Carta del Café Facsimile Edition

The Carta del Café is a compact printed document—almost a pamphlet-flyer in spirit—preserved today as a single-sheet publication. Its opening headline functions as a title-page substitute, announcing a “letter” written by a Christian physician in Antiberi to a Cardinal of Rome concerning the beverage called cahué (coffee)—already signalling both medical authority and the lure of the new.

Early Modern Coffee in Europe

The Carta del Café opens onto a wide early modern world of contact and curiosity. It describes coffee drinking among Ottoman, Persian, and “Moorish” communities as a familiar social custom—visible in urban puestos as well as in elite settings where the beverage is served very hot in fine porcelain cups.

Coffee appears not only as refreshment but as a vehicle for conversation, courtly exchange, and rumor, mapping a new European fascination with a practice already embedded in daily life elsewhere.

Spanish Printed Broadsheet

As Spanish print, the piece relies on a direct, persuasive cadence. The epistolary framing gives it immediacy, while the typography—headline first, then dense paragraphs—matches the document’s function as fast-reading, portable information.

Coffee as Medicine and Method

The letter moves between experience and citation, praising coffee’s perceived effects on fatigue, vigilance, and bodily “obstructions,” before shifting into an explicit modo de hacer section: a practical recipe for toasting, grinding, infusing, and sweetening—coffee translated into a household procedure. The result is both medical narrative and commercial instruction, a text that makes novelty believable by making it doable.

A Document of Cultural Transfer

In miniature scale, the Carta del Café captures a threshold moment: coffee not yet fully settled in name or meaning, but already staged as medicine, sociability, and modern habit—a world-changing drink introduced through the modest authority of a printed sheet.