"Habit" denotes the manner in which people acquire and internalize ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to themselves and their environments. In the early modern era, the concept helped philosophers, theologians, medical writers and practitioners, and art theorists, among others, address the mind's and the body’s paradoxical responses to actions and experience.

On the one hand, habit seemed to transform willed, conscious acts into unwilled, unconscious routines. The difficult and deliberate actions involved in learning a musical instrument, for instance, gradually become easy and almost automatic. On the other hand, habit seemed to dull the effects of repeated experience. A regular consumption of drugs, for instance, would give rise to progressively weaker effects, making higher doses necessary to achieve comparable results.

This workshop explores the role of habit from the middle ages to the nineteenth century, in particular its function in linking early modern ideas and practices concerning the arts with those relating to the mind and the body. Through a study of discourses invoking habit we hope to identify ways in which early modern people related aesthetic experience to their understandings of the mind and body.

This is the second of three workshops forming The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health Networking Grant. This grant is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and supported by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.