Reviewed by: Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601 by Ruth MacKay Claire Gilbert Ruth MacKay. Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601. CAMBRIDGE UP, 2019. 288 PP. MACKAY'S TIMELY NEW BOOK DEPARTS from the fateful docking of the ship Rodamundo in Santander in 1596 and the subsequent five years of plague which visited nearly every corner of Castile and marked some 500,000 casualties. Nevertheless, the real story demonstrated by her work is that of the "interlocking structures of Castilian political life," especially of towns and the connections between them as the crucible of negotiations between the "four instances" of the Castilian republic: king, Cortes, municipalities, and individuals (187). As she demonstrates throughout the book, "the experience and landscape of the plague; the degree to which the common good managed to survive the onslaught; the measure of people's sense of where they were in relation to everything else, both physically and more abstractly, these were questions largely defined and possibly resolved at the meeting tables in the ayuntamientos" (212–13). Such a focus on the municipality is both a conscious choice and a natural result of her source base of city council minutes and related documents, along with lawsuits, medical treatises, and local histories (which yielded less information about the plague than one might expect). Indeed, her close focus on Castile and the archives of Castilian institutions provides a useful political answer to the question of how plague affects a community, from contagion to recovery. MacKay explains: "There was a political disposition to the relationships and events of the plague in part because there is always a political disposition, but also because this plague took place in Castile, where the common good was wrapped into every decision and every conflict. … Disputes over quarantine, taxes, or guard duty were not only matters of public health or policing but also statements about past political practices and the meaning of good government" (4–5). Reading and reviewing this book in 2020 and 2021 called to mind inevitable comparisons of the fraught political balance between public health and economics, which was likewise not resolved to universal satisfaction at the close of the sixteenth century. MacKay sets out her argument as one of "continuity rather than collapse" (3n5), proposing to show that "the political culture and institutional foundations that existed at the start of the cycle existed at the end of the [End Page 173] cycle" (246). She is largely successful in this goal, though—as she indicates repeatedly—the period from 1596 to 1601 coincided with several dynamic turning points in Castilian history in addition to a widespread public health crisis, including the succession of Philip III following the death of Philip II in 1598, ongoing fiscal and financial difficulties, international conflicts, and the shift in traditional political negotiation at home as the powers of the representative Cortes dwindled. Nevertheless, the argument sustained throughout the book is not, in fact, that nothing changed, but rather that plague was an opportunity for a variety of political acts and expressions, motivated by plague as much as by the other political and economic affairs of the Hispanic Monarchy at the turn of the seventeenth century. Always a precise and engaging writer, MacKay structures her book around seven "sites"—Palace, Road, Wall, Market, Street, Townhall, and Sickbed—through which she declines the collective Castilian experience of this particular plague as it affected the republican body politic rather than individual bodies, which barely appear in the book. That is not to say that we do not meet individual characters; the administrative and legal archives MacKay mines are replete with information about individuals—royal and municipal officials, petitioners, plaintiffs, defendants, authors, patrons, and so forth—but their stories serve the more collective institutional and political story she seeks to tell. In this book, Castile appears not as the seat of a global empire, but as an autonomous republic united by administrative patterns and functions common among the diverse municipalities which were the cells of its body politic. By seeking out such patterns across the varied sites which united a single region, rather than following a...
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Jan 1, 2021
Huma Amin + 1
Open Access
