Reviewed by Marcy Norton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

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Reviewed by Marcy Norton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Pluralism and Tolerance

Marcy Norton

I am very grateful for this book. It lets us see the Iberian Atlantic world—in fact, the early modern world—in a fresh light. Despite (and sometimes even because of) state and church policies that prohibited and harshly punished deviations from religious orthodoxy, heterodoxy survived at all social levels and among many subcultures. Among the heterodox, many espoused and promoted toleration, an outgrowth of relativist, universalist, and skeptical views. Moreover Stuart B. Schwartz shows connections where historians have tended to see differences—between Spain and Portugal, between metropole and colonies, between southern and northern Europe, between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment, and between popular and elite.

Yet there is a connection that he underplays and sometimes appears to reject: namely, many of those who voiced relativist or universalist views did so in the context of religious and/or ethnic pluralism. In fact he distinguishes the tradition of tolerance in the Iberian Atlantic from its appearance in places such as "France, England, and Germany, where confessional divisions had made life almost unbearable." In contrast, argues Schwartz, "in the Hispanic world the context [was] of a single state religion" (250). Yet Schwartz brilliantly demonstrates that this may have been the official "context," but the social reality was, nonetheless, one of heterogeneity—in Iberia, of not only Conversos and Moriscos but also "Old Christian" Spaniards who had converted to Islam as captives in North Africa and then reconverted to Christianity and "Old Christians" who were spouses and friends of Conversos and Moriscos. In Spanish America and Luso-Brazil, Indian and African populations added to the heterogeneity, along with those of colonizing stock who had "gone native" to varying degrees.

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