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 forgiveness, is increasingly figured as compulsion, the inability to shift away from drinking. To John Downame, as for other puritan writers, those who “addict themselves to much drinking” prompt a spiritual, economic, and legal crisis.72 William Perkins thus warns his allies “not to addict ourselves to drinking,” while William Prynne chidingly writes, “The people given to idlenesse and vaine discourse doe in these dayes addict themselves more to drunkennesse, surfetting, Playes and wantonnesse, than to divine things.”73 Writers bolster their arguments with medical diagnoses, anticipating the modern notion of addiction as compulsive, pathological attachment. Texts such as The Drunkards Cup, Diet for a Drunkard, The Drunkard’s Character, and The Condition of a Drunkard speak of drunkenness as a physical disease and as a defining identity much earlier than current narratives on the rise of “modern” addiction suggest.74
Downame elaborates on the two ways that drinkers abuse themselves: “First by drunkenness, when by immoderate swilling and tipling they are deprived of the use of their reason, understanding, and memory; so as for the time, they become like unto beasts. Second, by excesse, when as they addict themselves to much drinking, and make it their usual practice to sit at the wine or strong drink.”75 While “drunkenness” and “excess” might seem synonymous to modern audiences, for Downame they are distinct. “Drunkenness” describes the phenomenon of overdrinking, regardless of how often—drunkenness produces, he says, substance-related problems (deprivation of “reason, understanding, and memory”). “Excess” denotes habitual overdrinking or compulsive use (a “usual practice” of excess, as men “sit at the wine or strong drink”). Thus, both singular drunkenness and habitual drinking are part of the dangers of alcohol. Addiction appears, Downame claims, when the drinker can no longer abstain: “They who addict themselves to this vice, doe finde it so sweet and pleasing to the flesh, that they are loath to part with it.”76
Downame’s concern for those addicts of alcohol stands in contrast to the widespread Galenic prescription of alcohol in promoting good health.77 Alcohol’s role in that regard was especially crucial since daily beverages such as beer and ale provided both clean water and calories to their consumers. Indeed, as Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy write, “Alcohol, consumed in moderation, was thought to be an important ally in the fight against disease. Ale, beer, and wine were all touted for their preservative properties.”78 Excessive and habitual drunkenness challenged the Galenic prescriptions for self care and provoked increasing concern from medical, legal, and religious authorities, prompting examination, as Jennifer Richards illuminates, of precisely what constituted “enough.”79 This concern is expressed not only in sermonizing writings but also in historical chronicles such as Holinshed’s, where he notes the role of beer in the English diet and the resulting “ale knightes so much addicted thereunto, that they will not cease from morow untyll even.”80
Addicted drinkers suffer, many writers argue, from disease. The daily bouts affect the drinkers’ brains, leading to greater toleration for alcohol. John Hoskins, in concert with his contemporaries, describes how wine gives “the braine a blow, that like a subtil wrastler, it may supplant the feet afterwards.”81 While these authors had none of the modern tools, such as brain-scan technology, that are available to twenty-first-century neurobiologists, they nevertheless anticipate modern research in their preoccupation with the drunken brain, as well as the drunken body. Further, these writers catalogue a set of diseases familiar to modern researchers and chronicled in Trotter and Rush’s work, cited above. The drinker, Downame and other critics of drunkenness argue, “is brought unto grievous diseases, as dropsies, gouts, palsies, apoplexie, and such like.”82 This catalogue of diseases appears in nearly all discussions of drunkenness in this genre of religious polemic.83 Drunkenness leads to such “diseases in the body of man, as apoplexies, falling sicknesses, palsies, dropsies, consumptions, giddinesse of the head, inflammation of the blood and liver, distemper of the brain, deprivation of the sense, and whatnot,” as the anonymous author of A looking glasse for drunkards (1627) writes.84
Of course, this language of disease does not indicate that early modern notions of diseased alcoholism map easily onto modern ones. To early modern writers, drunkenness is also a sign of errancy, not least because, as Roy Porter argues, “sickness was largely seen as personal, internal, and brought on by a faulty lifestyle…. Careful attention to all aspects of ‘regimen’ or lifestyle, would prevent ‘disease’ (literally ‘dis-ease’) in the first place.”85 Yet ultimately these authors find the language of vice and condemnation insufficient, an important point considering that later addiction studies label the early modern period as a strictly moralizing one in its descriptions of drunkenness. Wrestling with the agent behind the lure of drinking, reformers alternate between blaming the drinker and the power of alcohol. Ostensibly the “drunkard” brings this infirmity “upon himself.” Yet equally, in trying to account for the radical changes in a drinker’s condition, these writers turn to language on the overthrow of the subject: what had previously signaled dedicated commitment when directed at God indicates instead a form of slavery when linked to alcohol. As we learn in The odious, despicable, and dreadfull condition of a drunkard, “drunkards” suffer from a “slavish condition,” tied to the “tap-house.”86 The language of tyranny and enslavement illuminates the strange condition of drunkenness, in which a subject is both himself and not himself. Arguably “the outcome of weakness or self-indulgence on the part of the paradigmatically ‘free’ agent,” drunkenness resonates in these writings with a condition problematically deemed to be voluntary slavery, the socially and politically stigmatized failure of mastery on the part of an individual. “When a higher faculty of the free self falls subject to a lower faculty, or when the free self as a whole becomes hopelessly enamored of inferior, mundane pursuits,” Mary Nyquist writes, “ethico-spiritual ‘slavery’ is the inevitable result.”87 This peculiar notion of slavery’s voluntarism allows the drinker some agency: the addict is not a slave in a political or legal sense, but rather is reflexively attached and ravished by an object or activity of choice, becoming diseased and abused in the process.
In their complex invocations of drunkenness as a disease of body and spirit, these early modern theologians are at the heart of a historical irony: it is the largely religious preachers who explore the empirical connection between habitual drunkenness and a set of disorders linked, today, with alcoholism. Yet in the context of twentieth-century addiction discourse, these writers will be dismissed as ignorant moralizers, as proto-temperance fanatics, and as biased evangelicals, even as their
