The Dedalus Book of Gin E-Book

Richard Barnett

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From the tyranny of madame Geneva to the doomed romance of Casablanca, this is a cultural history with a twist.

Das E-Book The Dedalus Book of Gin wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

The defining image of the gin craze: William Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’, 1751.

William Hogarth’s ‘Beer Street’, 1751. The companion piece to ‘Gin Lane’, less well-known but just as loaded with moral meaning.

To Matthew Barnett

London’s Victorian gin palaces: gaily lit and full of bustling conviviality, but also the setting for violence, obscenity and despair. ‘Scene in a London Gin Palace’, The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, vol 1 no 4, 25 Oct 1851, p 56.

Acknowledgements

For friendship, guidance, expertise, and material which I would otherwise have missed, my heartfelt thanks to Elma Brenner, Rosalind Draper, Geoffrey Elborn, Caroline Essex (especially), David Allan Feller, Alex Hammond, Patricia Hammond, Anne Hardy, Phoebe Harkins, Theresia Hofer, Tom Gillmor, Mike Jay, Allison Ksiazkiewicz, Eric Lane, Marie Lane, Ross MacFarlane, Bill MacLehose, Joanne McKerchar, Anna Morgan, Michael Neve, Mark Pilkington, Kelley Swain, Thea Vidnes, Hannah Westland, Caitlin Wylie, and the staff of the Bishopsgate Library, the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Wellcome Library. Thanks also to my colleagues and students on the 2011 Pembroke / Kings International Programme, Cambridge, for creating a thoroughly congenial atmosphere in which to finish the first draft.

I am indebted to several writers who have mapped aspects of this territory in their work: Phil Baker, Jared Brown, Peter Clark, Geraldine Coates, Patrick Dillon, Lowell Edmunds, Iain Gateley, Ted Haigh, Brian Harrison, Mack P. Holt, Anistatia Miller, and Jessica Warner. It goes without saying that my errors are not their fault.

The photograph of Jared Brown and the Sipsmith’s Gin still appears by kind permission of Sipsmith Independent Spirits, and is copyright © Sipsmith Independent Spirits.

The extract from ‘Casino Royale’ by Ian Fleming is reproduced with the permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, London, www. ianfleming.com, and is copyright © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1953.

The extracts from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1949) are reproduced by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

The images on pages 125, 154, 206, 231 and 249 have been reproduced courtesy of Diageo plc, owners of the GORDON’S® and TANQUERAY® brands.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue – The Murder of Mrs Atkinson

1. Living Water

2. Rough Spirits

3. The Infernal Principle

4. From Chinchón to Martinez

5. The Silver Bullet

Epilogue – Gin Renaissance

Appendix One – Selected Texts

Appendix Two – The Hogarth Sampler

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Juniper – sacred herb, medicine, and one of the two crucial ingredients in gin. ‘Juniperus communis’, from Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, 3 vols, Berlin, 1897.

Prologue

The Murder of Mrs Atkinson

On the morning of Wednesday 23rd February 1732 a prisoner was brought up from the dank, cramped cells of Newgate Prison into the open-fronted courthouse of London’s Old Bailey. Robert Atkinson – a leather-worker from the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields – was on trial for his life, and he knew that, if found guilty, he would be hanged before the crowd at Tyburn. Atkinson stood accused, in the eighteenth century’s vivid, precise legal language, of murdering his mother:

by throwing her down a pair of Stairs, upon a Pavement of Tiles below, and by which fall her Skull was broke, and she receiv’d one mortal Bruise, of which she instantly dy’d, the 15th of this Instant February.

The case against Atkinson seems, at first glance, to have been unanswerable. He lived with his mother, Ann, and her maidservant, Mary, in rooms above his shop. Mary testified that on the night of the crime, she had gone to bed just after midnight, but her mistress had stayed up to let her son in when he returned. Woken in the small hours by Atkinson battering on the front door, she heard him bellow ‘Damn ye, ye old bitch, do ye think I’ll be lock’d up in my own House?’ Ann let him in, entreating him to go quietly to bed, but he had other things on his mind. He burst into Mary’s room:

I was very much frighted, for he was stark naked without his Shirt. Sir, says I, you had much better go to Bed: No, says he, I will have a Buss first. He came to my Bed-side, and as he did not offer any Rudeness, I suffer’d him to kiss me once or twice, in hopes that he would then go away. But instead of that, he got upon the Bed (outside the Bed-Clothes) and lay upon me very hard, and endeavour’d to put his Hands into the Bed, but with much difficulty I kept them out.

