All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World

by Stuart B. Schwartz

It would seem unlikely that one could discover tolerant religious attitudes in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition, when enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was widespread and brutal. Yet this groundbreaking book does exactly that. Drawing on an enormous body of historical evidence—including records of the Inquisition itself—the historian Stuart Schwartz investigates the idea of religious tolerance and its evolution in the Hispanic world from 1500 to 1820. Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of common people rather than those of intellectual elites, the author finds that no small segment of the population believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Church.

 

The book explores various sources of tolerant attitudes, the challenges that the New World presented to religious orthodoxy, the complex relations between “popular” and “learned” culture, and many related topics. The volume concludes with a discussion of the relativist ideas that were taking hold elsewhere in Europe during this era.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Spain, World History, Christianity

336 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2008

About the author

Stuart B. Schwartz is Professor of History at Yale University and the former Master of Ezra Stiles College.

He studied at Middlebury College, where he received his undergraduate degree, and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. He then went on to study Latin American History at Columbia University where he received his Ph.D. (1968).

He is one of the leading specialists on the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion.

Reviews

[Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is deeply researched and, in fact, incredibly funny. reading the things people would actually and purposefully say to the Extreme Violence People in their trials is crazy. it's also a particularly incisive attack on the idea that ideas of tolerance were held only by the educated few, who had access to written texts. rather, tolerance, and even pelagianism, are old and deep beliefs, ones that people could reach simply through common sense. though never the prevalent belief, Schwartz shows that even in Spain and Portugal, two of the societies thought of as the most religiously repressive of the Early Modern period, religious toleration was a widely held belief amongst the common people.

[NuevoBereano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aunque el libro bebe de las fuentes según el interesante método de la microhistoria, no reusa hacer juicios de vuelo y síntesis. Los archivos de la Inquisición nos permiten ver a vista de suelo, en este caso, una corriente popular de espíritu tolerante (con todo tipo de orígenes, desde el pragmatismo más pedestre hasta el idealismo evangélico) en los largos años de control institucional de la pureza religiosa.

[João Paulo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incontornável para quem quer entender não só a toda a tretando tolerantismo, mas também certas características interessantes da formação religiosa da península ibérica

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schwartz examines cases to moriscos, conversos, and Old Christians, many of the them peasants, who were hauled before the Inquisition for saying that "All can be saved in their own law." That is, there is plenty of evidence of religious tolerance and even religious skepticism among the popular classes in the early modern periods. Schwartz suggests that we pay more attention to the circulation of ideas between high and low cultural notions: "Ideas circulated from high to low and low to high, and while common people might not have the education or background to write a play or a sermon or to formulate dogman, they had their own understanding of right and wrong, good and bad" (172). He puts the last nail in the coffin of heavy-handed Foucaultism, daring to assert that early modern people had notions of "common sense" and "fair play" that allowed them to resist, ignore, or subvert state control.

[Mike Emett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for the "Atlantic Word" graduate seminar