Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601 by Ruth MacKay (review)

How did an early modern European society respond to the challenge posed by plague? In her eloquent and deeply researched study of the plague that ravaged Castile for five years at the end of the sixteenth century, which may have killed half a million people, MacKay provides a fine-grained detailed depiction of how Castile's inhabitants responded to the plague through a close reading and analysis of dozens of archival collections and the rich contextual knowledge that she has acquired through her previous work on early modern Spain. The book's central argument, carefully and convincingly presented throughout, is that as horrific as the plague was and as much as it may have driven individuals to despair, Castilian society as a whole displayed a remarkable amount of resilience, drawing on past practices and memories in its response to the challenges posed by epidemic disease (2–3).

MacKay has structured the book in chapters that are defined thematically around sites—Palace, Road, Wall, Market, Street, Town Hall, and Sickbed. This structure facilitates her approach of foregrounding the voices of Castilians themselves, while allowing her historiographical and methodological asides. The book, however, is not especially interdisciplinary. MacKay is aware of what might be called the recent "genetic turn" in plague studies—largely driven by the genetic and archaeological work that discovered Yersinia Pestis as the pathogen behind medieval and early modern plague outbreaks in Europe—suggesting that the last decade of this research warrants revisiting previous narratives of disease transmission (5—6, 112). But such is not the focus of her valuable work, which offers a deep understanding of the nature of state and society in early modern Castile.

The challenge posed by the arrival of the plague in 1596 at the end of Philip II's reign fell principally on the court of Philip III, who became king in 1598, ruling over a state that was decentralized, both administratively and financially. The corregidores, one of the most common groups that MacKay follows through the archives, were hired by municipalities as intermediaries between towns/cities and the Cortes, which collected the taxes for the Crown (38—39, 173). The municipalities taxed themselves in order to buy food and clothing for the poor (126, 160). They also decided how and against whom to enforce quarantines (57), which buildings to requisition to create hospitals for the contagious sick (233), how to raise new taxes to support these hospitals (184), and when to raise taxes to hire physicians (215).

Castile had been suffering, even before the arrival of the plague, from famine and harsh winters. MacKay clearly depicts local and royal officials carefully balancing the imperatives of commerce—the need of farmers, peasants, and especially friars for access into and out of cities to make a living—with the public-health concerns around disease transmission (106, 117). In addition, tension between gathering information about the spread of the disease and controlling its spread was rife (72); quarantine enforcement was never better than partial (115). As for the mechanism of the disease's transmission, notwithstanding the raging contemporary debate and confusion about the nature of contagion (111, 226), the consensus that the culprit was cloth led to the burning of both clothes and linens, a policy that disproportionately affected the poor (109, 160).

This rigorous, lucid, and occasionally beautiful book will benefit any student of early modern Europe or of the history of health and disease. It merits a wide readership even though it does not address a number of comparative questions that are worthy of consideration, including how this plague affected other parts of the Iberian peninsula and how precisely the Castilian experience of the plague changed between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.