medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
"V. Kerry Inman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Peter the Venereal translate the Koran?
had something to do with it --i know not the details.
a pretty amazing thing to do, en ces temps la.
it does seem strange to me that, given Jonathan's brief history of Coffee, the
drink was known among the Moslems (east and west?) and chez the Byzantines(?)
for *centuries* before it caught on in the West.
of course, a parallel might be suggested with the opium poppy, which, as
everyone knows, was brought back to England from Jerusalem by Brother Cadfael,
who used it medicially and where it appears on at least one surviving capital
in a 12th c. cloister (where *is* that, btw?), but was then *lost*, for
centuries.
coffee, it might be argued, is just a recreational drug, but how the knowledge
of something so clearly efficacious medicinally could have been known and then
lost is quite a mystery to me.
c
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then,
when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show
that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process
for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false
belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." --George
Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose," 1946
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