of drunkenness as disease, but not until fifty years after these religious writings. Notably, Dr. Everard Maynwaringe takes up the concern with drunkenness. In his Vita sana & longa the preservation of health and prolongation of life proposed and proved (1669), he writes “that drunkenness is a disease or sickness, will appear in that it hath all the requisites to constitute a disease, and is far distant from a state of health … the eyes do not see well, nor the ears hear well, nor the palate relish, etc. The speech faulters and is imperfect; the stomach perhaps vomites or nauseates; his legs fail … an unwholesome corpulency and … plentitude of body does follow: or a degenerate … and a decayed consumptive constitution … as well as imbecility of the nerves.”88 Maynwaringe, like the godly polemicists before him and modern researchers after, links excessive drunkenness to precisely those diseases that continue to be associated today with alcoholism. Indeed, as Jessica Warner has illuminated, these pamphlets directly anticipate the work by the addiction pioneers Trotter and Rush centuries later: “We ultimately owe our own habit of identifying heavy drinkers as addicts and alcoholism as a disease not to physicians but to the clergymen of preindustrial England.”89 This is because, she argues, “it is in the religious oratory of Stuart England that we find the key components of the idea that habitual drunkenness constitutes a progressive disease, the chief symptom of which is a loss of control over drinking behavior.”90 Yet, as Christopher C. H. Cook has argued, “under the influence of the Enlightenment, the vast interdisciplinary literature that surrounds addiction and alcohol studies has come to exclude theology.”91
Drinking and Good Fellowship
The embrace of one form of addiction, to God, and the censure of another, to alcohol, creates the appearance of an oppositional logic structuring the conceptions of addictive attachment. But the story of early modern addiction is more complex than mere opposition. For against the puritan concern about addictive drinking as a form of diseased compulsion lies a contemporaneous discourse on drinking as laudable commitment to community and nation. When examined through the ubiquitous early modern conversations on good fellowship, certain aspects of drinking culture—namely, the community ties, friendships, and national allegiances—parallel the devotional addiction to God or love, a point taken up in Chapter 3 of this project. Mark Hailwood’s recent study provides a succinct definition of this capacious category of good fellowship and, in doing so, highlights its links to drinking and to loyalty to community: “It was an activity structured by a number of rituals—toasting, drinking contests, games and gambling, songs—and by a series of behavioural conventions that encouraged liberal spending, heavy but controlled drinking, and the maintenance of a jovial—or ‘merry’—disposition and atmosphere. These rituals and conventions expressed a number of values: courage, self control, loyalty, financial prosperity and independence, a pride in hard work, a bold defiance of dominant gender norms.”92
In sharp contrast to the godly condemnations of diseased drinking, the rituals of good fellowship and its attendant values, including “courage” and “loyalty,” attest to the cultural benefits of drinking culture. Exclusive friendships sustain drinking communities in times of strife. In his poem “Good Fellowship,” for example, Hugh Crompton’s speaker trumpets his dedication to communal drinking:
Fill, fill the glass to the brim,
‘Tis a health unto him
That refuses
To be curb’d, or disturb’d
At the power of the State,
Or the frowns of his fate;
Or that scorneth to bark or to bite at our Muses:
And that never will vary
From the juyce of the Vine, and the cups of Canary.93
The emphasis on exclusive loyalty—one who “never will vary” in his drinking—appears in a range of writings on good fellowship that are structured around those who “refuse” to be daunted in their commitments to each other. Thomas D’Urfey’s “The Good Fellow” offers a similar rallying cry:
A pox on the times,
Let ’em go as they will,
Tho’ the taxes are grown so heavy;
Our hearts are our own,
And shall be so still,
Drink about, my boys, and be merry.94
The speaker upholds his unity with his drinking “boys,” who still claim ownership of their loyal “hearts” even in times of political isolation. “To quaffe is fellowship right and good,” writes William Hornby; such drinking fellowship helps “maintain friendship and nourish blood.”95 Even the critics of good fellowship recognize its connection to forms of loyalty and devotion. Thus drunkenness goes, William Prynne writes, “under the popular and lovely titles of hospitality, good-fellowship, courtesie, entertainement, joviality, mirth, generosity, liberality, open house keeping, the liberall use of Gods good creatures, friendship, love, kindnesse, good neighbour hood, company-keeping, and the like.”96
The language of good fellowship resonates with a model of addiction in urging one’s release into a spirit—the spirit of alcohol—as a sign of loyalty, with the alehouse functioning as an alternate family.97 “To consider seventeenth-century drinking,” Adam Smyth writes, is “to consider friendship, community, conviviality.”98 Tavern drinking helped establish affiliation and loyalty, often to a community structured around shared gender, class, regional, or political affiliations made evident in drinking habits.99 Since one’s choice of alcohol helped to signify one’s class status, drink functioned as a mode of social recognition.100 Drunkenness, or claims of drunkenness, might serve as a way for the gentry to distance themselves from those impoverished visitors who haunted the alehouse; or drinking could help designate political affiliation, either through the types of beverage consumed or the spaces of consumption.101 Smyth’s collection, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality, elucidates the range of such sociable drinking, from the English versions of Anacreontic verse studied by Stella Achilleos, to the ballads analyzed by Angela McShane, to the drinking communities illuminated by Michelle O’Callaghan, Marika Keblusek, and Charles C. Ludington. A range of studies of admirable drunkenness also expose the flourishing of carnivalesque ritual and the politics of mirth, both dependent on drinking culture for political and social union.102
Despite the seemingly opposed (and equally voluminous) cultural responses to drinking from puritan critics and inspired tavern haunters, both groups share an embrace of the spirit as connection to community and fellowship. Ravishment, be it through transforming God on the one hand or inspired drinking on the other, reshapes the devoted addict.103 Indeed, these drinkers of divine and alcoholic spirits wrestle over the claim to good fellowship itself, as the godly attempted to assert their form of pious “good fellowship” in their communities of the faithful. The link of good fellowship to drinking thus provoked particular ire, with puritan critics calling out the deception of secular calls to “good fellowship” that served merely as a synonym for drunkenness. As Henry Crosse claims in Vertues common-wealth (1603): “If we looke into the monstrousnesse of sinne in this age, we may see every abhomination sport it selfe, as though there were no God. Drunkennesse is good fellowship.” Indeed, he warns, one might “carrie the verie badge of good fellowship upon his nose.”104 As William Perkins asks, in dismay, “Is not drunkennes counted good fellowship”?105 George Benson also derides the “drunkennesse of good fellowshippe,” while Thomas Cooper condemns how “drunkenesse is counted good fellowshippe.”106
The
