Brew coffee and drink coffee every day to study the aroma of coffee, and occasionally forget about the understanding of flavor, aroma, sourness and sweetness, and change your brain to listen to anecdotes about coffee culture.
Fish need water to rejoice, coffee needs cups to dance with. Do you know how the cup in your hand came from?
Today we are talking about the cup again, do you know the origin of the name of the mug? Did you know that a long, long time ago, the mug used to have a relationship with a witch?
Today we are going to gossip about a black history of the Mug and the witches of Europe.
Once upon a time there was a cup called Mark
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Before talking about the relationship between witches and mugs, first of all, let's talk about the origin of the word MUG.
The mug was not invented by a man named MUG, and the word MUG is not native to English.
Pictured: Mugg in stoneware, from the Staten Museum of History, Sweden
From the etymological history, it is believed that the word "MUG" originates from the ancient Norman peoples in Europe and the terms used by the Germanic peoples.
The Normans are the ancestors of today's Nordics. Around the 15th century, Mugge (Danish) or Mugg (Swedish) were used to describe a wide barrel-shaped water tank with a handle and often no lid.
MUG is actually the most generalized name of the water container, evolved to the later, because the contents of the cup are different in capacity, these container water cups have a variety of new names, away from just using MUG to call.
So around the 14th and 18th centuries, we often heard other names to describe mugs rather than the word MUG.
Mugs had many names in the early days
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Pictured: Salt-glazed tungsten cup in 1575
The mug shapes we are familiar with now are European wine glasses derived from the Renaissance era, and their size is very different from the 270-370 ml version common in modern times.
In the 15th and 18th centuries, the following early mugs appeared, which may be made of silver, tin, glass, faience, salt glazed stoneware, porcelain, wood, leather, etc.
At first, the stoneware cups were more common, but gradually because of the capacity, the shape and material have changed, and the name of the mug has begun to be different.
Metal lid mug - Tankard
Pictured: 19th-century Norwegian wooden Tankard
Tankard is a type of beer mug, the word Tankard first referred to wooden containers in the 13th century, and later the word developed into the name of drinking containers.
From the second half of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century, the cups were made of a variety of materials, which may be wood, pottery, leather, or glass, but more commonly made of tin or silver.
Tankard is popular in Northern Europe, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, and is mainly used to hold wines with a pint or more.
Pictured: German-made tin-plated Humpen in 1680
Tankard was a large cup with a lid during the Renaissance, and there was another name in German called Humpen.
The capacity of the Tankard must exceed one pint, which is the imperial capacity unit, which is about equal to 590 milliliters, because tin and silver used to hold wine can easily lead to poisoning, and by the 18th century the British changed its material and renamed it.
Pictured: Silver Tankard from the time of King George III
Stoneware with covered mug - Bear Stein
Bear Stein got its name from The Tankard, but with more emphasis on stoneware, bear Stein is an English character that only came after 1855.
Stein is actually German is the meaning of stone, the word English is derived from German, but Germans prefer to call it Humpen.
Pictured: 18th-century German faience cup
The invention of the lidded cup, mainly because from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Black Death was rampant, in order to avoid the drink from being contaminated by germs, so the top cover was invented.
Whether it's a Tinkard in silver tin or a Bear Stein in stoneware, its capacity is half a liter. A larger glass that can hold one liter of wine has another name.
One-liter mug - Maßkrug
The last one to be easily confused with Bear Stein or Tankard is the German beer mug Maßkrug.
Pictured: Oversized mugs
The word specifically refers to a glass that can hold a liter or more, it is usually made of glass, which is the designated style of the Oktoberfest in Süd today.
Mug (MUG) originally referred to a generalized drinking water container, but water in the Middle Ages was equal to beer, so Europeans designed various wine glasses.
At that time, no one dared to drink real water, because the Black Death had been prevalent since the 14th century. The mug has a relationship with the witch and is also blessed with wine.
Mugs and the Black Death
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Pictured: The Black Death plagued Europe from the 14th to the 18th centuries
The Black Death was transmitted by rats, but the way of transmission was related to rats hiding in sewers and polluting water sources.
Drinking water from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was polluted, water purification equipment was lacking, and the safest source of drinking water was boiled and sterilized beer containing alcohol.
This is why we just introduced the various early mugs that were filled with beer.
Pictured: An 18th-century painting, a mug on a table in an English country beer hall
The winemaking woman was falsely accused of being a witch
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What does the witch have to do with the mug? The era of witchcraft prevalence in Europe was about the same time as the Black Death.
