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

Complicating the Standard Narrative

Andrew R. Murphy

READING my colleagues' reactions to All Can Be Saved and Stuart B. Schwartz's reply has reminded me just how much new and exciting scholarship has been produced on these topics over the past decade or so and how much more remains to be done. If Schwartz's book motivates scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to revisit the history of religious tolerance in the Iberian world—either on an imperial, macro level or in its various local instantiations—then we will not only be able to tell a more richly nuanced story about the Iberian experience of religious dissent, tolerance, and intolerance but also emerge with new comparative insights on the British Atlantic experience as well. In the process, what's more, we will enhance our understanding of the all-important interplay between individual attitudes and political developments. So for all these reasons, I am delighted to have been a part of this Forum and hope that All Can Be Saved gets the wide readership it so richly deserves.

In his response David D. Hall points to a growing literature that has called into question the basic assumptions of what we generally term the "standard narrative" of the rise of religious toleration. In this telling of the story—less overt now than in years past, but still a prominent whiggish undercurrent of much writing on the subject—toleration in the West grows out of the wreckage of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious wars, spurred on by enlightened protoliberal philosophers and opposed by fanatical religious believers and power-hungry clerics. The triumph of toleration, in this account, is due primarily to the inherent superiority of its humanistic ideals and only secondarily to any mundane or historically contingent considerations. Those who fought for toleration are warmly applauded, while assessments of those who opposed it range from pity for their ignorance to posthumous character assassination for their mendacity.

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