摘要：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. His passage to cultural and religious history fits in a pattern of neoliberal interpretation of the Western civilization between the discovery of America and the French Revolution. Written in a pleasant narrative style, rich in captivating stories and details, the book deals with a wide range of propositions concerning religion, beliefs and justice, recorded by the Inquisition: even if expressed by common people, assertions like “each person can be saved in his or her religion,” claims for tolerance towards the victims of inquisitors or popular violence, as well as other generic statements that indicated thoughts which dissented from orthodoxy and the unquestionable authority of the Catholic Church, would be “the key to understand how the formalized theories of toleration, the great texts of Bayle, Locke, Voltaire, and others, eventually became part of the general intellectual and political life of modern Europe” (243). Therefore, those obscure men would have been “precursors of our world.”
