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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or all the examples given in the article do, in fact, describe drinking water instead of beer or wine as a thing that was done but was (a) something unusual, (b) a sign of religious self-limitation ("so abstemious that he ... drank water instead of wine") or (c) as a punishment (diet of bread and water).

So it only supports the thesis that people in medieval times did generally avoid drinking water to the best of their ability; it does say that the reasons for doing so aren't so simple to avoid 'bad water'.

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The examples given only showed that of drinking only water, which I would say is exactly how we see people today.

If someone is only drinking water, so avoiding coffee, tea, soda, wine, beer, etc. we see it as something unusual. Normally as a sign of self-limitation either due to a self or medically imposed diet.

I haven't drank a glass of water in weeks, does that mean I avoid drinking water, or that I just have something better than water to drink?

Ascribing meaning into a choice with no knowledge or insight into the reasoning inherently creates falsehoods.

The Romans weren't masters of aquaducts just because they wanted to bathe in it. They drank it, they cooked with it. It's just absolutely silly to think people didn't drink water.

I don't drink coffee because my water isn't safe. I drink coffee because it tastes better than my tasteless water.

I've never heard the idea that no one during the Middle Ages drank water, so I'm not sure who the author is referring to when they say reputable scholars repeat this idea unthinkingly. It is notable that there seem to be no references in the post to anyone who actually believes this supposed myth.

The notion that anyone believed "bad water" caused disease is also one I've never heard in a Medieval context. "Bad air" and evil supernatural influences were the most commonly believed causes of disease in Medieval Europe.

People may have drunk watered wine and small beer and said they believed it "healthful", but many people smoked cigarette in early-to-mid 20th century said that was "healthful" too. Some of them may have even believed it. What people say about things doesn't necessarily tell us much about their actual reasons for doing them, or their true effect.

Drinking your local water source, full of micro-organisms your body was already familiar with, may have been on average no worse for you than drinking watered wine or small beer. Or there may have been some raw empiricism at work whereby people noticed that people who rarely drank pure water didn't get sick when everyone else did.

To make that argument you'd have to give an account of why no one ever noticed that bloodletting never cured anyone of anything, or that geese didn't actually come from barnacles, and so on.

Our ancestors were very bright, but had an outlook on the world that allowed them to miss the notion that small animals--tinier than dust motes in a beam of sunshine, too small for the eye to see--that lived in water and on decaying flesh and feces were the cause of much disease. Which is weird, because you'd think that such a simple idea would have been mentioned by god in one of those books he spent so much time dictating or inspiring: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1052

The myth is not clearly defined at the start, but it goes that people avoided water because alcoholic drinks were safer to drink than water. What you're hinting at is that people often prefer to drink something else for flavor/variety/intoxication, which is just as true today. The article does seem to debunk the myth that they were avoiding it for health reasons however.

I think this is adequately addressed in the article as well:

>Did people in the time prefer alcoholic drinks? Probably, and for the same reason most people today drink liquids other than water: variety and flavor. A young man in a tenth century Saxon colloquy is asked what he drinks and answers: “Beer if I have it or water if I have no beer.” This is a clear expression of both being comfortable with water and preferring beer.

The article debunks the idea that there was some sort of blanket fear of water. It makes it pretty clear that when clean water was available and recognized as clean, that people had no problem drinking it.

But I've never heard the myth that people avoided drinking even seemingly clean water. I've always heard that many people didn't have regular access to clean drinking water (particularly in non-Roman cities) would drink alcohol as a safe substitute.

That might possibly be the case. But then, where is any of the academic evidence? In general or even for particular settlements? There seems to be plenty of evidence saying that people were fine drinking water, there seems to be a distinct lack of evidence for the "people were afraid of the water" theory.

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