At this moment his mother entered the room, catching her son on the cusp of a bodice-ripping violation: ‘You Dog, said she, what business have you upon the Maid’s Bed?’ Atkinson turned on her, and she tried to slip past him into a cupboard, but he seized her and threw her out of the room. Mary did not see the rest of the incident: she heard ‘a great Scuffle, and a Struggling in the Passage at the Stairs Head as if he was running after her, and she was endeavouring to get away from him’. In the next moment Ann tumbled down the stairs with such violence ‘as if Part of the House had fall’n with her’. After this she made no sound, not even a groan.

How could Atkinson possibly justify his actions? A coroner’s inquest had indicted him for murder, and he did not dispute that his mother had died after a brutal quarrel. Indeed, in the heat of the moment he appeared to have admitted his guilt. Seeing his mother lying at the foot of the stairs, he cried out ‘Damn the old Bitch, I have murder’d her, and I shall hang for it’. Atkinson’s defence hinged upon intoxication, and no ordinary intoxication – the vicious, malevolent haze induced by gin. Cross-examining Mary, he forced her to admit that her mistress was a regular and heavy drinker, who had rounded off her last evening on earth with ‘half a Pint of Gin and Bitter (I think they call it)’. Mary fought back – ‘I know she would drink a great deal; but she was so much used to it, that it would hardly disorder her’ – but she acknowledged that Ann was almost dead drunk by the time he had returned. And Atkinson himself had spent the night in a circuit of local taverns and gin-shops, enjoying a binge which had, he admitted, inflamed his ‘great Passion’.

Gin, it seems, enabled Atkinson to get away with murder. The jury found him not guilty, concluding that his mother’s death was not even manslaughter but a mere accident, and he left the dock a free man. And this episode of gin-fuelled violence was far from unique. Leaf through the Newgate Calendar, the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts or the Proceedings of the Old Bailey for any year in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and you will find dozens of similar examples. To many of Atkinson’s contemporaries, these cases proved that English law and society were dissolving in a flood of cheap gin. This episode – the ‘gin craze’ – has had a profound effect on our historical perceptions of gin, but it also captures a truth central to the story of this book. Gin is not (like absinthe) the drink of velvet-trousered aesthetes, nor is it (like port) the toast of respectable merchants and scholars, nor (like ale) the refreshment of peasants in the meadows of ‘Merry England’. It is urban, and it possesses – or has been said to possess – all the vices and virtues of urban life.

What is gin, this liquid fire both pleasurable and deadly? One place to start is with Atkinson’s and Hogarth’s contemporary, Samuel Johnson. In his mighty Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, Johnson defined ‘gin (contracted from GENEVA)’ as ‘the spirit drawn by distillation from juniper berries’. As any modern master distiller will tell you, Johnson slightly missed his mark here: gin is not distilled from juniper berries, but is rather a neutral spirit flavoured principally (though not exclusively) with juniper. The best base spirit is produced from grain or maize, though it can be (and has been) made from almost anything that contains enough carbohydrate to produce alcohol when it ferments. It is rectified, or, in other words, distilled at least twice – once or more to produce the base spirit, and once or more with juniper berries and other botanicals to develop the flavour. And it is un-aged – no years or decades in sherry casks, but as near as possible straight from the still into the bottle.

Even this straightforward definition, however, conceals a rich and diverse history. Modern premium gins are flavoured with up to a dozen botanicals (of which much more later), but for Arthur Hassall, a Victorian physician obsessed with food adulteration, almost anything apart from juniper counted as a potentially hazardous impurity. In much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gin the juniper was replaced entirely by a zingy combination of turpentine and sulphuric acid. And in what we might recognise as its very earliest incarnation – a fortifying cordial made at monastic medical schools in eleventh-century Italy – an aqua vita distilled from wine was combined with juniper oil to make gin at its most potent and most basic.

But definitions are, in a sense, a distraction. The point is that gin’s proverbial clarity, like a prism of clear glass, refracts a rainbow of historical colour. To tell the story of gin is to follow the fortunes of alchemical secrets and scientific treatises, royal houses and poor migrants, armies and navies, fashions and diseases, as they have moved around Europe and across the globe. It is a tale with ethical and philosophical overtones, an anatomy of pleasure and pain, revealing how we have got to grips with outcasts, drunks and criminals, how we have comforted ourselves when times were tough, and how we have aspired to elegance and modernity when life was good.

