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.

From children’s visions of angels to the cancerous belly of a king, this book shows how the body was at the centre of religious experience in seventeenth-century Lutheran culture. It explores what it was like to live in a body that was situated between the heavenly and earthly realms in the century following the Reformations, how faith shaped the experience of the body, and how the body shaped religious experience. Lutherans fasted and fortified their bodies through asceticism or exposure to harsh conditions. People of all types could feel the Holy Spirit entering their bodies and follow its movement within. Early modern Lutherans used their bodies to understand the complexities of their world, and by knowing about their physiology we come closer to grasping it.Based on a varied set of sources from the expansive Swedish empire, with connections from Lapland to the North American colonies, this book shows how spiritual experience played out in relation to gender and age, revealing the powerful resemblances that connected bodies spiritually, politically, socially and emotionally. This book challenges received notions that Lutheranism implied a removed corporeality, mediated by an abstracted faith, and offers new insights into studying early modern corporeality.The Word Made Flesh will be of interest to scholars and students in history, religion, history of medicine, gender and body studies.