Students love alcohol. As long as there have been students there have been drunken students, staggering around campuses the world over as they experiment with levels of tolerance for the grape and grain. While their inexperience with intoxication often ends in tears, it was students’ enthusiastic embracing of all things alcoholic that led to the social drinking culture we know today.
In a talk for the Festival of Ideas, Dr Phil Withington, a lecturer in the History Faculty, will look at how the dramatic increase in university students during the education boom of the early 17th century cemented much of the ritual and tradition that we are familiar with today, in pubs and clubs up and down the country.
“There’s an assumption among historians that drunkenness during early modernity became inappropriate for civil behaviour, and excessive consumption was the reserve of the common poor,” says Withington. “But there’s a huge amount of evidence that you needed to be affluent to indulge in vast quantities of alcohol, and the new wave of educated elite led the charge.” > > > > Read More
