Addiction turns labor to waste, as we learn poignantly in the Middle English The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools (henceforth Debate), an obscure 294-line festival poem (ca. 1500) that depicts a craftsman's animated hand tools confronting their master's drinking problem.1 The lively encounter has received some critical attention, initially as a lighthearted, clever exercise in the medieval tradition of debate poetry and for the role it plays in a sprawling collection of devotional and romance materials in MS Ashmole 61, an engagingly dynamic “book” reflecting the domestic virtues and notions of family stability in many of its texts.2 In this essay I read the Debate as a serious, even grave study of the destructive power of an addiction that threatens to undermine the noble labor of a carpenter, a figure whose work, at its best, resonates powerfully through salvation history both literally and metaphorically. My essay is driven by two complementary imperatives: first, by way of advocating for a field of “Addiction Studies” in medieval literary criticism, to explore the Debate's critical representation of craft-class labor lost to the force of addiction; and second, to identify the tradition of medieval Christian spiritual exaltation associated with carpentry in analogous Middle English texts. In the Debate's conflicts, addiction, as is its custom, creates personal and familial chaos, breeds disintegration and alienation, and effectively prevents the poem's Carpenter from enjoying both the material profits of his work and the spiritual rewards of his dutiful labor. Carpentry, in its ideal form, emulates divine craft, fulfills the aspirations of healthy masculinity, and ensures ultimate salvation. Addiction dismantles personhood, envenoms self-governance, ruptures family, and evacuates the sacred labor of carpentry.Editors and critics have laid some strong, thoughtful foundation for such modern study of the Debate. Scholars certainly recognize that the poem may have functioned as a record of real celebratory entertainment for a carpenters’ guild, marking a night of hard drinking and fellowship, as Edward Wilson explains.3 This occasional origin, familiar throughout time to anyone who ever worked in a labor union, ties the poem to issues in artisanal labor practices, a productive step in our understanding of its meaning. Wilson accordingly notes the poem's attention to real-life work as revealed by its detailed knowledge of the tools of carpentry and their functions.4 Whoever wrote this poem knew the craft well and preserved the tools of the trade—and the guild members’ festive urges—meaningfully for posterity.Scholars are increasingly noticing as well that the poem has greater significance for modern readers than initially imagined, or than might be apparent on the poem's comic surface. George Shuffelton, editing the poem for TEAMS, recognizes it, much as Wilson does, as festive entertainment and a comic lamentation on the inevitable failure of a working man to get rich. But he also hints at something more, as he explains: “Though this carpenter seems to be a feckless alcoholic who has doomed his tools, his apprentices, and his bitter wife to a life of mediocrity, the more optimistic tools suggest that hard work might radically change him. While labor was always believed to have an important spiritual function . . . here the rewards of hard work are imagined primarily in terms of wealth and status.”5 Such concerns regarding the Carpenter as a worker compel fresh attention to the struggle inherent in the Debate's central crisis: the disabling trauma of addiction—specifically alcohol dependency—inhibits him from meeting the basic dictates of family care and self-governance. Addiction also impedes him, perhaps most critically, from emulating the scriptural and spiritual models set forth, as we will see, by Noah, and then by Christ's own earthly father, Joseph, two exemplars of spiritual carpentry who reflect God's own divine craft.This all might sound exalted for a minor, essentially unknown comic poem that appears on the surface to have provided laughs for a bunch of working men putting back a few on a well-deserved day off. But since this poet and these workers certainly believed that God incarnate chose carpentry for his and his human father's profession, the literary depiction of carpentry in a medieval Christian text cannot remain bound to the literal and historical, nor to its domestic themes, despite the poem's realism and festive origins. For carpentry—the work of cutting, scraping, binding, and building—ever echoes metaphorically along a hermeneutical continuum marked urgently with salvific, Biblical images and with confrontational moments of salvation anxiety.6Lisa Cooper's penetrating exposition of the poem in relation to contemporary Guild policies further provokes a serious look at the poem's engagement with matters more urgent than comedy or celebration. Cooper suggests that “the