Bücher von Ruth MacKay

From the Middle Ages onwards, deadly epidemics swept through Spain repeatedly, but the Castilian Plague of 1596 was especially terrible. Rejecting traditional interpretations, this places the epidemic in communities' long-standing political practices, culture, and law to understand how it was experienced, understood, and managed by everyday people.

In what is sometimes called the age of absolutism, Castilian nobles and commoners, tribunes and towns, were to a considerable degree able to resist and shape royal commands. This is a study of one such form of resistance: the opposition to military levies in the 1630s and 1640s.