Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe - Couverture rigide

Taylor, Scott K.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1501775464 ISBN 13 : 9781501775468

Editeur : Cornell University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive. During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities.

Drawing from primary sources in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, Scott K. Taylor shows that these substances embodied Europeans' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade.

Through the writings of physicians, theologians, political pamphleteers, satirists, and others, Ambivalent Pleasures tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that consuming them would make users more foreign); and the new forms of sociability that coalesced around their use.

Even as Europeans' moral concerns about the consumption of these drugs fluctuated, the physical and sensory experiences of using them remained a critical concern, anticipating present-day rhetoric and policy about addiction to drugs and alcohol.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Scott K. Taylor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1501775464
• ISBN 13: 9781501775468
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 318
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible