The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville (review)

Reconstructing life in a major urban center during the late sixteenth century, Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook offer a lively, interesting, and detailed picture of Seville during a short span of multiple crises, from 1579 to 1582. In these years, city leaders faced a variety of problems, including swarms of locusts, famine, the royally mandated quartering of several hundred soldiers, the threat of internal revolt by Moriscos, and epidemics of both influenza and plague. The authors chose to examine this specific time period in part because it coincides with the management of a single governor—Fernando de Torres y Portugal, the Count of Villar—and in part because these years are well documented by extant records in the municipal archive. The bulk of these records, and thus the bulk of their study, relates to a plague epidemic in 1582.

The authors’ approach is largely narrative, offering an interesting tableau of life but no analysis of events. Instead, they follow the documents themselves, offering translations and summations of what officials discussed, decided, and then did in response to these myriad crises. Though not interdisciplinary in its approach or methodology, this work holds an interdisciplinary appeal in its subject matter. This brief but detailed look into life in Seville illuminates a great deal about the functioning of the city’s government, the interaction of residents with city officials, and the relationship of an urban center to its more rural hinterland. Scholars of urban history, public-health history, and economic history may find this work useful; others will certainly find it interesting.

The emphasis of this book is on the ability of the city’s administration to continue its work diligently and to deal with constant challenges. One drawback of the narrative approach is that, despite its wealth of detail, it leaves unanswered questions. To cite one example, the book offers an interesting view of how city councilmen responded to plague diagnoses by medical practitioners; they accepted these diagnoses only sometimes. The authors offer no commentary for why the wine merchant Gonzalo Martín was ordered to leave his house in the city despite a diagnosis from Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero, “one of the most celebrated surgeons of his time,” that Martín did not have plague (144). Nor do they comment on why, in a later instance, when another surgeon diagnosed plague in a young girl, councilmen chose to seek a second opinion (204). After reporting the diagnosis of the second doctor that “she did not have ‘a disease from which there can be danger of contagion, because it is maturing like a tumor,’” the authors then shift attention to other events in the city without addressing this resort to a second opinion or the curious conflict that it created (204).

Despite the sometimes frustrating lack of continuity to these stories, the authors effectively bring to life the people and events of this era. Ultimately, this fragmentation of stories may well be an appropriate reflection of the disruptions or chaos that such epidemics produced, even when relatively well managed.