Gin is the grandchild of the alchemists’ elixir of life, and it came of age in a series of world-changing collisions. It first achieved popularity in two Protestant powers with connections around the (known) world – England and Holland – and the contours of its consumption reflected the cultural and geographical watershed separating the cold, Protestant, grain-fed north from the warm, Catholic, vinous south. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution gin, like tea, was a modish and exotic commodity, but by the mid-eighteenth century William Hogarth was portraying ‘Gin Lane’ as the corrosive, subversive antithesis of ‘Beer Street’. Nineteenth-century writers like Dickens saw gin as the handmaiden of squalor, melodramatic poverty and the workhouse. And in the early twentieth century it gained powerful new enemies, in the shape of the Prohibition movement: for a few turbulent years of US history, ‘bathtub gin’ was the order of the day.

But gin has always enjoyed multiple lives, and its mystique – the enigma of secret recipes and the alluring tang of botanical flavourings – has helped to carry its influence around the world. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traders and explorers carried gin with them to Africa, Asia and South America. As a way of making the daily dose of bitter quinine more palatable, gin and tonic became the tipple of choice for colonial soldiers, planters and bureaucrats. They and their descendents carried the habit back to the mother country, where it chimed with a new fashion for drinking mixed cocktails rather than straight shots of spirit. Shipwrights and factory hands swigged beer; Europhiles sipped wine; but the (sub)urban smart set drank gin with tonic, vermouth, bitters or a whole happy hour of mixers.

In the early twenty-first century gin has come full circle: once a drink of the rich, then a drink of the poor, it is again in vogue, having experienced a striking renaissance with the growth of small-batch distilling and the revival of Thirties and Fifties couture, décor and drinks. But this dissolute tale of consumption and excess begins with the alchemical laboratories of Dark Age Europe, the precepts of Classical medicine, and the sacred rituals of pre-Christian Europe.

For nineteenth-century temperance campaigners, gin and other spirits were the last step on a long journey into degradation and squalor. Nathaniel Currier, ‘The Drunkard’s Progress, from the First Glass to the Grave’, c. 1846.

1

Living Water

Some time before 1310 Arnaud de Ville-Neuve, a physician and alchemist at the University of Paris, poured wine into a glass alembic and heated it in a sand bath over a charcoal brazier. Ville-Neuve was not the first person in the world, or even in Europe, to do this: he was well aware of the long and distinguished tradition of Arabic alchemical distillation, and from his reading he must have had some inkling of the principles he was playing with. Others had already named the fluid which condensed in the neck of his alembic: some called it aqua ardens, ‘fiery water’, or aqua vine, ‘water of the grape’, but to Ville-Neuve it was aqua vita, ‘living water’:

This name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. Its virtues are beginning to be recognised, it prolongs life, clears away ill-humours, revives the heart, and maintains youth.

Ville-Neuve wondered whether this liquid might be the essence of sunshine, distilled by vines into their grapes. And his ‘living water’ captured the imaginations of all kinds of Europeans: gentlemen pursuing natural philosophy in their private closets, physicians seeking new medicines and restoratives, alchemists searching for the elixir of life, and (not least) tradesmen looking to make money from the basic, visceral human drive for intoxication. It was instrumental in forging new connections between alchemy and medicine, politics and religion, trade and empire, East and West. These factors all came together in the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and one result of this fruitful collision was ‘genever’ – a rectified liquor named after its principal flavouring, juniper. It was once argued that this rich, rough drink was the creation of one man, Sylvius de la Boë – a deeply contentious point, as we’ll see. But the early history of gin (the subject of this chapter) is much more than a flash of inspiration in the laboratory of an Amsterdam physician. It is the gradual coming-together of two heady, symbolically-charged substances – juniper and spirit – both of which had many adventures before they were united in a glass of genever.

But why was genever – the first incarnation of gin, born in an age of global trade and exchange – flavoured with the berries of a plant well-known throughout the West for millennia? The solution to this puzzle takes us back through the depths of European prehistory to the end of the last ice age. Around twelve thousand years ago, as the glaciers and tundra began to retreat, juniper and other conifers began to spread north alongside bands of Neolithic farmers. This double migration established the earliest rhythms of a relationship: juniper thrived in the open heaths and moorlands created by farmers, as they began to clear the primeval forests of northern Europe and the British archipelago. Archaeological evidence suggests that juniper quickly found its way into the diets of these pastoralists, and traces of this ancient taste can be discerned in the traditional cuisines of Scandinavia, Germany and the Low Countries. The berries (actually tiny, fleshy cones) balance a resinous, balsamic warmth with a fresh, citrus clarity, which cuts through the richness of dark meats and game.

