Rebecca Lemon, Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England

What do we mean when we say someone is addicted? Scholarship on the subject points to the pioneering work of Thomas Trotter and Benjamin Rush in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: they proposed that habitual drunkenness should be treated as a disease, not as a series of free choices. But it is Rebecca Lemon’s contention that we should look further back in history to understand what addiction is: while the disease model may be formally only two centuries old, ‘addiction is not a singular feature of modernity’ (p.5). A literary critic, Lemon argues that drama and other writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have much to tell us about what it means to be addicted before the identity of the addict came to be formed. Lemon’s illuminating study starts with the origins of the word ‘addiction’ in Roman contract law. To be addicted could mean to be sentenced

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