Debate operates . . . as an animation of and reflection upon the kind of internal strife referred to in the 1389 carpenters’ ordinances and in the records of so many other guilds.”7 Through the conflict among the tools and the Wife (which swirls around an ever silent Carpenter) “the poem also peers through the fissures in the ideal of group harmony so firmly promoted in the ordinances of craft and parish guilds.”8 The resulting discord that “the querulous, self-interested tools” generate bespeaks the voices of apprentices betraying their carpenter, possibly reflecting the “rebellious journeymen associations of the post-plague years,” who “caused much dismay among English craft masters” when they attempted to form their own fraternities.9 Add to this the reality of the Carpenter himself as an “economic disaster waiting to happen,” and Cooper's analysis abundantly compels us to see the poem as more than a frivolous, uncomplicated celebration.10 She sees it therefore as entertainment “of a quite anxious sort” with even the poet/performer reminding the audience that he has yet to be paid for the gig.11 All considered, Cooper concludes that the Debate expresses “an imaginative catharsis of both social unrest and financial trouble.”12Similarly addressing serious historical concerns, Wendy A. Matlock senses the transtemporal significance of the poem, specifically in relation to domestic gender issues; she argues that the Debate “relies on the medieval tradition of debate poetry to normalise new ideas about patriarchal authority, households, and family. Its form looks back to the literary conventions of the Middle Ages while its content anticipates early modern ideas about family and labour.”13 Stressing the importance of the tools as apprentices, Matlock identifies the Carpenter as an instructor who has become derelict in his duties, creating peril for the community and his guild: “The poem animates tools to highlight their importance to the carpentry trade while personifying them as apprentices to develop the need for masters to be good teachers as well as expert craftsmen. In fact, the strongest indictment of the Carpenter comes not for his drunken dissipation but for his failures as a teacher.”14 I might not separate the “dissipation” so readily from this teacherly neglect, for his failures directly relate to his drinking. And in fact Matlock helpfully acknowledges as much, as she asserts: “the Carpenter in the poem does train his many apprentices, but he teaches his own bad habits rather than his profession” with the result that “the tools are incapable of carpentry but expert at debauchery.”15 Cooper and Matlock thus each reveal that the Debate works in a complex nexus of gender, masculinity, authority, and work, all pertaining to critical social and family responsibilities, as addiction, good at spreading harm, corrupts both household and workplace.Clearly, scholars are seeing beyond the comedy, the manuscript contexts, and the simple historical record of guild celebration. My approach differs from Cooper's and Matlock's in complementary and not oppositional ways, as we all seek to understand the complex forces that act upon the Carpenter, his family, and his “apprentices” the tools. The contexts I will explore help us further to recognize the Debate not simply as a festive drinking poem, or as a sober assertion of ethical family values in its manuscript context, but also as a depiction of the destructive power of an addiction that dismantles carpentry, an especially important form of work in salvation history. For the Debate provokes us to study carpentry as respected, honest labor but also as the symbolic action of building the kingdom of heaven by erecting structures of safety and protection, enclosures brought down by destructive addiction. Tools, in the hands of any artisan or craftsperson, manipulate the natural world, taking bits of wood or stone, and any such materials wrought by the creator, and joining them into something new, inspired by human imagination. Such acts of creativity reflect the genius of God, the divine architect and builder, who in (what we call) the very first poem in English, “Caedmon's Hymn,” praises God most of all for building a roof.So we can read the Debate as a tragicomic dialogue, one fixated on the physical and spiritual forces that prevent work from its intended productivity. As Chaucer's Miller—a comedian who knows a thing or two about carpenters—reminds us, Middle English texts tend to range somewhere between earnest and game, and behind every weakness, however comically staged, lies a sense of loss and shame.16 Carpentry in medieval Christianity, infused with images from salvation history, compels a certain subordinate but joyous instrumentality where true productivity, true earnings, and true prosperity lie. As carpentry shoulders the burden of salvation, the Debate voices the battle between this sacred productivity and damnable waste, where labor, besieged by addiction, produces