A handful of berries might be thrown into a prehistoric communal cooking-pot, but juniper also added a refreshing tang to the drinks of early Europeans. Finnish sahti – a beer flavoured with juniper berries instead of hops, and filtered through juniper twigs – has been brewed since the sixteenth century (and possibly much earlier), making it the only medieval-style beer still widely drunk in Europe. Slovak borovička, a juniper brandy, has been drunk throughout the former states of the Habsburg empire for at least seven hundred years. And there are reports, though little firm evidence, that some Scottish Highland clans drank juniper-flavoured whisky, and used fires kindled with juniper sticks to heat their pot-stills.

But its culinary use was only one aspect of juniper’s significance, and evidence from the earliest literate cultures reveals a parallel strand of sacred symbolism and healing power. For the Syrian Canaanites juniper was associated with the fertility goddess Ashera, and it makes many appearances in the Old Testament, typically as a sign of protection and fruitfulness. King Solomon built the first Temple from juniper and cedar wood, and in the Apocrypha a juniper tree was said to have sheltered the Holy Family as they fled from Herod’s troops. In other Middle Eastern cultures juniper’s religious and medical virtues were seen to be intertwined: the crushed berries were one ingredient in the salves used for embalming in ancient Egyptian funerary rites, and Egyptian medical papyri recommended the berries and needles as a treatment for tapeworm infestation.

In AD50 the Roman physician Pedanius Dioscorides brought together the various Mediterranean medical traditions involving juniper in his De Materia Medica. Unlike so many other Classical texts, this remained in continuous circulation and use throughout the West for more than a thousand years, and served as the standard pharmacopoeia for European physicians until the sixteenth century. Dioscorides recommended the application of crushed juniper berries to the genitals as an effective form of contraception, and also lauded the fumigant virtues of its needles and twigs. Producing an aromatic smoke when burned, they might drive out the miasmas thought to be responsible for many epidemics. This view led some medieval physicians to include juniper berries and twigs in the long, beaklike masks they wore when attending the victims of the Black Death.

Almost fifteen hundred years after De Materia Medica, a self-proclaimed successor to Dioscorides – the seventeenth-century English apothecary Thomas Culpeper – continued to insist upon the therapeutic value of juniper. Culpeper inherited the Classical tradition of Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides, but he also brought a radical twist to their thinking. His experiences serving as a surgeon with the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War convinced him that the secrets of effective medicines should not be concealed within the pages of expensive Latin tomes, but should be available to all – a dangerously extreme position even at a time when, in Christopher Hill’s phrase, the world had been turned upside down by the execution of Charles I. Culpeper described his English Physitian, published in 1652 after the end of the war, as:

a Compleat Method of Physick, whereby a man may preserve his Body in Health; or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with such things as only grow in England, they being most fit for English bodies.

Culpeper made Classical thought, astrological reasoning and the folk medicines of unlettered wise-women march together in the service of a common aim – to help the poor maintain their rude English heath. The English Physitian was a self-help book for those who could not afford the expensive, and not always satisfactory, attentions of apothecaries. Culpeper argued that anyone could treat themselves far more effectively with what was to hand, and juniper – growing wild in hedgerows, and on moors and chases – could cure a multitude of English diseases:

[Juniper berries] are admirably good for a cough, shortness of breath, and consumption, pains in the belly, ruptures, cramps, and convulsions. They give safe and speedy delivery to women with child, they strengthen the brain exceedingly, help the memory, and fortify the sight by strengthening the optic nerves; are excellently good in all sorts of agues; help the gout and sciatica, and strengthen the limbs of the body.

In Culpeper’s cosmology, juniper also tapped into the powers of the divine macrocosm, and his full entry is reproduced in Appendix 1. The English Physitian was not only a practical herbal, but also an ‘Astrologico-Physical Discourse’: each herb, and each malady, was associated with a heavenly body, and (in good Classical fashion) treatment was a matter of balancing one influence with its opposing partner. Juniper, a ‘solar herb’, was naturally efficacious against diseases associated with the moon.

Though mainstream belief in astrology and the power of the macrocosm faded, juniper’s reputation as a medicine did not. A new generation of practitioners came to value juniper oil for its antiseptic and insect-repellent powers (hence its use in flea collars), and it is still used occasionally in dressing wounds and in the treatment of urinary tract infections. It continues to play an important part in the traditional medical systems of Eastern Europe, frequently in the form of brinjevec, a Slovenian spirit produced by fermenting and then distilling juniper berries. Valued for its digestive properties, brinjevec is also said to relieve stomach ache and menstrual pain, and is variously consumed, inhaled or rubbed into the skin.

