ABSTRACT
A 62-line broadsheet verse satire in pentameter rhyming couplets. The satire adapts the conventional attack on coffee as an emblem of the cultural innovations of the Restoration by elaborating a complex and extended analogy to relations between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The trope plays at several levels, one of which is a metaphor of coffee as a profane marriage between a brown Islamic bean and innocent Christian water. As well as the by now conventional burlesque of medical writing on coffee, the poem weaves together intricate layers of cultural stereotype, cross-cultural curiosity and transculturated practices around coffee and Turkey, making this a telling symbol for Anglo-Turkish relations in the seventeenth century. In addition, the poem makes some historical notes on the first arrival of coffee and coffee-houses in England (ll. 35–40), perhaps a sign that, by 1672, Londoner’s had become so habituated as to think of it as having a history, no longer an innovation.
