Grounds of Authority: Building Expert Knowledge of Coffee in the 17th Century

Over the course of the seventeenth century, few substances provoked as much fascination, suspicion, and polemic in the early modern world as coffee. It was never just a drink; but a flashpoint. The effort to build trustworthy medical knowledge around coffee compelled elite European scholars to seek information from a wide range of actors, including craftspeople, merchants, women, and enslaved Muslims, to assemble a more expansive body of knowledge about a beverage that “everyone asks about.” At the same time, however, growing curiosity about coffee further destabilized established forms of medical authority. Conflicting assessments of its benefits and harms produced a lack of medical consensus, opening space for alternative knowledge claims. Merchant-apothecaries and Orientalist scholars leveraged this uncertainty to critique learned medical scholarship and to promote their own distinctive skill sets as indispensable to contemporary medical debates. This paper examines the contested boundaries of expertise as they emerged through debates surrounding coffee. The protagonists of the case studies examined here—including an enslaved Italian naturalist, a French merchant-apothecary, and an Orientalist scholar, and their engagements with the Ottoman Empire—sought recognition within the medical field by foregrounding their practical knowledge and specialized competencies. The questions regarding physicians’ fallibility and uncertainty in the face of a novel substance thus became a focal point through which new actors navigated their expertise within scholarly debates on coffee.