Wine, women and song
Wine, women and song

Summary/Abstract: In medieval universities to begin with, the idea of wellbeing seems to have been summarized in the “Wein, Weib und Gesang” hendiatris. The Nordic (English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) lore did not fail to assimilate this hedonistic philosophy on the spot, to see that it was by no means singular, the tripartite motto to an exuberant lifestyle having a perfect equivalent in Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi, a slightly changed equivalent in the Italian “wine, tobacco and love,” the Portuguese “whores, music and green wine,” the Persian “meat, wine and youth,” a negatively connoted equivalent in the Spanish “cards, women and wine,” and, in the distant future, an unorthodox interpretation in the “sex and drugs and rock‘n’roll” refrain. pp. 95–99

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