Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon

I saw, that Gods law is most excellent, and therefore addicted myself so much the more to lone [love] it and to hate al wicked ways.”⁵² Thomas Taylor’s parable of the sower and the seed similarly counsels that the faithful say “in their hearts, Thus much wealth I will attaine unto, and when I have done that, I will addict my selfe to the service of God.”⁵³ Paul, in his letter to Titus, impresses upon his audience the value of addicted service, at least in Erasmus’s version of the text. The epistle begins with lines in which Paul casts himself as an addict: “I Paule my selfe the addict servant & obeyer, not of Moses lawe as I was once, but of God the father, and ambassador of his sonne Jesus Christ.”⁵⁴

      For most of the sixteenth century, addiction, in its link to God and service, was not a problem; it was an achievement. To be an addict indicated commitment, vulnerability, hard work, and courage. To be an addict meant to devote oneself entirely to a calling—to be addicted to scripture, to scholarship more generally, or to Christ. Nevertheless, in its derided invocations, such addiction might signal enthrallment, the relinquishment of good sense and true faith: one might be addicted to the pope or superstitious practices, or one might, as Joye suggests, be addicted to alcohol. Thus addiction appeared both laudable and dangerous, a commitment to salvation or degeneration. Furthermore, the term “addict” contains at once a sense of obligation (as in its Latin origin, in contract law), as well as a sense of choice (to bequeath or give). These alternate, competing, but connected senses of addiction—as compulsion and choice, as the right path or the reprobate one—resonate with the philosophical and theological questioning familiar to readers of Reformation literatures: what is the role of free will in faith? If the godly seek to will away the will, hoping to receive grace, addiction encapsulates this struggle in the desire to give oneself over to a higher power. The struggle remains, ultimately, an active, unresolved one, because the concept of addiction leaves profoundly unsettled this question of devotional agency: the addict might will himself or herself toward God; equally, however, as the voluminous literature on pious living suggests, an earthly authority might attempt to command or dictate (dicare) such dedication, or God might offer it through grace.

      Addiction as Abuse

      The profound uncertainty surrounding both the agent propelling addictive devotion (be it the believer or an external authority) and the object of devotion itself (the godly or heretical path) invites wary understandings of addiction’s power. Thus, in addition to the view of addiction as an extraordinary form of commitment, sixteenth-century religious polemics warn against the dangers of fervent attachment to the wrong object. Such warnings take the form of cautions against idolatry and of a more general fear of material forms of worship associated with Catholicism. Thomas Bilson, writing in support of the English church, claims that Catholic “writers were all addicted to images,” while William Charke criticizes the “willful addiction to the olde translation” of the Bible.⁵⁵

      The investigation of errant addiction is particularly evident in the works of John Foxe, who derides those who “addict themselves so devoutly to ye popes learning,” singling out individual stories of those “worshipping of Idoles” to which they are “addict.”⁵⁶ Depicting the adoration of icons as a kind of addiction, Foxe writes, as in the case of the Catholic Lord Cobham: “If any man do otherwise abuse this representation, and geve the reverence unto those Images, which is due unto the holy men whom they represent … or if they be so affected toward the domb Images, that they do in any behalfe addict unto them, eyther be more addicted unto one Saint then another, in my minde they doe little differ from Idolatrye, grievously offending agaynst God the author of all honor.”⁵⁷ Foxe links addiction and abuse here, deriding those believers who mistakenly “abuse” representations and “addict” themselves to “domb images” or “one Saint then another.” Such a form of addiction is a grievous offense, for it establishes a deep but improper commitment to idols over God.

