Tag: research

A Brief Word About Historical Terminology

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Just read a wonderful piece over at the excellent beer history blog Zythophile on the historical changes undergone by the terms “ale” and “beer”: I used to think that their merger into synonymity was pretty much complete in Georgian England at the latest, agreeing with the historian WH Chaloner, who wrote in 1960, reviewing Peter Mathias’s great book The brewing industry in England, 1700-1830: “By the end of the seventeenth century the terms ‘ale’ (originally a sweetish, unhopped malt liquor) and the newer ‘beer’ (a bitter, hopped malt liquor) had come to describe more or less identical products following the victory …

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Beer and the Habsburgs, Plus Lager Confusion

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In my recent post about the economics of brewing and the consolidation of breweries in London in the wake of the Gin Craze, I mentioned that I’m searching for sources on beer under the Habsburgs. I haven’t found all that much, but maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise: after all, wine was preferred in Habsburg Vienna, and the kind of taxation that marginalized wines in England only affected wine consumption in the Habsburg Empire more slowly… though the eventual stratification we see in England does eventually appear in the Habsburg domains as well, and for the same reasons: ‘Modest’ is …

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The Economics of Beer and Brewing in Gin-Craze London

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I’m trying to get a handle on London Brewing during the 1700s (especially during the Gin Craze), as part of the research for the novel I’m writing set at that time. What’s interesting is how English brewing transitioned from being primarily a small-scale industry, to being a large-scale industrial business with international reach, during this precise time. I found an interesting bit of information about the transition which is worth talking about: From 1748 to 1830, the transition is massive: brewing went from almost 60% smaller business, to 15% smaller business, even though the scale of production (and, presumably, demand on …

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The Altarpiece of Ghent

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The first truly great masterpiece to demonstrate the possibilities available when working with oil paint, so they say, was the van Eyck brothers’ Altarpiece of Ghent. (The elder brother, Hubert, apparently did the general design, and his brother Jan painted it after the brother’s death.) I ran across a reference during my studies of the history of Belgium, and found it interesting, though it is (at present) very unlikely to turn up in my novel. A little research turned up a few worthwhile links, though: Here’s an NPR piece on it (supposedly) being the most stolen artwork in history, and …

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Research Springboard

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I’m currently bouncing back and forth between two major writing projects that are so different that they really do serve as a break from one another: the language of each is quite distinct, the characters and their trajectories rather different, and so it works for me, right now, to switch from one project to the other when I start to run out of steam on whichever one I’m currently working on. At the moment, I’m working is about alchemy and conspiracy, a story that begins at the height of the Gin Craze; that is, a time period I used to …

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