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Reviews of Books
Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of annual critical forums. Respondents from diverse fields of history have been invited to consider the book under discussion in its broadest historical and scholarly context. Their comments and the author's rejoinder are the inspiration for the second round of brief remarks.
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| All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. By Stuart B. Schwartz. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. 350 pages. $40.00 (cloth).
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Attitudes, Alterity, and the Law
Lu Ann Homza
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| IT is a truism that historians who study the Spanish Inquisition or even Iberia itself in the early modern period frequently find themselves having to apologize for their research interests: the stereotype of the Peninsula's religious fanaticism is so well entrenched in western history that audiences from Amazon.com to scholarly journals expect stories about violence, intolerance, and the rejection of everything secular, rational, and modern.1 As a result Stuart B. Schwartz's desire to surprise readers of All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World with tales of religious tolerance from the Iberian Atlantic is very welcome. While recognizing that Spanish and Portuguese institutions took coercive measures against religious minorities and freethinkers, Schwartz has tried to overturn presumptions about insularity and homogeneity by highlighting dissidents who endorsed religious relativism and indifference. What makes his conclusions about the pervasiveness of tolerance even more provocative is the fact that they arise, more often than not, from opinions voiced by common people rather than intellectual and ecclesiastical elites, though friars and priests walk onto his stage as well. If early modern Europe rightly has been portrayed as an epoch of astonishing religious divisiveness, Schwartz aims to shift our focus to the pacifistic, tolerant impulses therein and to enhance our understanding of Spanish and Portuguese people's presence in such efforts. There is no doubt his book will shock those who still prefer to think about early modern Iberia in the mode of Henry Charles Lea, whose history of the Spanish Inquisition, published in 1906–7, envisioned Spain as epitomizing intolerance.2 |
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All Can Be Saved also provokes contemplation of how to achieve an appropriate balance between a subject and the contexts necessary to illuminate it. Historians of Christianity know that heterodoxy was only defined via orthodoxy, and Schwartz has read widely in Inquisition history. But though he knows that inquisitors' surveillance on the ground was not nearly as effective as older clichés might suggest, he tends to present the Catholic Church and the Inquisition as the hegemonic monoliths that other recent studies have energetically undermined. Moreover, by focusing on religious dissidence and slighting religious authority, his work sometimes misstates the distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable religious behavior and belief as well as how Catholicism developed over time. The Council of Trent (1545–63) reflected as much as mandated religious change, and its doctrine of justification did not forsake free will. The Old Testament was not theologically irrelevant to early modern Christianity. Fierce clerical opposition to the Inquisition existed within Spain in the early modern epoch. Spanish alumbrados of the 1520s and 1530s did not pursue an eroticized spiritual agenda; Juan de Valdés was not tried as a Lutheran in an auto de fé in the 1540s.3 |
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