Hit by the Mill: Material Culture and the Carnivalesque in Early Modern Dutch Drinking Bouts

Windmill cups are found in many Western European museums and private collections, especially in the Low Countries. During seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drinking bouts, men played simple drinking games with these lavishly decorated drinking vessels. This paper argues that the peculiar objects can shed light upon the paradoxical relation between manhood and excessive drinking in the Dutch Republic. The use, material properties and decorations of mill cups, it is argued, referred to the iconography of carnival. Because of that, they created specific occasions that invited specific drunken comportment of participating men.