Addicted to Love

In this chapter I examine the close commensurability between modern Addiction Literature and premodern literary representations of lovesickness and problematic love. Reading Ovid’s Remedia Amores (c. 16 BCE), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380) and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390), I consider the conceptual and discursive parallels between premodern lovesickness and modern addiction.