[_audakel]

Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered directly to your table. The thread tying it all together is a new drug from the Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching—called “coffee.”

[gcb0]

Hold your horses. Author is citing from a satirical text. it's probably 110% false. Telling like a fact in the first paragraphs and title is just click bait at its finest.

[benbreen]

Author here - the opening paragraph is based on Brian Cowan's academic monograph on 17th century coffee houses which I recommend highly to anyone interested in this. None of the things I wrote there are mentioned in the satirical text, but are instead based on documented cases, such as Lloyds coffee house becoming an insurance brokerage.

[tomlock]

I've been pretty fascinated by the idea of ancient coffee houses since reading Raymond E. Feist's fictional novel "Rise of a Merchant Prince" in which most of the action happens in a coffee house.

Are there any more articles or books you'd suggest to get more across the topic, and particularly the salacious and dramatic details?

[benbreen]

It's so funny you mention that book because it was one of the things that set me on my current path (got a Phd in early modern history and am now writing a book about the drug and spice trade). I need to reread it, it's been a long time. Anyway, Cowan's "The Social Life of Coffee" is a good read, I thought. The diary of Samuel Pepys is an exceptional book if you're looking for something written by a contemporary, although he spends more time in taverns. I suspect that Dutch and French coffeehouses were even more interesting than English ones but there doesn't seem to be much on them unfortunately.

[Tossrock]

It's fiction, but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle features many coffee house intrigues in this exact setting (Restoration England)

[Alex3917]

Was coffee being used roughly the same way it's used today at Starbucks or whatever, or was it used closer to the way that the Sufis used it? The article doesn't really make any sense without this context.

[benbreen]

I'd say much closer to Starbucks in that it was bought and sold at a place of business, and consumed in a secular context. One important difference is that many coffeehouse goers on the 17th century appear to have been drinking alcohol as well, which helps explain why things were so much more raucous.

[saghm]

So essentially 17th-century Four Loko

[mortenjorck]

I wouldn't be surprised if there were sources for each of these happening on some occasion at a 17th-century coffee house. I would be quite surprised if they all happened, with regularity, at the same coffee house.

[eddiecalzone]

Lots of coffee shops have fireplaces. The rest is covered by free WiFi. Not the end of the world as we know it. Well, actually it is, but not because of coffee or prostitutes.

[zeroer]

Sounds like the Internet.