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...