Folkloric uses of juniper have likewise continued, particularly in northern Europe, and tend to reflect its medical function as a fumigant. Juniper branches were thrown on to the Beltane fires, and a faggot of smouldering juniper twigs was used to purify farmsteads and stables on the first morning of the New Year. With a darker purpose, the wise-women of Lothian prescribed a tea made of juniper berries and needles as an abortifacient, and farmers included it in their hedges, where it was believed to guard against the depredations of wolves and wildcats. These usages and meanings have been carried over into modern magical and neo-pagan practices: juniper twigs, or juniperlaced incense, provide fragrant smoke for manifestations and rituals of purification, and pouches of berries are hung around the necks of infants to ensure a lifetime of good health.

But juniper also provided a setting and title for that most chillingly Sophoclean of folk-tales – ‘The Juniper Tree’, a Low German story collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century and published in their Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. Driven by the primal jealousy between a stepmother and her stepson, this deliciously pre-Freudian allegory features cannibalism and metamorphosis, filicide countered with matricide. (It has since inspired an eponymous novel by Barbara Comyns Carr, a 1985 opera with music by Philip Glass, and a 1990 Icelandic film starring Björk.)

‘The Juniper Tree’ begins with a moment of innocence, tinged with shades of the Fall. A pregnant wife, walking in the garden of her house, eats a handful of berries from her juniper tree. She falls ill – the reasons for which are unexplained, as juniper berries are not notably poisonous – and dies during birth, though her new son survives. She is buried beneath the roots of the tree, and her widower takes another wife, who gives him a daughter. The daughter and her half-brother get on well, but the stepmother resents her stepson who will one day inherit his father’s estate, leaving her daughter with nothing. So she asks him to choose an apple from a wooden chest; as he bends down, she brings the lid down on his exposed neck and strikes his head from his shoulders.

In a hideous parody of the conscientious housewife, she does not waste the carcass: she turns her stepson into a stew and black puddings, and feeds them to her husband, who – unaware – pronounces his child delicious. But the daughter appreciates the horror of what has happened, and when her mother is occupied she collects the bones of her half-brother from the cauldron, and buries them beneath the juniper tree. In a flash of fire his soul rises from the bones in the form of a bird, singing of his murder. The bird grows more powerful, until he can carry a millstone high enough to bludgeon his stepmother to death. As she dies, he returns to human form, and lives happily with his father and his half-sister.

So it seems that by the sixteenth century, when it was taken up as the distinctive flavouring for genever, juniper already had a long history of gastronomic, sacred and medicinal meaning. What of spirit – that playful, ambiguous word, which can signify a demon, a ghost, a principle of life, the essence of human character, or an extract of wine or beer?

Evidence for the origins of distillation is fragmentary to say the least, and what we have is a fairly speculative story elaborated from hints in ancient texts and traditions. The Sanskrit Vedas, thought to have been written around 2500 BC, mention a process which sounds like distillation, and which was used to produce the entheogenic somasara consumed during festivals. Stronger evidence comes from Chinese philosophical treatises of the eighth century BC, describing fragrances and tonics distilled from herbs. This raises the tantalising possibility that knowledge of the technique may have passed along the Silk Road to the Middle East.

In the centuries around the birth of Christ various scholars and artisans in trading ports around the eastern Mediterranean began to write about distillation. In Alexandria the alchemist and Gnostic Zosimos of Panopolis recorded the exploits of the semi-legendary Maria the Jewess, a female alchemist said to have invented distillation. In Athens Aristotle noted the paradox of wine: soup became stronger as it was reduced, but wine lost its power to intoxicate. This idea was taken up by Dioscorides, and De Materia Medica includes a recipe for a fortified vinum hippocraticum, made by heating wine in a clay pot and collecting the distillate in wool or a sponge laid over the mouth of the vessel. Ancient Greek sailors appear to have used a similar method to make drinking water from seawater on long voyages.

Wherever the technique originated, historians agree that distillation came of age in the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. At the Persian medical school of Jundishapur in the sixth century apothecaries were distilling rose-water, juniper oil and other herbal medicines, but the full flowering of Arabic ‘philosophical chemistry’ came with the establishment of the new Abbasid capital at Baghdad in 763AD. The caliphate established a large library, known as the ‘House of Wisdom’, along with schools teaching all the learned and humane arts. The result was an original and diverse research community, a torrent of translations from Latin and Greek texts, and the emergence of a distinctively Arabic alchemical tradition.

