The article argues that medical responses to plague were a cause of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm and with the intra-regional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorized plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women as well as men in the popularization of intoxicants. By tracing the popularization of sugar, tobacco and opium from c.1600 rather than c.1800 and considering their dietary uptake in relation to material changes in plague physic, it identifies an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain and bodily and mental disorder. The article concludes by introducing the concept of ‘accustomization’ as the way in which contemporary observers explained how reactive consumption in the face of epidemics could become habitual, recreational and forms of dependency over time.

This article investigates the dynamics of microcredit in late-medieval Italy by examining the case of fourteenth-century Vercelli and its surrounding rural area. Drawing on an extensive corpus of notarial sources, it highlights how credit networks were sustained not only by elite bankers and merchants but also by less prominent actors embedded in everyday social and economic life. Two case studies – the baker Enrico da Greggio and the priest Salerno Ferraroto – illustrate the role of small-scale lenders and borrowers in structuring a dense web of transactions. Their activities reveal how personal trust, proximity and reciprocity enabled access to liquidity through loans, rents and credit, often mediated by the Sant’Andrea monastery and hospital. Far from marginal, these practices constituted a vital infrastructure of support for urban and rural populations alike, allowing individuals of modest means to become active participants in the circulation of capital. By analysing these intertwined networks, the article underscores the significance of documentary practices in shaping the economy of trust and credit. The study ultimately argues that grassroots credit systems were central to the functioning of late-medieval urban society, challenging narratives that privilege only large-scale or institutional forms of credit.

Apprenticeship was important from the late sixteenth century for training and maintaining the English workforce. Masters and mistresses were committed by the apprenticeship indenture to provide food, clothing, shelter and training. Reference was rarely made, however, to what happened should the apprentice fall ill. Much the same was true of contracts between an employer and the young person who was hired to live and work in their household. Both sides of the agreement accepted that responsibility for sickness was part of the employer’s or master’s wider obligations. For some household heads, this was an unwelcome undertaking and from the early eighteenth century it became more common for them to opt out of this role. The fall in the age of these young workers during the eighteenth century and the relaxation of the rules of apprenticeship seem to have encouraged this development. Severe outbreaks of smallpox occurring throughout the country, particularly until the 1770s, highlighted the wider problem of sickness. An examination of the experiences of individual children who fell ill in this period provides insight into the lives of young workers when at their most vulnerable and dependent.