I don't know if going back to the second century will help but I will
indulge myself.

In the second century a freelance Christian prophetic and preacher named
Hermas produced a work named "The Instructor" . In it he wrote that
adolescent boys and girls should be kept from "the hottest of all
liquids---wine" least it kindle "wild impulses and burning lusts and fiery
habits...inflamed from within...beasts and organs of generation, inflamed
with wine, expand and swell in a shameful way...inciting the man of correct
behavior to transgression; and hence the voluptuousness of youth overpass
the bounds of modesty."

Plato said that; "Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their
eighteenth year."

So it is that the desire to protect adolescents from the dangers of alcohol
abuse is not a modern phenomena...

John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ann Tlusty" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2001 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: youth and alcoholic beverages


As an expansion of Rod's comments on alcohol and youth before the 19th
century, here are some observations from the 16th-17th centuries...  It's
certainly true that throughout this period, most official advice was based
on physical beliefs about the heat in alcohol and the youthful body (those
over 40, as long as they were men, were advised to be quite liberal in
their drinking habits...!).  But there were social considerations in
pre-modern European society regarding age as well as gender - while
virtually everyone, including small children, was given some alcohol to
drink (a little wine mixed with water functioned as Kool-Aid for early
modern Germans), the right to drink socially and publically, or generally
engage in drinking bouts, was a right of adult men only.  I don't doubt
that young boys did it from time to time, and there are occasional reports
of a group of "boys" drinking (a term which in modern German could be
either Knappe or Knabe), but without specific ages - this implies that they
were apprentices, which normally would be quite young, but in some cases,
weavers for example, they could easily be over 20.  But where age is
mentioned, I can honestly say that in all of the hundreds of cases I've
read of people being drunk or being involved in tavern drinking bouts in
early modern Germany, I've never seen anyone report their age as less than
16.  Granted, they weren't always very precise about their age ("says he's
about 16 or 17"). But there does seem to have been some sort of generally
accepted social restraint at work.  So where "age" as a specific
chronological boundary may not have been important, there were definite
boundaries between age-related identities (apprentice vs. journeymen, boy
vs. man).  Whether this can be defined as a moral issue, or whether is was
related to physical notions, or whether it is simply a status issue (boys
didn't have enough money to buy their own drinks), I'm not sure.  This is
also just an impression and not something I've been able to do targeted
research on - but I'll keep looking!
cheers
Ann Tlusty

At 04:04 PM 4/30/01 -0400, you wrote:
>You raise a lot of central questions here, David, and I hope you've set
>off a very interesting thread.
>
>One of the key questions is the way cultures construct ages and
>generations.  It's a commonplace, I suppose, that the chronological age of
>most individuals was not terribly important until quite recently.  Until
>minimum ages for drinking, driving, voting, retirement, and so on were
>regulated, who cared how old anyone was?  True, there might be significant
>ages related minority and majority and the legal capacity to marry

>without parental consent or to inherit property. But they probably
>affected relatively few people in western societies until the
>eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
>
>One survey I did years ago of people in late eighteenth-century France
>compared the ages they gave and their ages as determined by birth
>records.  Only 68% got their age right. A higher degree of accuracy in
>knowing ages is surely a necessary underpinning for any age-based
>restriction on drinking.
>
>Of course, for millennia there has been advice on the relationship of age
>and alcohol. (I give some in my history of wine.) Much of it was based on
>characterizations of the youthful body as hot and thereful vulnerable to
>combustion if "hot" beverages like alcohol were consumed).
>
>What's notable about the 19th and 20th centuries, when age restrictions
>began to appear consistently in all jurisdictions, is that it was based
>more clearly on moral rather than physical arguments: that children were
>innocent, vulnerable, and that alcohol was inappropriate for them. Of
>course, this also coincided with the rise of temperance arguments and
>of the wider availability of alternative beverages.
>
>Shifts in concepts of childhood and youth are clearly central to the
>history of alcohol regulation, but it's difficult to separate them (even
>for analytical purposes) from other social, econimic and cultural changes.
>
>I'll follow this thread with interest. I'm currently completing a history
>of alcohol (for the University of North Carolina Press) and I'm sure to
>learn something that will help me on this.
>
>Rod Phillips
>
>
>David Fahey writes:
>>
>> The more I study alcohol history the more that I begin to realize the
>> extent of my ignorance.  Perhaps ATHG subscribers can help me in regards
>> youth and alcoholic beverages.  I assume that a large part of the problem
>> is how a society defines childhood.  For instance, in recent years in the
>> USA, childhood has been both enlarged chronologically (university
students
>> are not expected to be as responsible for their actions as had people of
>> the same age a hundred years previously) and also narrowed (adult rights
in
>> voting and sexuality for teenagers).  I assume too that the varying role
of
>> formal law in different societies is relevant, as is the kind of
alcoholic
>> beverages (for instance, wine or whiskey, low-alcohol beer or regular
beer,
>> etc.).  And, of course, minimum legal ages for drinking seldom coincide
>> with practice.  There are all sorts of other considerations, as for
>> example, religion (notably, Islam) and the role alcohol plays in social

>> rituals, etc.  Any suggestions?
>>
>> David M. Fahey Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>
>
>
>Roderick Phillips
>Editor, Journal of Family History/
>Professor, Department of History
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Carleton University
>1125 Colonel By Drive
>Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6
>Tel: (613) 520-2600 ext 2824; fax: (613) 520-2819
>Email address: [log in to unmask]
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>