http://www.tarcherbooks.net/?p=1481&fb_source=message
A friend of mine sent me a link the other day with this article attached. I was telling her about Edmund Spenser and his pathetic brown-nosing, and brought up the fact that he was a stone cold Puritan. We began discussing the Puritan lifestyle since Thanksgiving was right around the corner, and I mentioned that according to our classroom discussions, being a Puritan meant sucking the fun out of everything. I told her that according to many poems and texts we had ben reading, Puritans did not partake in drinking, theater, any kind of under-belly-tavern-life, patries, dancing, etc... I read her the notes from class on the poetic discourse between Piers and Palinode in Spenser's Maye, and we talked about how boring the first Thanksgiving must have been without wine and Yahtzee. Needless to say, she found the above article just days later and sent it to me.
The article is short, but basically gives statistics of the amount (quite large) of alcohol that the Puritans consumed. According to this article the Puritans went a little drink crazy at EACH, and even brought tons of alcohol (of all kinds) over to the New World from England. I am hoping that this might start a dialogue that unmasks the "true" English Puritan. I am fascinated with the idea that these people are what we compare to modern day Amish, and yet it seems there are so many contradictory ideas of who they were and how they lived their lives.
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