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

I agree with a colleague who stated in a recent congress in Madrid: “The book by Stuart Schwartz demonstrates how secularization and modernity can be found where they are not expected.” Indeed, All Can Be Saved is an in-depth study of popular ideas about salvation and religious tolerance in a broad region that is usually identified with intolerance and Inquisition: the early modern Iberian World. While the first impulse that drove Schwartz to write this book was the reading of the classic The Cheese and the Worms (1976) by Carlo Ginzburg, the choice of the area of Portugal, Spain and their colonial dependencies in America is not just a provocation, but the consequence of the author’s long familiarity with Iberian history. A major scholar of Latin American studies, Schwartz is well known for his innovative studies about early modern Brazil, its administrative institutions, the social history of sugar cane economy and slavery.