only personal disintegration and hell, fueled by its appetitive zeal for more money and more drink.In this dual section, I will first explore some modern therapeutic literature about addiction and examine a stirring medieval manifestation of addicted compulsion in Piers Plowman's grand confession of the Seven Deadly Sins. These scenes in Piers, as analogues to the Debate, make an excellent case for employing Addiction Studies as a tool in our work with medieval literature. Then I will illustrate how carpentry, widely treated in Middle English literature, provides important contexts in which to understand this Carpenter's addiction. These vernacular adaptations of scriptural episodes idealize carpentry as perfected fulfillment of productive masculinity while also representing the craft as a particularly charged symbolic action. At that point, once we have discussed addiction and carpentry, we will be better prepared to talk about the addicted Carpenter in the Debate.The Latinate term “addiction” has no equivalent and is unattested in ME, as it is not chronicled in English until the 16th century.17 So what argument can we mount for its applicability to the current texts, and much more widely, to other medieval and premodern works? With a branch of critical inquiry called Addiction Studies, we could engage with the seemingly endless depictions of compulsion that animate so many medieval texts. Such study can help us to see past the comedy and past the condemnation of mere sinfulness, providing a more nuanced and informed understanding of behaviors that bring personal destruction, dissolution of family, and societal decay in the literary works of the medieval imagination.Various scientific and medical disciplines employ the term “addiction” to describe the widespread modern phenomena of compulsive behavior and the abuse of alcohol, pornography, video games, or any host of other destructive behaviors that arise in an industrialized and modern technological society. New technologies inspire age-old behaviors but with new objects. The addict focuses not on the self as created in the image of God but on objects that bring temporary, temporal pleasure to the self. Such “substances” are inherently insubstantial as sources of durable joy. The addict may know this but is mired in sensation, in a world of objects, so it is not surprising that modern therapeutic literature aligns in dynamic and compelling ways with medieval Christianity's awareness of what we call “substance abuse.”18In light of the addict's obsession with empty objects of pleasure, the healing powers of community and compassion inform much of the therapeutic literature one finds on addiction. Damian McElrath's foreword to the second edition of Craig Nakken's 1988 classic The Addictive Personality speaks of addicts as serious “victims” of affliction, suffering “destruction of their relationships” leading to “terrible isolation,” “despair and hopelessness”; these sufferers have been “moved from the ‘land of the living’ to the surreal land of objects.”19 Nakken himself speaks of addiction as entering into a “trance state,” “a state of detachment,” of “separation from one's physical surroundings,” as the addict floats “back and forth between the addictive world and the real world, often without others suspecting it,” for the “trance allows addicts to detach from the pain, guilt, and shame they feel, making it extremely attractive.”20 Such detachment allows them to “be with people without really being with them” until all that is real is sacrificed, as “addiction takes and takes, and then takes some more.”21 Nakken continues with some dramatic observations that seem crafted precisely for our study of medieval Christian literature: Addiction is an illness in which people believe in and seek spiritual connection through objects and behaviors that can only produce temporary sensations. These repeated, vain attempts to connect with the Divine produce hopelessness, fear, and grieving that further alienate the addict from spirituality and humanity.22What a powerful definition of addiction as alienation.Healing means reintegration into the real human community and liberation from the trance of deluded detachment. Care, compassion, and mercy animate many therapeutic volumes, both nondenominational spiritual texts and those based in the particulars of faith. For addiction, as Nakken's work attests, has inspired more than medical and clinical approaches. Gabor Maté, in work that seeks to highlight the humanity of those afflicted, calls addiction the realm of the “hungry ghosts,” depicting addicts as akin to the ancient Buddhist figures (preta) trapped in uncontrollable appetites that can never be satisfied by physical substances.23 He wonders as well about what “we could achieve if a great proportion of the resources now poured into the toxic sinkholes of enforcement and incarceration were dedicated to prevention, harm reduction, and treatment,” as he laments the fixation on “enmity, distain, and hostility” toward the addicted, leading to “ostracism [and] more violent repression.”24 Maté speaks of the “invisible boundary between society and socially ostracized addicts,” dedicating his work to all his “fellow hungry ghosts, be they inner-city street dwellers . . . inmates of prisons, or their more fortunate counterparts with homes, families, jobs, and successful careers.”25 Addiction, no matter whom it afflicts, “in all cases exacts the price of inner peace, harm to relationships, and diminished self-worth.”26Taking a deeply theological, philosophical, and Christian approach to the problem, Kent Dunnington also emphasizes compassion and a sensitivity to the alienation and disintegration that plague the addict, as he seeks for solutions that go beyond “scientifically reductive terms” too often used to describe addiction, which cannot simply be construed as a “disease” or a type of willful “choice.”27 And as part of his explicitly Christian focus, he continues: “Addiction is not identical to sin, but neither can it be separated from sin. The power of addiction cannot be adequately appraised until addiction is understood as a misguided enactment of our quest for right relationship with God.”28 He later notes that addiction demands that the addict “disavow projects and commitments that he knows must be included in a worthwhile life,” for addiction creates a false simulacrum of worth, a substitution “of what he knows to be his true end,” serving here as a form of “false worship.”29 The challenge for the institution of the Church, Dunnington argues, “is whether it can invite people into a life of devotion and dependence that is not self-deceptive,” as the addict moves from “addictive dependence” to “faithful dependence on God.”30 Pertaining to our concern as readers of medieval texts, these modern scholars, in their diverse responses to addiction, depict the addict as subject to alienation—from self, from society, from God—and depict recovery in a teleological sense as redirection to a truer, healthier integration into communities both earthy and heavenly.Our impulse to apply such concern and awareness from Addiction Studies to medieval literature gets tremendous support from the pathbreaking work of Early Modern scholar Rebecca Lemon in Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England.31 Noting that “the scholarship on addiction is vast and capacious,” as “are the critical bibliographies on early modern faith, love, and drinking,” Lemon works to “[chart] a path directly between them.”32 Her book indicates that addiction, ever a force of danger and dissolution, always exists in opposition to some other ideal, some other healing, integrating rhetoric, ethics, philosophy, habit, or proper and sustaining faith.33 Addiction can reflect healthy religious fervor—addiction to prayer and to God can be a form of grace—but addiction's misdirection can lead to error and “abuse,” when engaged with “idolatry and . . . material forms of worship associated with Catholicism,” clearly the particular fear of the Reformist authors she explores from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.34The bridge Lemon has built can serve our earlier texts as well, since the Debate (ca. 1500) and Piers Plowman (ca. 1380) stage similar conflicts between compulsion and the forces of love that seek, often powerlessly, to reform and heal the afflicted. Lemon also convinces us that, despite how modern the term and concept might seem, “Addiction is, at its [Latin] root, about pronouncing a sentence.”35 It can indicate “an assignment, such as sentencing someone to prison.”36 And “following the term's origin in Roman contract law, an addict was an individual, usually a debtor, who had been sentenced or condemned.”37 Latin “addictus” indicates bondage, being doomed, “[made] over by sale or auction,” “surrender[ed],” confiscated, “assign[ed],” “enslav[ed].”38 Any addict, in a moment of self-knowledge, will certainly recognize addiction as just such a terrible kind of doomed bondage. Lemon notes that “conventional medical history on addiction dates the concept to the turn of the nineteenth century,” and that though the field since then is rife with theories, it is “arguably short on history.”39 This drives her inquiry to see beyond presentism and prompts us as well to extend our awareness of addiction to the medieval period, for doing so can continue to enrich our understanding of addiction, its causes, and remedies, in the history of the human struggle for survival, integration, and perhaps most importantly, freedom.A poem ripe for such analysis, and one that provides immediate contemporary context for our study of the Debate, is Piers Plowman. Few poets knew the matter of the self as well as did that great master of human degeneracy, William Langland, in his staged “confessions” of the Seven Deadly Sins. The speakers appear as allegorical, isolated sins that typify urges for food, drink, wealth, or (more