Tuesday, December 16, 2008

From the bottom up ...

... Tolerant Propositions.

Given how widely and how deeply he has cast his net (twelve different archives on three continents), it would be immensely difficult to disprove Schwartz's claims. Spain, Portugal, and their colonies seem as awash in tolerant "propositions" as in informers who are eager to report their neighbors to the Inquisition.These doubters are there, no doubt about it; and so are the inquisitors, recording all the challenges to authority in great detail, tending to be relatively lenient in most cases—a far cry from the sadistic monsters imagined by the so-called Black Legend. Tolerance and intolerance relate to one another in this narrative as opposite magnetic charges in an electric motor, keeping things in motion.

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