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Schwartz, stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. xiii + 336 pp.
In this engaging book, Stuart B. Schwartz (George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University) explores early modern popular religious dissidence and toleration in the Iberian Atlantic world. Schwartz conceives of this study as a "cultural history of thought" (6), relying on stories about largely unknown common folk, whose doubts and dissenting views about salvation, sex, and other religious issues challenged Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Although Schwartz has drawn his data from Inquisition records in Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, the Spanish Indies, and Brazil, he eschews a quantitative method in favor of presenting serial microhistories of religious nonconformists on both sides of the Atlantic. He argues that these stories show basic patterns and contexts that help explain the widespread prevalence of dissident views by atheists, relativists (who found truth in different religions), universalists (who thought all could achieve salvation), and skeptics. According to Schwartz, these rustic dissenters were everywhere, and by the eighteenth century their views had merged with Enlightenment ideas to produce greater freedom of religion and conscience in the Iberian Atlantic world. The result is a well written and carefully argued book that still leaves its readers in doubt about what these popular dissidents represented: Were they precursors of religious tolerance or just a few unorthodox cranks, denounced by fellow citizens to the Inquisition?
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