broadly) the desire for power and dominance, achieved in the perverse practice of making others suffer unjustly. The Sins openly defy the virtuous dictates of charity, though aware of these imperatives, and reveal themselves as bound to their object obsessions. The mode of allegory and the staging of rambling, self-indulgent monologues brilliantly render the bondage and the trancelike state of addiction. The speakers here recount compulsive drinking, lying, cursing, cheating, deceiving, and hating, while the character of “Repentance” listens uneasily in the framework of the sacrament of reconciliation, implying the desire to reform, or at least the oblique awareness of the possibility of recovery. Few readers are convinced by the promises in these confessions, but most are entertained.40 For what is so amazing in all these confessions—all these attempts by speakers to understand their own depravity—is the tirelessness of their sinful labors. Even Sloth is hyperactive. Deeply addicted to the petty conflicts and appetites that animate their livelong days, they never appear to have a moment's rest. The scenes offer, on one level, a comic tour de force, yet the comedy is always tinged, if not subsumed, with earnest. The costs to self, family, society, and soul are simply too high.Most poignantly, like the tools in the Debate, many of the sins in Piers speak of a longing, a hope for betterment and prosperity. But as we read each paroxysm of regret, we tend to doubt the lasting power of these aspirations. Pernell Proud Heart (Pride), for example, repents her long list of selfish actions—disobeying parents, slandering clergy, mocking Church, pretentiously lording it over others, dressing boldly, speaking cruelly, and generally “bostyng and braggynge” in vainglory (C.6.34). “Lord, mercy!” she now cries, promising that she would “vnsowen here serk and sette þer an hayre / to affayten here flesshe þat fers was to synne” (C.6.4, 6–7). Then she boldly asserts: “Shal neuere heyh herte me hente, but holde me loweAnd soffre to be mysseyde—and so dyde Y neuere.But now wol Y meke me and mercy bysecheOf alle þat Y haue hated in myn herte.” (C.6.8–11)The confessions generally proceed with such urgent moments of what we sometimes call “clarity,” a sense of shock that they did what they did. And characters commit to their new lives with the same zealous busyness with which they had sinned, though likely this new labor will not undo the old. Envy, manifested in commerce, recounts his treacherous slander against neighbors and fellow merchants and then laments: “Now hit athynketh me in my thouhte þat euere Y so wrouhte! / Lord, ar Y lyf lete, for loue of thysulue / Graunte me, gode Lord, grace of amendement!” (C.6.100, 102). Wrought, from Middle English werken, related to ME wrighte (carpenter), in fact invokes the language of craft labor, rendering his past sin as a form of work.41 Addiction provides a strange sort of job security, and a full-time job at that, as Envy endlessly hammers away at his sin.In more than one scene, alcohol addiction specifically inspires obsessive, sinful behavior. Wrath, manifested at this moment as a monk, explains how “when wyn cometh” or when he drinks “late at euen” he gets a “flux of a foul mouth” and goes on a bender of slanderous behavior for five days, working overtime as it were (C.6.160–61). Drink in moderation, replies a hopeful Repentance, and “Esto sobrius!” (be sober!) (C.6.166–68). Lechery, evidently to decrease his carnal appetite, pledges to eat only one meal and “drynke but with þe doke,” that is, only water, since alcohol enflames desire and licenses recklessness (C.6.174). Glutton, a character similar in gross appetite to the Debate's Carpenter, feels desperate shame after sleeping off a bender and regrets his debauchery, crying to Repentance: “Haue reuthe on me . . . ‘Thow Lord that aloft art and alle lyues shope!’” (C.6.422–23). In a stark appeal, Glutton knows that only God, who shope (made, created) all life can save him now from his own sin. Through these and through all the confessions, each sin, so eager to dismantle both self and society, to shatter bonds of human caritas, knows that only an appeal to God can begin the process of rebuilding and enable the new, productive labor of love. Contemporary addiction therapy often focuses on teleology: what is the addict lacking, needing, seeking, and how can the desire for a false, unsustainable satisfaction in objects or substances be redirected to a higher good? Piers, in its explicitly medieval Christian contexts, asks these same questions.In episodes central to our understanding of sin and salvation in medieval literature, Piers Plowman dramatizes the self-conscious weakness of personae who, though conscious of their failings, remain powerless over their addictions. Readers can mine these confessions in all three versions of Piers for many such moments of regret and promises of reform, sometimes explicitly rebuked, as when Repentance deems