      The Reformers’ concern with addiction to physical forms of worship connects to their suspicion of addiction to physical pleasures more broadly. The Elizabethan “An Homilee agaynst gluttony and drunkenness,” for example, directly links improper forms of worship and gluttony: “Neyther woulde we at this day be so addict to superstition, were it not that we so much esteemed the fillyng of our bellies.”⁵⁸ Such a concern for idolatry and appetite appears from the inception of reformist movements in England. Henry VIII writes in A glasse of the truthe against those worshipers exhibiting “a great lacke of grace, and an overmoche addiction to pryuate appetites.”⁵⁹ Attachment to physical pleasures produces, these authorities speculate, misguided religious faith, or vice versa.

      The suspicion of material devotion expands from the attacks on papal dictates, iconography, and other earthly aids to worship into the preoccupation with addictive worldly lures. And in the process, puritan railers condemn lust, gaming, tobacco taking, stage plays, and any number of other material pleasures. Early modern historians have called this phenomenon the Puritan Reformation of Manners, because “pious pleadings” in the 1580s led, by the seventeenth century, to what Keith Wrightson has deemed “a programme of national significance,” regulating behavior from tavern haunting to May games.⁶⁰ “Scores of pamphlets and printed sermons,” Martin Ingram concurs, gesture toward “a ‘national’ movement,” one that is innovative in its reach: “Save for preaching from the pulpit and the circulation of statutes, proclamations and town ordinances,” he writes, “there was no late fifteenth-century equivalent.”⁶¹ This reformation of manners had a dramatic legislative and administrative impact on the early modern landscape, an impact achieved largely by the vehemence of the reformers and their “narrowness of concern.”⁶² The legislative effect was particularly felt in the arena of drunkenness, which was increasingly perceived as a national problem. Beyond tavern regulation, early modern legislators developed laws against drunkenness itself, following the decade of puritan attacks on drinking and tavern haunting. As A. Lynn Martin puts it, “If the moralists are to be believed, drunkenness reached plague proportions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in England.”⁶³ Indeed, the early modern period saw the passage of England’s first national law against drunkenness itself, after a forty-year parliamentary battle. The “modern” discovery of addiction and the resulting legal regulation with the 1879 Habitual Drunkards Act (discussed above) was in fact mirrored centuries earlier with the 1606 Statute Against Drunkenness.

      Concerns about drunkenness have, of course, a long history, extending from classical literature forward.⁶⁴ From Beowulf to Langland, medieval writers chronicle drinking rituals and abuse. The English abbot and homilist Aelfric of Eynsham, anticipating later puritan detractors, cautions that “drunkenness is a vice of such magnitude that … drunkards are not able to obtain the kingdom of God.”⁶⁵ And The Trinity Homilies compare the gluttonous man to a swine in language resonant with early modern descriptions: “Some men pass their lives in eating and drinking, as swine, which foul themselves, and root up and sniff ever foully.”⁶⁶ Yet even as medieval examinations of drinking accord with early modern discussions on drunkenness as beastly, ungodly, and dangerous, their framework differs notably, frequently hinging on the language of the seven deadly sins and the eight sins before them.⁶⁷ The deadly sin of gluttony—with attendant drunkenness—attracted special attention as a gateway sin, a point Chaucer’s Parson makes clear in The Canterbury Tales: those guilty of gluttony, as he puts it, “may no synne withstonde.”⁶⁸ From the character of Gluttony in medieval dramas such as The Castle of Perseverance to Langland’s extended tavern portrait in Piers Plowman to the Parson’s and Pardoner’s tales about the seven deadly sins in Chaucer, the warnings against drunkenness are often predictable: the drinker fails to attend church, saps family’s finances, endangers health, and commits other sins as a result of being drunk.⁶⁹

      As powerful as this medieval framework of the deadly sins might be, by the sixteenth century writings on drunkenness shift away from the schema to a more pointed view of drunkenness as disease and reprobation.⁷⁰ From Shephard’s attack on Catholic curates in “Doctor Double Ale” to Skelton’s infamous misogyny in “The Tunning of Elynour Rumming,” allegations against drinkers offer satirical portraits of corruption and hypocrisy.⁷¹ What had been deemed errancy and sin, in need of salvation and