I Dropped Out of a Beer Mile And It Was Still Awesome
If you study literature and politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you will read a lot about vomit. I'm not kidding. It was a useful metaphor in an age of philosophical dispute, religious division, and self-reflection. For example, Shakespeare turned to the gut for the presentation of truth. Overwhelmed by sadness, Titus Andronicus explains, “my bowels cannot hide her woes, but like a drunkard must I vomit them.” The religious reformer Martin Luther condemned Roman Catholics as doing “nothing but vomit, throw, and blow out devils.” Even the poet John Milton got in on the purgative action, declaiming monarchical bishops as giving “a vomit to God himself.” The bishops were so odious even the Creator couldn’t keep his lunch down. The Annunciation (or When God Ate a Bad Chicken Sandwich) by Melchior Broederlam It is a sign of the times then that emetic activities have returned to the cultural forefront—perhaps a reflection of the new medievalism of the po
