Hattox Ralph S. Coffee and coffeehouses

Third printing. — Seatle: University of Washington Press edition, 1996. — 178 p. — ISBN: 0-295-96231-3Coffee has never been a mere beverage. Some three centuries have passed since it became the overnight rage among the fashionable and witty in cities throughout Europe. Even in the late twentieth century, however, it has yet to be relegated to the ranks of the more pedestrian potions with which we quench our thirst or warm our insides. Little of coffee's original mystique has been worn off by centuries of familiarity.What is true for contemporary Western society was all the more so for that of the sixteenth-century Near East in the decades following coffee's sudden emergence from the obscure corners of the Yemen. Among other things, it was a commodity for speculation, a symbol of hospitality, an excuse for sociable procrastination. It also became one of the great legal, intellectual, and literary obsessions of the age, around which an intense, if sporadic, debate raged in the capitals and metropolises of Islam from Adrianople to Aden.