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Reviews of Books
Tolerance in Unexpected Places
Stuart B. Schwartz
| TO have a book about Spain, Portugal, and their New World territories serve as a centerpiece for discussion in the William and Mary Quarterly recognizes that the histories of early modern Europe, Latin America, and North America are intimately linked, and I am pleased to think that All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World might suggest parallels or contrasts that cut across old academic territorialities. The four reviewers have done their task with gracious generosity but with a sharp eye to the inevitable failings or contradictions in the work, some of which I have been struggling to resolve for over a decade. I will comment here on a few important issues of methodology, epistemology, and definition that may, in fact, be insoluble but, for that reason, are no less necessary for historians to consider. |
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In the sixteenth century, the vast majority of people in Europe and its overseas outposts believed that unity of religion helped ensure the security, stability, and tranquility of society and that the king or the state had the right to use coercion to create and maintain that unity. By the twentieth century, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and religious toleration had become widely accepted as positive attributes of the modern world. How and why did such a transformation in ideas and practices take place? Those questions lie at the heart of a venerable and extensive historiography of religious toleration that has in the main concentrated either on humanists, theologians, and political philosophers, whose ideas seemed to eventually, somehow, shift, or on governmental policies that conceded toleration to keep the peace or because it was good for business. As David D. Hall and Andrew R. Murphy both suggest, however, the old story of a triumph of ideas that by their own weight led to the spread of toleration and reason has now been replaced by a far more nuanced and contingent history of interests, strategies, and compromises.1 |
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In the older historiography and in the new, however, little attention has been given to popular reception of either the great ideas or changing governmental policies. What did common people think about freedom of conscience, religious difference, and "otherness," in general? Did they express attitudes of tolerance, and how did their thinking change over time? All Can Be Saved was an attempt to address those questions in the seemingly infertile context of Spain and Portugal and their Atlantic empires, which were founded on unity of faith, enforced religious exclusivity, and were usually absent from the histories of religious toleration.2 Moreover the book's approach also raised the possibility that the ideas expressed about freedom of conscience and religious toleration did not necessarily flow only downward and that they were, instead, part of broadly held attitudes whose origins lay not only in skepticism, indifference, and rationalism but also in an alternate, sometimes profoundly Christian common sense of right and wrong. |
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