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  • All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World
  • James E. Wadsworth
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. By Stuart B. Schwartz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 336. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $25.00 paper.

Stuart Schwartz has produced what he calls a "serial microhistory" that examines, in the tradition of Carlo Ginzburg's Cheese and the Worms (1980), the dissident cultural attitudes of the popular classes. Schwartz analyzes how cultural attitudes of tolerance and dissidence about sex and salvation existed in the same societies that fostered intolerant institutions like the Inquisition. He seeks to know where these attitudes and ideas came from and what they represented. He avoids a quantitative methodology, preferring to examine case studies that reveal the "patterns and context that help to explain the thoughts and actions of the people involved" (p. 5).

Using cases drawn from Inquisition archives in Spain, Portugal, and Spanish America, Schwartz argues that "dissidence in matters of faith was common [in the Iberian world] and an attitude of tolerance, at least among some elements of the population, had long existed" (p. 243). These tolerant attitudes emerged from the religious stew of early modern Europe and in the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal. First, these attitudes drew on the convivencia of the Iberian Peninsula, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews had lived in close contact for many centuries. Then, the Protestant Reformation complicated the religious mixture. Finally, European religious creeds came in contact with Native American and African religious traditions.

As these religious cultures mingled in the Atlantic world, individuals developed tolerant attitudes toward religious faith, drawn from their own experience and from their own sense of justice and equity. The existence of this undercurrent of tolerance, not only in the Spanish and Portuguese empires but in Europe generally, explains how philosophical theories of tolerance came to dominate European political life. These attitudes also merged with liberal ideas that were used to challenge and undermine traditional institutions.

Schwartz situates the history of tolerance in the broader, deeper history of ethnic, cultural, political, and religious conflicts and interactions. He begins by discussing which propositions were found heretical to Church dogma and why. Then he demonstrates how those beliefs and debates mixed and mingled over several centuries. Schwartz [End Page 557] shows that both Jewish and Moorish converts to Christianity often mingled their new faith with their old. Some held to the belief that the law of Moses or of Mohammed represented the true path to salvation, while others argued that all could be saved in their own faiths. This kind of relativism drew the attention of Inquisitors, who found it across a wide section of society from learned theologians to common folk. Spanish and Portuguese immigrants carried these ideas with them to the Atlantic colonies, where weaker political and religious institutions permitted increased scope for dissidence, sexual promiscuity, and even tolerance. The intermingling of European attitudes and beliefs with those of the large indigenous and slave populations in Spanish America and Brazil created multiple forms of religious syncretism and fostered beliefs that the various religious traditions represented multiple paths to salvation.

Schwartz acknowledges that the cases of tolerance and dissidence he examines are not representative of dominant attitudes. Still, the existence of doubters, atheists, relativists (all religions had some truth), universalists (all would be saved), and faithful Christians who disagreed with the Church reveals a complex and often contradictory history that serves as an important corrective to the long-standing scholarly focus in the history of ideas on the educated elite. It also demonstrates that the dominant views of religion, sexuality, and salvation were contested at all levels of society.

This book represents a far-reaching, thoughtful, entertaining, and provocative study of dissidence and toleration. As other reviewers will no doubt point out and as Schwartz is well aware, the data presented here cannot provide hard and fast answers to the difficult (perhaps unanswerable) questions about how widespread these views were, what direct influence they played in the broader trend toward more open societies, and how and why these ideas changed over time. Nonetheless, this book will...

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