Rebecca Lemon illuminates a previously-buried conception of
addiction, as a form of devotion at once laudable, difficult, and
extraordinary, that has been concealed by the persistent modern
link of addiction to pathology. Surveying sixteenth-century
invocations, she reveals how early moderns might consider
themselves addicted to study, friendship, love, or God. However,
she also uncovers their understanding of addiction as a form of
compulsion that resonates with modern scientific definitions.
Specifically, early modern medical tracts, legal rulings, and
religious polemic stressed the dangers of addiction to alcohol in
terms of disease, compulsion, and enslavement. Yet the relationship
between these two understandings of addiction was not simply
oppositional, for what unites these discourses is a shared emphasis
on addiction as the overthrow of the will. Etymologically,
"addiction" is a verbal contract or a pledge, and even as
sixteenth-century audiences actively embraced addiction to God and
love, writers warned against commitment to improper forms of
addiction, and the term became increasingly associated with disease
and tyranny. Examining canonical texts including Doctor Faustus,
Twelfth Night, Henry IV, and Othello alongside theological,
medical, imaginative, and legal writings, Lemon traces the variety
of early modern addictive attachments. Although contemporary
notions of addiction seem to bear little resemblance to its initial
meanings, Lemon argues that the early modern period's understanding
of addiction is relevant to our modern conceptions of, and debates
about, the phenomenon.
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