Books by 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.

Since the early modern era, historians and observers of Spain, both within the country and beyond it, have identified a peculiarly Spanish disdain for work, especially manual labor, and have seen it as a primary explanation for that nation's alleged...

On August 4, 1578, in an ill-conceived attempt to wrest Morocco back from the hands of the infidel Moors, King Sebastian of Portugal led his troops to slaughter and was himself slain. Sixteen years later, King Sebastian rose again. The author recalls this conspiracy, marked both by scheming and absurdity, and the legal inquest that followed.

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.