My Chocolate Fantasy

“Chocolate and tobacco will never taste the same. Smokers and chocoholics will understand themselves better, thanks to Marcy Norton´s book, not as victims of their own addictions or indulgences, but as part of a vast, fascinating, and world-shaping episode of the history of cultural exchange.”–Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Tufts University, author of Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

“Marcy Norton’s fascinating, beautifully illustrated, and deeply researched book traces the history of chocolate and tobacco as each crossed the Atlantic in the early modern era. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures draws on a rich and varied array of sources, including artwork, shipping registers, religious treatises, medical manuals, Inquisition records, and poetry. Norton delineates how Iberians emulated and adapted American habits as they sought to fit tobacco and chocolate into their religious worldviews, medical practices, habits of sociability, and economic systems. This original and pathbreaking work deserves a wide readership.”–Alison Games, Georgetown University, author of The Web of Empire: British Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660

“In Mesoamerica, tobacco was consumed as a paste to apply on the body, as an alkaloid to chew with lime, as a powder to sniff, or as a cigarette to smoke. Chocolate was originally consumed mostly by elites, mixed with corn flour, spices and honey. Marcy Norton deftly shows in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures that European colonizers eventually embraced these patterns of consumption. Norton puts Spain at the center of the narrative on the early modern consumer revolution. She succeeds brilliantly in showing how tobacco and chocolate were consumed in Mesoamerica prior to the European arrival and how the Spaniards and their descendants sought to cleanse these two staples of their pagan, demonic associations.”-Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin, author of Puritan Conquistadors