The leading figure in Baghdad alchemy was Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to his medieval Western successors as ‘Geber’. In the course of his work Geber created the ‘alembic’ – the swan-necked alchemical still made of glass, ceramic or copper. He experimented rapaciously, distilling just about any liquid he could get his hands on, and his writings describe the clear, flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of wine. His colleague at the House of Wisdom – Abu-Yusuf Ya’qoub ibn ‘Ishaq ibn al-Sabbah ibn ‘Omran ibn Isma’il al-Kindi, known, mercifully, as ‘al-Kindi’ – used the alembic to make cordials and perfumes, but it was the ninth-century physician Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, ‘Rhazes’, who collected and codified the secrets of wine-distillation. Rhazes became fascinated with the properties of this volatile, ephemeral liquid, and gave it an Arabic name – al-koh’l. Already we can see the doubleness, the playfulness, wrought by this substance on the minds that contemplated its nature. In Arabic, al-koh’l signified both a psychoactive substance and a djinn, prefiguring the double meaning of ‘spirit’ in English. And it recalled and transformed the central image in ‘Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp’ from The Thousand and One Nights, compiled in Persia around the time Rhazes was writing: the djinn rising from the spout of Aladdin’s lamp, just as al-koh’l rose from the neck of the alembic.

But this magical substance, and the technique that produced it, did not make a single grand leap across the Mediterranean. Rather, it took a more gradual route from the libraries of Baghdad to the monasteries and universities of Europe. A ninth-century monastic treatise nicknamed the Mappae Clavicula (‘The Little Key to the Map’) – a practical handbook for blacksmithing and copying manuscripts – also contains the first known European instructions for distillation. By the eleventh century, the secrets of Arabic philosophical chemistry had reached the most important centre of medical education in post-Roman Europe, and the place where juniper and spirit first came together: the Benedictine monastery at Salerno in southern Italy.

Juniper grows abundantly in the hills around Salerno, and both monks and apothecaries worked with alembics in the workshops and kitchens of the monastery. A textbook written in 1050, the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitatum, recommended bandages impregnated with juniper, and the Compendium Salernita, a collection of treatments compiled around 1055, includes a recipe for a tonic distilled from wine infused with juniper berries. Was this the first gin, or perhaps an archetypal ‘proto-gin’? Perhaps: it is certainly the earliest recipe we have for anything that looks (to modern eyes) like gin. But this Salernitan proto-gin was created in a very different context from later genevers and gins. It was a medicine, one of many herbal tonics produced by hand in monastic kitchens, prescribed in small quantities and according to strict rules derived from the canon of Graeco-Roman medicine. And it was a simple and unsweetened distillation of wine and juniper berries – and hence fiery and mouth- puckeringly sharp.

This proto-gin – a fusion of Arabic alchemy and Classical medicine – signalled a new European interest in what had been lost with the fall of Rome, and what might be gained from a thorough study of the new Islamic corpus. Geber was translated into Latin in 1144, and Rhazes in 1279, as new universities and medical schools (particularly Montpellier, and the Sorbonne in Paris) began to incorporate Arabic learning into their curricula. Knowledge of distillation, and the medical possibilities of distilled herbal spirits, spread rapidly across Europe, and were taken up by the highest echelons of the leading political and spiritual power – the Catholic church. In his mid-thirteenth-century Liber de Oculis (‘Book of the Eyes’), Pedro Julião, later Pope John XXI, described another proto-gin in the shape of his celebrated ‘eye water’. Intended as a restorative rinse for weary or inflamed eyes, this did not feature juniper, but it did prefigure another aspect of later gin manufacture by including a mix of ‘botanicals’, including fennel, endive and rue. Following his example, many monasteries began to produce their own distinctive cordials, rectified with local herbs. Probably the most famous survivor of this tradition is Bénédictine, produced at the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy from 1510.

Medieval Catholic scholars owed far more than they were usually prepared to admit to the works of the ‘Islamic Renaissance’, and it is telling that the two great physician-alchemists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were born in what had once been Muslim Spain. Arnaud de Ville-Neuve, Latinised as Arnaldus Villanovus, was born in Catalonia, but spent most of his life in Paris and Montpellier, where he studied and improved the existing translations of Geber and Rhazes. In his own writings he described the processes of distilling wine to make spirit, and then re-distilling with herbs or botanicals to make tonics. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Ville-Neuve also coined the name aqua vita, which when translated provided many European languages with their word for spirit: eau de vie in French, akvavit in Swedish, usquebaugh in Gaelic. Ville-Neuve’s pupil, the aristocratic Catalan monk Ramon Llull, went further. In his Secunda Magia Naturalis he argued that the distillation of wine was a way of concentrating its ‘quintessence’, and that seven re-distillations would produce the most pure form of quintessence available on this fallen planet. For Llull, the transformative power of this discovery seemed unlimited, and the spirit of wine was:

An emanation of the divinity, an element newly revealed to man, but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage, [which is] destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude.

