This original and highly readable book examines an immensely rich array of cases from the early modern Iberian world that suggest the existence of a vibrant tradition of religious tolerance and scepticism in matters of faith and morals. Following Clifford Geertz's concept of the instability of meanings, Schwartz attempts to show how ‘alternate interpretations of ideas, practices or symbols might be made by people who consider themselves part of the same religious community’ (p. 11). The author is especially successful in breaking down compartmentalised barriers, not only between Spain and its American possessions but also, which is much rarer, between Spain and Portugal. Moreover, his skilful deployment of a prodigious wealth of primary materials, his historiographical grounding of them in an equally impressive range of secondary works and his many suggestive and insightful observations all mark this audacious book as a major scholarly achievement.

The book's central thesis is that popular tolerance was a generalised phenomenon in much of early modern Europe. The reason why it has tended to elude historians is that early modern history has often been ‘cast in terms of religious conflicts, violence, and in the process of confessionalization’. Consequently, the ‘long-overlooked existence’ of a more irenic world ‘is the key to understanding 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’. It is not ‘the triumph of conviction’ but a ‘tale of pragmatism and convenience’ that Schwartz offers, a tale where the ‘charity, incredulity, indifference and doubts’ of clusters of ‘rustic pelagians’ – a term borrowed from Christopher Haigh to refer to anyone ‘living a good life, believing in God, and doing no harm’ – ‘all made their contribution to tolerance alongside the programmes of the politiques’ (pp. 243–5).

Unfortunately, the thesis is not as consistent or as convincing as it might have been. Although Schwartz is careful to stress that there is nothing whiggish or teleological about his approach – even granting that in early modern times ‘almost no one believed religious toleration to be beneficial in either political or religious terms’ (p. 7) – he seems intent on demonstrating that his characters ‘were the unwitting godparents of the secular future’ (p. 12). In the process, the complexities of the Christian tradition are cast in terms that are grossly misleading. The principle that there can be no salvation outside the Church, for instance, is presented as ‘codified’ by St Augustine who allegedly argued that even those who had not had a chance to hear the Gospel ‘were ignorant of it because God had foreseen that they would reject the truth even if they heard it’ (pp. 36–7). In similar vein, he sees the widespread opinion that sex was not all that sinful as a popular indictment of Tridentine attempts to control sex (pp. 31–2), themselves a reflection of the influence of Thomas Aquinas who had ‘codified’ Christian teaching about the illicit nature of any sexual practice outside marriage (p. 26). The much more likely possibility that the attitude might be a reflection of pastoral practice does not seem to have crossed Schwartz's mind. Even less reassuring is that in neither instance does he provide references to the original sources. He seems happy to follow the opinions of obscure secondary works when they fit his general thesis.

All this is symptomatic of an approach that sits very uncomfortably with the book's explicit claim to eschew teleology. Montaigne, Vannini and Toland, for example, are credited with views ‘directly aimed as an attack on religion’; the post-Cartesian philosophical trends are seen as promoting ‘a rational questioning of religious beliefs’ (pp. 75–6); and the late sixteenth-century emergence of ‘curiosity’ as ‘a neutral or sometimes positive human characteristic’ is contrasted (again without any reference) with the ‘Augustinian’ and ‘medieval’ tradition of seeing it as a ‘distraction’ (p. 83). Similar assumptions inform his treatment of American cases. The well-known opinion of the Dominican friar Francisco de la Cruz that ‘implicit faith’ was sufficient for salvation is seen as the logical conclusion of the ‘universalism’ of Las Casas (pp. 156–7). The same idea is given more flesh in the case of the Franciscan Miguel de Bolonia who ‘seemed to share … universalist hopes with the reformist Italian evangelicals whose movement was suppressed after Trent’. Denounced to the Mexican inquisition, Bolonia cleverly argued that ‘all people can be saved in their law by the absolute power of God’. Schwartz comments that the inquisitors were forced to admit that ‘even though the statement implied a contradiction, the necessity of the church for salvation and the absolute power of God, Fray Miguel had neutralized the implication of heresy. … [He] represented both continuity with the past and its transformation in the Indies’ (pp. 157–9).

It is in these seemingly ‘contradictory’ spaces that Schwartz locates the emergence of a ‘context of tolerance in which the ideas of the Enlightenment could flourish’ and where his characters could become ‘as much the precursors of modernity as their more literate and eloquent contemporaries’ (p. 241). But it could be just as forcefully argued that what we are observing here is the expression of a creative tension between a notion of the Church as a local, empirical institution and a notion of the Church as a transcendent, heavenly home. It is one thing to realise that the post-Tridentine Church, just like the Protestant Churches in the same period, tended to stress the second of these conceptions and to impose traditional structures as metaphysical absolutes. It is quite another to pretend that the many varieties of structure and experience that Schwartz has observed do not call the bluff of any rigorist application of the principle of the necessity of the Church for salvation. Surely, the missionary impetus cannot be explained in the absence of a clear sense of the inclusiveness of divine election and its universal scope.

It is, of course, true that in the bulk of the official documentation the official Church seems often unaware of any need to present God's elective love in terms of a creative human freedom. But this should not obscure the endless efforts on the part of the local Churches to make God's inclusiveness empirically visible. In the process Christians often became certain, as a matter of elementary common sense, that those outside the Church or in conflict with it might do God's will just as well as those inside it. But this was hardly a symptom of secular, relativistic toleration. Indeed, the principle of the necessity of the Church for salvation seemed to remain untouched by any general views about the salutary efficacy of non-Christian religions or the reasonableness of those at odds. This was because the Christian sense of kinship with dissidents and non-Christians still demanded the concrete historical expression of divine transcendence in the Church. Thus understood, the necessity of the Church for salvation was a matter of freedom, realised in mutual human sympathy. It is a pity that Schwartz's failure to acknowledge this fundamental creative tension should serve to de-contextualise his fascinating material, thereby damaging his central argument irreparably.