Seth Kimmel challenges the conventional cultural and intellectual history of early modern Spain by arguing that religious intolerance, rather than consolidating the fields of canon law, philology, and history, instead created the conditions for a radical transformation in religious reform and disciplinary innovation in the Age of Inquisition. After the fall of Granada, Kimmel shows, competing scholarly communities in Castile and Aragon were forced to come to terms with the eradication of the traces of Judaism and Islam from the peninsula, obliging the legal scholars, linguistic experts, and historians of the time to go beyond their immediate fields of expertise in order to establish their political relevance and defend their interpretive methods to a wider audience. For Kimmel, it was the disagreements among the expertsinquisitors, university professors, Arabic and Hebrew scholars and translators, royal chroniclers, and even the Moriscos themselveson the issues raised by conversion, inquisition, biblical exegesis, and historical discourse that drove reform and innovation. It was the need for what we today call interdisciplinarity that caused the disciplines, and the scholars in them, to reinvent themselves, with New and Old Christians working together to redefine the meaning of religious conversion and to redraw the limits of their particular fields. As Kimmel notes, we need to rethink our understanding of early modern Spanish scholarship and revisit documents with fresh eyes, because the methods we have used to gauge religious tolerance and intolerance are too limitingthey fail to recognize that peninsular and transatlantic debates of the period about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over those interpretive methods and pedagogical practices that demarcated one discipline from another.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.
In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion,Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.