What did Europeans make of this mysterious, ephemeral substance – a water which burned, a spirit which intoxicated, a hidden essence which could dissolve into the air, leaving no trace behind? For some, the stigma of pagan alchemy was too much to bear: in 1288 the Dominican friars at Rimini abjured their stills, and denounced distillation as a black art. But for an elite coterie of European scholars, this black art held out the promise of eternal life and unlimited power over the world around them. By the sixteenth century most European gentlemen and aristocrats might be expected to possess some knowledge of the learned art of alchemy – far from a kind of ‘failed chemistry’, but a profound and esoteric body of scholarship which held that the true meaning of the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature was occult, and could be discerned only through deep allegorical reading and reflection.

For these would-be magi, the great work of alchemy was transformation. Just as nature turned seeds into flowers, and bakers turned flour into bread, so the physical and chemical transformations in retorts and alembics were mirrored by transfigurations in the soul of the alchemist. The end – in both senses, the purpose and the conclusion – of transformation was the extraction and contemplation of quintessence, the occult substance permeating and underlying the visible world. Alchemists used various techniques to pursue quintessences – sublimation, calcination, corrosion – all of which aimed to separate what was impure, earthly and mutable from what was pure, heavenly and eternal. But lines in the Emerald Tablet, a short, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of alchemy, seemed to suggest that only distillation would reveal the full glory of the quintessence:

8. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle and thin from the crude and coarse, prudently, with modesty and wisdom.

9. This ascends from the earth into the sky and again descends from the sky to the earth, and receives the power and efficacy of things above and of things below.

10. By this means you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and so you will drive away all shadows and blindness.

11. For this by its fortitude snatches the palm from all other fortitude and power. For it is able to penetrate and subdue everything subtle and everything crude and hard.

There is much truth in the image of the Renaissance alchemist as a solitary magus, working for decades in a secluded laboratory to discover the secrets of transformation. But alchemists also saw their work as transforming the world around them – not least in the pursuit of long life and good health – and the ‘quintessences’ produced via distillation were taken up by some physicians as an effective new therapeutic. The leading figure in linking alchemy with medicine was the Swiss physician and occultist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as ‘Paracelsus’. Transformation was, Paracelsus thought, all around, and (literally) within: the human body was a living alembic, in which food was transformed into the ‘spirit of Man’ through fermentation and distillation. So the quintessence of Llull and the alchemists was not merely an elixir of health and life, but also the living flame within each soul. In the Archidoxa, written around 1520 but not published until after his death, Paracelsus summarised the virtues of the quintessence:

A nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once, indeed, shut up within things, but now free from any domicile and from all outward incorporation … It is a spirit like the spirit of life, but with this difference, that the life-spirit of a thing is permanent, but that of man is mortal.

In the Paracelsian cosmology disease was a disharmony between the human microcosm and the heavenly macrocosm, and the role of the physician-alchemist was to restore health by readjusting the proportions of the three ‘cardinal principles’: salt, representing solidity; mercury, representing fluidity; and sulphur, representing flammability. This could be done with the aid of ‘spagyric’ therapies – medicines combining Salernitan proto-gins with the principles of alchemical transformation. From the Greek spao ageiro, meaning ‘to break open and pull out’, spagyric tonics mixed spirit and the distilled extract of a plant with the ash of its leaves, a technique which extracted the quintessence just as one might prise a nut from its shell. It seems that Paracelsus acquired a taste for his own medicines: one rumour, circulating after his death, had it that he died after drinking himself into a stupor with one of his spagyric proto-gins.

Paracelsus was an iconoclast, a figure who divided as he sought to unify. Even his name was a boast, proclaiming his equality with the illustrious Roman physician Celsus. But by the time of his death in 1541 variants of his spagyric medicines were finding their way into the mainstream of Renaissance medicine alongside Salernitan proto-gins. Here, too, health was a matter of balance. The four humours of Classical Graeco-Roman medicine – blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm – had to be kept in their correct proportions, determined by interactions between the microcosm of individual constitution and lifestyle, and the macrocosm of the natural world and the heavens. Within this tradition, wine had high status as a medicine. For the Roman physician Galen, wine embodied the heat and moisture characteristic of living things, and those melancholy individuals in whom black bile predominated could cheer their outlook by consuming blood-like red wine. But wine, like any medicine, affected different people in different ways, and was only beneficial in the correct proportions. In excess it could dry the body by provoking urination, and its cloudy vapours could rise to the head and fog the faculty of reason.