Covetousness “an vnkynde creature” whom he cannot “assoile” until the sinner makes “to alle men restitucioun” (C.6.294–95). Confession is nothing without the work of penance, and renewal demands first undoing the wrong that's been done. If we remain skeptical of the Sins’ ability to make such amends, our suspicions are justified when we see them return, in full vicious vigor, at the end of the epic when the armies of sin, led by Pride and Antichrist, stride on the battlefield against the Church, Unity. If Langland wrote today, one of the star allegorical characters in this battle would no doubt be “Addiction,” a power he did not know in the social science or medical contexts that we now apply, but which he consistently depicts as triumphant against the forces of virtue and charity, constantly besieged in those afflicted.If we are justified in proposing an Addiction Studies perspective on such texts as Piers and the Debate, we now have to consider the ultimate costs of such addiction as imagined in analogous medieval writings about sin and salvation. So here I bring the Debate into dialogue with other Middle English texts that specifically feature carpentry as spiritual work. We can learn here what is lost in alienation wrought by drink, and we can ponder the glorious, salvific paths taken by other carpenters in the medieval Biblical imaginary.What does “alienation” mean in this medieval Christian context?42 Our Carpenter is properly identified historically as an artisan rather than a wage-laborer. But I will freely call him a “worker,” in part because we cannot see him as economically secure, beyond precarity, somehow free of the anxiety of living, as we might now say, from paycheck to paycheck.43 The very first speech in the poem by the Chip-axe tells the Carpenter that he'll never prosper, “Ne none that longys the crafte unto” (Debate l. 7), compelling us to acknowledge Matlock's worry that the threat of poverty haunts the poem.44 While we should avoid anachronism in linking him too readily with twenty-first-century labor struggles—to imagine him as a modern blue-collar, union construction worker—the constant attention to physical labor in the Debate licenses us to explore, in a class-cognizant and transtemporal way, the varieties of preindustrial alienation that clearly arise in his work circumstances and personal behaviors.45What remedy does the poem—and the medieval Christian culture that produced it—offer for such alienation, wrought from financial precarity and addiction to drink? If the work of carpentry indeed resonates along a divine continuum, Cooper accordingly identifies a “tension between the concrete and the abstract that characterizes much medieval literature” and in particular artisanal texts.46 In this context, literary “representation” of the concrete carries with it complex personal, social, and spiritual implications for the artisan. As Cooper reminds us, “craft labor” has, since ancient times, “provided a way to consider the coming-to-be of the material world and to celebrate its maker as God the Artifex, master-craftsman of the universe.”47 That is quite a supernatural burden for the artisan, as manifested in the Debate, for what happens if one refuses, or cannot climb such a celestial ladder in divine celebration of God the artificer?Such alienation in the context of medieval Christian theology can mean damnation. We explored Piers Plowman's depiction of compulsive behavior to bolster an argument for Addiction Studies. And now we can turn again to Piers for its exposition about carpenters, labor, instrumentality, and waste in a compelling scene about the workers who built the Ark, itself a structure critical to salvation history. In all versions of the narrative, Will interviews Clergy and Scripture about how to “do wel” and to achieve salvation. At the end of the encounter Will alone (in versions A and B) takes center stage and ruminates about whether various figures, known to be saved or damned, actually deserved their various fates, confessing that he cannot comprehend the random correspondences among knowledge, action, and salvation. The heavyweight scholars Solomon and Aristotle are in Hell, but the thief crucified with Christ is saved? For their part, Mary Magdalen, King David, and Paul all manifest some disjunction between reward and behavior. Versions B and C substantially expand Will's ruminations by considering the Ark's carpenters, noting that “Was neuere wrighte saued þat wroȝte þeron, ne ooþer werkman / ellis” (B.10.399–400). The poem so often questions the value of “clergy,” broadly understood as learning of any kind, so these unfortunate carpenters, however precise their skills in building the seaworthy vessel, display the disjunction between craft/knowledge and salvation status. Genesis does not actually mention any carpenters being summoned other than Noah himself, but the fourteenth-century medieval imagination likes to domesticate the divine and so could not think of a giga