, it was also believed to cure the madness brought on by excessive drinking…
Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE) is often presented as the archetypal example of the ancient Roman head of the household taking charge of his family members’ health, the result of claims made by Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his encyclopaedia Natural History:
For [Cato] adds the medical treatment by which he prolonged his own life and that of his wife to an advanced age, by these very remedies in fact with which I am now dealing, and he claims to have a notebook of recipes, by the aid of which he treated his son, servants, and household.
[Pliny, Natural History 29.8.15]
A bucolic scene featuring a walled garden, Red Room, Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Boscoreale
The Greek historian Plutarch (c. 40-120 CE) offers more detail in his Parallel Lives, describing Cato’s theories, methods and practices, which show strong parallels with those utilised by the period’s physicians:
[Cato] had written a book of recipes, which he followed in the treatment and regimen of any who were sick in his family. He never required his patients to fast, but fed them on greens, or bits of duck, pigeon, or hare. Such a diet, he said, was light and good for sick people, except that it often causes dreams. By following such treatment and regimen he said he had good health himself, and kept his family in good health. [Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder 23.4]
Both Pliny and Plutarch offer Cato’s longevity as proof of his medical capabilities, at least in respect of himself (his wife and one of his sons predeceased him). Unfortunately, Cato’s book of recipes has not survived. What has is his treatise On Agriculture, the very first such work to be written in Latin, which dates to around 160 BCE. The treatise was directed at a very specific audience: young men who, thanks to Rome’s recent triumph in the Second Punic War, were in a position to purchase fertile agricultural land in central Italy, along with sufficient slaves to enable them to cultivate grapes and olives in order to produce wine and oil for sale, but who were not in possession of sufficient knowledge or experience as to how to proceed beyond that. The priority is economic self-sufficiency and investment potential, with as much as possible being produced on the estate, for use on the estate, hence the prominent place the garden takes in Cato’s list of requirements: a garden can be used to grow fruit, vegetables, flowers, and herbs not only for food, but also for medicine.
The prescriptions and recipes found in On Agriculture indicate that, in addition to acting as a healer for the human members of his household, Cato also acted as a veterinarian for his livestock (oxen, cattle, and sheep are all mentioned specifically), and recommended that others do the same. Throughout the text the authority of the master – which, it is made clear, results from a combination of knowledge and experience – is emphasised, as is the importance of drawing upon the resources immediately to hand, those grown on the estate, predominantly in the garden. Of Cato’s numerous prescriptions and recipes for the treatment of both humans and animals, the ingredients required are all those which he either explicitly states were cultivated within his garden, or were likely to have been.
Pomegranates, Garden Room, Villa of Livia, Prima Porta
In conjunction with Cato’s recommendation that, if an estate is located near a town, the garden should be used to cultivate flowers for garlands, he lists those he considers to be the most suitable: ‘white and black myrtle, Delphian, Cyprian, and wild laurel, smooth nuts, such as Abellan, Praenestine, and Greek filberts’ (On Agriculture 8.2). Elsewhere in the treatise, laurel leaves appear in a recipe for a tonic for oxen, while black myrtle is a main ingredient in a recipe for indigestion and colic (On Agriculture 70 and 125). In a remedy for indigestion and strangury, he includes pomegranates, instructing his reader to ‘gather pomegranate blossoms when they open’, thus implying that these plants were within easy reach (On Agriculture 127). Pomegranates also appear in a recipe for ‘gripes, for loose bowels, for tapeworms and stomach-worms, if troublesome’ (On Agriculture 126). The wine and oil produced on the estate are also frequently enlisted in Cato’s medicaments, both as primary and secondary ingredients. With regard to wine, the addition of black hellebore is recommended to make a laxative, while that of juniper is recommended to treat the retention of urine, and gout, while the amurca that results from the production of olive oil is enlisted (along with wine) as a treatment for scab in sheep (On Agriculture 114, 115, 122, 123, 96).
It would appear that in respect of domestic medical practice, Cato very much practiced what he preached!