These ancient ideas shaped the attitudes of medieval and Renaissance physicians to the new proto-gins. The friar and philosopher Roger Bacon, writing in the thirteenth century, suggested that aqua vita was an exact counterpart of the human life force, and could also be produced by the ghoulish expedient of heating fresh human blood in an alembic. But for most physicians, spirits offered the powers of wine in a concentrated form. Following the Salernitan tradition, they could be used as a carrier for the healing powers of botanical medicines like juniper, and by the fifteenth century apothecaries were using them to preserve seasonal herbs, making them available all year round. But spirit itself was celebrated as a general tonic, reflected in the name given to spirit-based medicines: ‘cordial’, from the Latin cordis, ‘heart’. A shot of spirit could warm the cockles of the heart, and stimulate a flagging intellect. After 1348, with the Black Death ravaging the population of Western Europe, juniper cordials were in high demand to fumigate the body and strengthen the constitution against infection.

Following the invention of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century, treatises revealing the secrets of distillation quickly began to move beyond elite medical and alchemical circles. One of the most successful was the Liber de Arte Destillandi (The Book of the Art of Distillation), published by Hieronymus Braunschweig, an Alsatian physician, in 1500. Braunschweig praised distilled spirits as ‘the mistress of all medicine’, and (in the words of a 1651 translation by the English physician John French) enumerated their virtues:

[Spirit] eases diseases coming of cold. It comforts the heart. It heals all old and new sores on the head. It causes a good colour in a person … it eases the pain in the teeth and causes sweet breath … it heals the short-winded. It causes good digestion and appetite … and takes away belching. It eases the yellow jaundice, the dropsy, the gout, the pain in the breasts when they be swollen, and heals all diseases in the bladder … it heals the bites of a mad dog … It gives courage in a young person and causes him to have a good memory.

Endorsements like this made proto-gins seem to be truly an elixir of life, a medical miracle fulfilling the stale promises of quack nostrums. But medical interest was balanced with concern, and as spirits became part of European physicians’ armamentaria, some writers began to warn of the dangers of excess consumption. The Austrian physician Michael Puff von Schrick gave one of the first caveats in his Hienach volget ein nüczliche Materi von manigerley ausgepranten Wasser (Useful Material on Distilled Waters), published in 1478. Puff von Schrick reassured his readers that small quantities of spirit could keep one in near-perfect health, but warned that apothecaries, quacks and wasserbrennerinnen – village wise-women who ‘burnt waters’ as a sideline – were encouraging dangerous overindulgence. The Nuremberg surgeon and poet Hanz Folz was more concerned about keeping up appearances: in a pamphlet published in 1493, he argued that excessive consumption of aqua vita would lead to embarrassing and un-gentlemanly conduct in public.

But it was midwives, rather than physicians, who were seen to embody the double face of distilled spirits. They used cordials and aqua vita as part of their practice, both to blur the pain of childbirth and to help ‘ungrease’ the child. Wet-nurses, meanwhile, might consume botanical cordials as an indirect way of administering them to the child. According to the Dutch-English distiller and alchemist William Y-Worth, to whom we’ll return, proto-gins were especially popular for this purpose:

It is a general Custom in Holland, when the Child is troubled with Oppressions of Wind, for the Mother whilst the Child is sucking, to drink of the Powers or Spirits of Juniper, by which the Child is Relieved.

Therapeutic dispensation sometimes shaded into pleasurable carousing, and midwives and wet-nurses acquired a reputation as secret tipplers if not outright sots. In Romeo and Juliet Juliet’s nurse drinks aqua vita to calm herself after hearing that Romeo has killed Tybalt, and in Twelfth Night a forged letter works with Malvolio ‘like aqua vita with a midwife’. Stories of wet-nurses so drunk that they smothered their charges, or failed to notice when they fell into the fire, were common currency in this period, and (as we’ll see in the next two chapters) went on to become one of the principal tropes of anti-gin literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And some midwives took their passion for cordials to an extreme: in 1447 one Giovanna of San Ambroglio in Florence was censured by the church authorities for distilling a love-potion from wine mixed with powdered skulls dug up in her parish graveyard.

Increasingly public disapproval of genteel drunkards and tipsy midwives reveals that the place of distilled spirits in early modern culture was beginning to shift. By the sixteenth century distillation was no longer the exclusive province of alchemists, apothecaries and physicians. More and more people across Europe were producing proto-gins, flavoured with a range of botanicals – some for medicine, but many more for pleasure and profit.