The witch's identification is related to the historical background of women's profession in winemaking at that time.
The picture below is a woodcut of a witch created in 1510, and the woman on the left holds a very large cup in her hand, and the liquid in that cup is wine.
Maki: 1510 Shaman Woodcut
The Black Death was a natural disaster, and in the days when it was popular, people had no knowledge, thought they were cursed, and then blamed the east and the west, suspicious of gods and ghosts.
And a group of women who "make wine as a profession", because of their dress, their demeanor looks mysterious, and they have nothing to do every day in the backyard of the kitchen to boil a pot of unknown things, and it is easy to be framed as a witch.
The following painting was created in 1624, the title of the painting is "alewife", ale is what we are talking about now, it is a malt wine brewed without hops, Alewife refers to the woman who brews this al beer, they are usually housewives, so it is called Wife.
Pictured: A woman made of beer in woodcuts of 1624
What makes women winemakers
Why do women become winemakers?
Originally, in Europe where the Black Death was prevalent, because the water would be contaminated by pathogens, it could not be drunk raw, and the beer production method could disinfect and sterilize and reduce the risk of infection, while beer was also rich in calories, and people in the social class who had no money could not afford to drink milk, so they used beer as a source of calories and drank it in large quantities.
Because every family, whether adults or children need to drink alcohol every day, it is naturally impossible to buy, because the economic burden is too heavy, so every family brews beer privately, so the housewife naturally becomes a brewer.
Winemaker costume with witch bump shirt
The medieval engraving impression of the witch dress is actually based on the female winemaker's costume as a blueprint. Why would a good wine be framed as a witch?
It turned out that this was the legacy of patriarchal society.
At that time, most women brewed beer privately, only for their families to drink, but some women who had spare energy could take out the wine she brewed, and these women generally went out to dress as shown below.
Pictured: An old english brewer in 1793
If you look at the picture above, this is a painting from the end of the 18th century, and the title is also alewife, but do you think it is familiar? Isn't this dressed like the witch we think of?
For centuries: an old woman in a pointed hat, boiling an unknown liquid at a cauldron, holding a broom, and carrying a beer cup, was often misunderstood as possibly a witch!
This is really a big misunderstanding. This was just a woman who made wine, and she had to take a mortar and a pestle every day and boil it in a large cauldron with the brown paste of the myrtle.
Because rats steal from the grains that make wine, women winemakers need to keep cats and keep them from rats.
The woman needed her to take a broom in the backyard and keep cleaning the grain crumbs such as the brewed barley and oats, and when she had finished brewing a pot, she would put the broom by the door, and then change her clothes and go out to sell wine.
Pictured: A painting of a witch riding a broom in 1720
In fact, the reason why winemaking women wear hats is because in the 16th and 17th centuries, hats were a fashionable appearance for women.
Housewives, who usually have leftover wine to take out, are economically independent women, and hats are a sign of wealth.
The witches all carried her mugs
Pictured: Many women were hanged at the peak of witch hunting in the 15th and 17th centuries
Before the advent of commercial brewing at the end of the 18th century, the small profits made from selling beer were not looked at by men. So in the early days they were all female winemakers.
Early women did not have the ability to work outside the home, except for winemaking because men did not like to give it to women, and women were generally appendages of men.
Women who had a way to make money from selling alcohol had some degree of independence and did not have to be attached to men, and women's independence was not tolerated in the patriarchal society at that time.
So many women are hanged for being witches, especially those who are financially independent. Joan of Arc of France was also hanged as a witch because she was too independent and capable.
Therefore, during the peak of witch hunting around the 14th and 17th centuries, one of the characteristics of witch dress was to hold a "mack beer mug". This was not until the 18th century, when the brewing industry returned to commercialization, private brewing disappeared, brewing became the work of men, and women with beer mugs were spared death threats.
Beer mugs and coffee mugs
beer
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Finally, we have to talk about the coffee into the mug, as introduced above, the early mug capacity is very large, not very suitable for coffee, because coffee is not yet a large number of colonies before the success of planting, is an expensive commodity, it is impossible to drink a lot of consumption!
Therefore, in the 16th-18th centuries when coffee first began to flourish in Europe, the shape of the coffee cup was mostly a porcelain cup with ears, definitely not a mug such as a coarse or large-capacity shape!
Pictured: The shape of the coffee cup in the 16th-18th centuries is very beautiful
When did the mug become one of the standard versions of the coffee mug? This is the evolution that waited until after the 19th century,