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El azar ha querido que dos prestigiosas revistas,  American Historical Journal -núm. 113 de febrero, págs. 257–258-  y European History Quarterly, conincidan en eseñar un volumen de 2006: ‘Lazy, Improvident People’: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish, de Ruth MacKay (Cornell University Press).En el segundo caso, el encargado de la recensión es Henry Kamen (vol. 38, núm. 2, abril, págs. 337-338), que comienza con este párrafo:"This is an unusually rich book, albeit at times a bit difficult to follow because it pursues complex trains of thought. MacKay examines the long-standing idea, maintained not only by prejudiced foreigners but also by both scholars and politicians, that Castilians were a lazy lot, responsible for their own backwardness and for the failures in their history. She finds that the idea, which has persisted in the writings of well-known historians of our own day, was in large measure propagated by eighteenth-century Spanish reformers who hoped to resolve defects in their society".