Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
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holds the potential to gesture beyond isolated and isolating modes of life. Addiction offers one such model. Drawing attention to addiction as utterance and ravishment, this project illuminates the fundamental dispersal of agency at the heart of addiction itself. In doing so, this project explores how the early modern mode of addictive release might be admired and imitated for offering a form of related living based on connection rather than isolation and on community rather than individuality.
This book begins to tease out such philosophical and ethical resonances of addiction by turning, in the introduction, to the first uses of a word: “addict” and its derivations. The word’s use clusters in three arenas: faith, love, and drinking.24 Analyzing addictions to faith and love, the first half of this project reveals how such addictions require dedication and an exceptional vulnerability that eludes many seekers. To be an addict demands the simultaneous exercise and relinquishment of the will, a paradoxical and challenging combination. One must consent to give up consent, and banish the will, to addict oneself fully. This form of addiction is at once laudable and dangerous, for the addict undergoes a transformation, a ravishment, in pursuit of the addictive object. Examining this process of self-shattering, the project’s first chapters expose how addictive release overtakes individuals, bringing them into deep relation with another.25
As sixteenth-century audiences actively sought and embraced such addiction to God and love, however, they were also warned of addiction’s danger for physical, spiritual, and communal integrity: exceptional attachment or commitment to improper forms exposed the threat of addiction. This book examines, in its second half, such allegedly dangerous addictions, turning to Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism” to understand how an object initially attracting attachment might impede an individual’s flourishing. In its study of such cruel attachments, “those binding kinds of optimistic relation we call ‘cruel,’” this portion of the project pays particular attention to alcohol as a secondary addiction.26 The turn from hopeful attachment in friendship, partnership, and community to a compulsive mode of addiction exposes alcohol as an available elixir, one that seems to offer the promise of community and the devotional attachment charted in this book’s first half. Yet this study of drinking also anticipates modern notions of addiction. Early modern theological, medical, imaginative, and legal writing directly references habitual drunkenness as addiction, insisting on its link to disease and tyranny and resonating with the work of later medical researchers. Even, then, as my study of alcohol is yoked to this book’s primary argument—uncovering early modern addiction’s association with devotion and pledging—my work also contributes to the voluminous scholarship on modern addictions, demonstrating the relevance of the early modern period for more familiar notions of addiction as compulsive drug taking. My hope is that this book might help encourage future projects on other addictive relations from this period since, as suggested above, tobacco-taking, gambling, and sex, as well as witchcraft and swearing, appear, at times, as compulsive and ravishing activities. Beyond the necessary limits of this book, I am eager to see what studies my foray into the topic might help encourage.
Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England
Introduction
Addiction in (Early) Modernity
The scholarship on addiction is vast and capacious. So, too, are the critical bibliographies on early modern faith, love, and drinking. This book, which is indebted to these large fields, charts a path directly between them, clearing the way to a previously obscured area: early modern addiction.1 This area has remained largely invisible for two reasons. First, critical discourses on addiction tend to emphasize the concept’s modernity, as this introduction’s opening section reveals. Second, the scholarship on early modern devotion, love, friendship, and drinking—the addictions charted in this project—attends to a wealth of historical evidence beyond what might appear the philological curiosity of addiction’s appearance. The study of early modern addiction thus brings together what are otherwise distinct scholarly approaches to the study of modern addiction on the one hand and to early modern practices of faith, love, and good fellowship on the other.
Addiction and Modernity
In her essay “Epidemics of the Will,” Eve Sedgwick explores addiction precisely as a feature of modernity. Just as Michel Foucault theorizes how same-sex acts preceded the formation, in the nineteenth century, of the identity of the homosexual, so too with the addict. First came the acts—the drinking, the smoking, and the gambling—then came the character designation of the addict. As Sedgwick writes, “In the taxonomic reframing of a drug user as an addict, what changes are the most basic terms about her. From a situation of relative homeostatic stability and control, she is propelled into a narrative of inexorable decline and fatality,” being given “a newly pathologized addict identity.”2 Sedgwick’s distinction between acts and identity hinges on the opposition of what she calls the “stability and control” evident in willful choice—the individual who chooses to drink—and the tyranny of compulsion—the “pathologized” addict, who is compelled to consume.
Current addiction research asserts, and at times attempts to theorize, this pathologized identity of the addict. Debates on addiction as choice, predisposition, dependency, and disease move between the poles of free will and undermined agency.3 Jeffrey Poland and George Graham write, for example, of a “toxic first-person self-pathologizing” that may in fact “undermine a person’s efforts to overcome her problems.”4 Their study of addiction and responsibility emphasizes instead the degree of agentive selfhood exercised by addicts, and more broadly, their edited collection features a range of essays on addiction, free will, and choice. Such agency appears compromised, however, to many other addiction researchers. Lubomira Radoilska argues, for example, that “addiction-centered agency is paradoxical by its very nature. For it is eccentric in a self-defeating way: agential control is surrendered in search of a greater, though impossible, control. As a result, a form of passivity or dependence is placed at the heart of an addict’s activities.”5 Such passivity or dependence appears, in Radoilska’s formulation, as a form of “defeat in action.”6 With diametrically opposed approaches to addiction and agency, theorists struggle to formulate policy in dealing with a perceived health crisis.
“The field of addiction is not short on theories,” the authors of The Theory of Addiction write: “There are psychological theories, biological theories, sociological theories, economic theories, biopsychosocial theories and more.”7 But the field is arguably short on history. In fact, much of the effort to understand addiction in a modern setting overlooks or radically shortens its history, approaching addiction as if it were a universal or modern phenomenon. This project, while influenced by the range of recent studies, particularly within the philosophy of addiction and the history of science, nevertheless takes a different approach. It uncovers both a longer history of views on addiction and an alternate understanding of addiction as an achievement.
Conventional medical history on addiction dates the concept to the turn of the nineteenth century, when physicians in both Britain and America diagnosed alcoholism as a nervous disorder; no concept of addiction, it is claimed, existed in England or America before this period. Advances in medical science and psychology led to its definition in both countries. First, the British navy physician Thomas Trotter, who has been called “the first scientific investigator of drunkenness,” produced a 1788 Edinburgh doctoral thesis arguing that habitual drunkenness is itself a disease.8 His dissertation was published in 1804 as An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and Its Effects on the Human Body, and in it Trotter notes, “In medical language, I consider drunkenness, strictly speaking, to be a disease.”9 This disease manifests in illnesses attendant on overdrinking, including “universal debility, emaciation, loss of intellect, palsy, dropsy, dyspepsia, hepatic diseases, and all others which flow from the indulgence of spirituous liquors.”10 Nearly simultaneously, Benjamin Rush in America (one of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a man deemed the founder of American psychiatry) published An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits