Seminar: Making and Marketing of Roman Wine

Dominic Rathbone: The making and marketing of Roman wine 

18:00 Wednesday November 19, 2014.
The Plough, 27 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH 

What was Roman wine like? How was it produced and distributed? Through an illustrated survey of some of the evidence, especially the archaeological evidence, for wine-making in Roman Italy and the marketing of Italian wine, I try to reconstruct and explain the major changes that occurred in the period 200 BC to AD 100. First, we see the rise and fall of large wineries, aimed at large-scale production of a standardised product, which was exported in massive quantities in an new ‘Italian’ form of amphora.

Later, Italian wine is marketed in much smaller quantities but throughout the Roman world in an adapted Greek-style amphora, and literary sources start praising the distinct wines of regions and even estates. This suggests a perhaps surprisingly ‘modern’ correlation for Roman wine between production strategies (quantity or quality?), changing markets and consumer tastes, and product packaging.

(Dominic Rathbone, King's College London)

ALL WELCOME

This seminar is part of the History Down the Pub series, organized by Gabriel Bodard and Lorna Richardson. We have an open Call for Papers for the coming year. Contact the organizers with any suggestions or questions.

Seminar: Great London Beer Flood

HISTORY DOWN THE PUB

Martyn Cornell: Remembering the Great London Beer Flood

18:00 Thursday October 16, 2014.
The Plough, 27 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH

Two hundred years ago this month, a tsunami of beer weighing hundreds of tons crashed through crowded streets just off Tottenham Court Road, bringing death and destruction. Historian Martyn Cornell will discuss the sources for this event, and how we need to read them in order to reliably describe how and why it happened. Contemporary newspaper reports give a very different story to the ones that appeared in accounts of the event in the 20th century, with a great story accruing all sorts of falsehoods and exaggerations.

ALL WELCOME

This seminar is part of the History Down the Pub series, organized by Gabriel Bodard and Lorna Richardson. We have an open Call for Papers for the coming year. Contact the organizers with any suggestions or questions.

Call for Papers: History Down the Pub

History Down the Pub is an academic seminar series, held in a Central London pub, discussing the history and archaeology of beer, brewing, pubs, drinking and other alcohol-related matters. We attempt to take a methodological perspective to the history of drinking, with speakers addressing as much how we know, the nature of our sources and the historical/archaeological methods applied to them, as what we know about our ancestors’ drinking habits.

We invite speakers for the 2014-15 seminar season on any aspect of this subject, from the archaeology of ancient brewing or wine-making and trade, or modern English (or other) brewing and pub history, and all topics in between. We shall attempt to alternate between ancient and modern topics throughout the year.

The first seminar, Harvey Quamen’s “Using Digital Humanities Techniques to Study the History of Beer and Brewing” was held in The Plough in August 2013. Further details of the series can be found at http://scienceforthirstypeople.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/HDtP

To offer a paper, please send a 300-500 word abstract to both Gabriel Bodard (gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk) and Lorna Richardson (l.richardson@ucl.ac.uk), or feel free to enquire informally to the same addresses.

History Down the Pub: London, August 28th

Harvey Quamen: Using Digital Humanities Techniques to Study the History of Beer and Brewing

Three major questions—all difficult to answer—prompt this talk:

1. what caused the sudden demise of porter around 1820?
2. how did the style called India Pale Ale spread so rapidly?
3. can we locate the historical London breweries?

Although surrounded in some mystery, these questions might be answerable using some techniques from the digital humanities. In particular, building a database of historical recipes will help us understand the movement and growth of beer styles (especially as those styles moved through homebrewing) and we can begin to track master-apprenticeship relationships with the use of propopographies, databases that serve as “collective biographies” of groups of people. Finally, using historical maps (like the Agas map digitized at the Map of Early Modern London project), we might begin to reconstruct the historical distribution of beer around the capital.

Harvey Quamen is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. A longtime homebrewer, Quamen spent the 2009 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. Drinking with KCL and UCL friends began his foggily remembered interest in the history of London brewing.

This lecture is the inaugural event of the History Down the Pub series, and will be held in the Plough, 27 Museum Street, London (opposite the British Museum: see https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC1A+1LH), at 6pm on Wednesday August 28th 2013.

All welcome.