On Gambling by Pascasius Justus Turcq (review)

Reviewed by: On Gambling by Pascasius Justus Turcq Patrick Ball Turcq, Pascasius Justus, On Gambling, trans. by William M. Barton (Lysa Neo-Latin Texts, 1), Gent, Lysa Publishers, 2022; paperback; cloth; pp. 284; R.R.P. €39.00; ISBN 9789464447668. William M. Barton’s translation of the only known work by Pascasius Justus Turcq (‘Pascasius’) inaugurates Lysa Publishers’ series ‘Neo-Latin Texts’. Lysa Publishers, a new arrival on the early modern scene, may interest Australia and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies members. The work, cited regularly in the early modern period, then forgotten, resurfaced around thirty years ago. German and French editions have since appeared; Barton’s is the first one in English. His translation accompanies the Latin original. Despite a few potentially misleading proofreading errors, the volume’s presentation is of a high standard. The translation is highly readable, something especially commendable considering the Latin’s acknowledged tortuousness. It is a measure of Barton’s introduction that it accounts for this inelegance: Pascasius imitated the style and vocabulary of Roman author Cornelius Celsus. The introduction is admirable. It covers the author’s life and book, in the context of contemporary history, early modern science and humanist studies, and subsequent research on gambling and addiction. The footnotes and bibliography are accordingly wide-ranging. Why study Pascasius? On Gambling was—as its author himself proclaimed— the first clinical account of addiction: ‘It [pathological gambling] is a serious and long-term disease of the mind’ (p. 103). Hitherto, problem gambling had been regarded from a moral standpoint only. Till lately, addiction studies were understood to have commenced with eighteenth-century work on alcoholism; Pascasius’s re-emergence displaces its beginnings from the Enlightenment to the Renaissance. It means, further, that addiction scholarship opened with an investigation of gambling, the only formally recognised non-substance-abuse addiction. This makes the work significant. Scholars of early modern science and medicine should find it informative. Barton’s translation might profitably be read alongside the substantial survey by Marc Valleur and Louise Nadeau that precedes an (abridged) French translation of Pascasius and situates his work within the history of addiction studies (Pascasius, ou comment comprendre les addictions, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014). Equally, it is a resource for those who study gambling. On Gambling comprises two books. In Book 1, Pascasius mounts the case for gambling as a disease. Contrary to popular opinion, greed is not responsible: gamblers are spendthrifts; misers fear hazarding money. Rather, gamblers naively imagine they can master fortune; Pascasius believes, following Galen, that their optimism and [End Page 274] impulsiveness reflects a warm humoral temperament. Thus physiology, not vice, predisposes people to excessive gambling. In Book 2 he outlines his cure: to counter this warmth one must engineer coldness. Gamblers dismayed by their losses often vow to renounce their activities: they do so because sadness chills them, momentarily offsetting their natural heat. Once their depression lifts, though, they warm again and relapse. Pascasius offers arguments gamblers can memorise and repeat to keep cool: it is folly to think one will win at games determined randomly; besides, seeking to prosper through one’s companions’ losses offends nature. If this parallels certain modern clinical approaches, the book remains nevertheless of its time. Its rhetorical structure imitates Melanchthon. Classical authors are cited throughout: Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates, also Cicero, Terence, Ovid, and Virgil; the work’s motto is the Delphic maxim ‘Follow God’, while Aeneas is held up as a role-model—the hero who subdued his desires, directed by reason and the gods. This humoral, humanist emphasis means On Gambling has the potential to yield insights into contemporary thinking about youth, manhood, and so on. While Pascasius’s clinical approach was unique, his outlook can be contrasted with other sixteenth-century works on gambling. One would be Gerolamo Cardano’s Liber de ludo alea, written about the same time. Cardano, Pascasius’s contemporary at the University of Pavia and, like him, a physician and inveterate gambler, outlined an early form of probability calculus that gamesters might use to help them win at games of chance. He aimed, in short, to master chance; Pascasius held that the mistaken...

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