Reviewed by Andrew R. Murphy | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

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Reviewed by Andrew R. Murphy | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Tolerance, Toleration, Salvation

Andrew R. Murphy

I approached Stuart B. Schwartz's All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World with a great deal of excitement and not a little trepidation. The excitement was fairly easy to explain: here was a study of a topic closely related to my own work but focused on a historical and geographic context about which I know rather little. The trepidation was perhaps a bit more difficult to explain, much less justify, but I think it had to do with a vague unease about the ramifications of what I might learn from Schwartz's book for my own, by this point somewhat settled, ideas about toleration: what it meant, the attitudes and arguments that undergirded it, the historical dimensions of its achievement in various times and places, and so on. As space is limited, and as the great appeal of this Forum lies in its interdisciplinarity, I would like to probe Schwartz's text a bit from my own perspective as a political theorist and historian of political thought and explain both what I find so admirable about the book and why I think there are places it might be open to challenge.

Schwartz clearly delineates the book's focus on the "attitudes of tolerance among common folk ... [in] the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds" (8). The topic under examination is not, he argues, "the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy, but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments" (6). This emphasis—on the attitudinal, and on the nonelite and the socially marginal—yields evocative vignettes that appear throughout the book, stories of ordinary skeptics and religious unbelievers (not to mention believers of a decidedly unorthodox bent) who speak in their own voices across the centuries, often in ways that might strike the modern reader as eerily familiar. The aptly titled section "Names of Belligerent Intimacy" (48), for example, explores the many ways in which religious attitudes issue forth in insults and invective, providing a window into the often-contentious connections among attitudes, speech, and behavior.

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