The past few decades have seen a considerable expansion in both the quantity and the quality of scholarship on early modern Spain's moriscos, the nominally Christian descendants of Spanish Muslims. While much of this literature has focused on the moriscos of Granada and Valencia, populations separated from the “Old Christian” majority by major cultural and religious differences, a handful of researchers have turned to examine the more assimilated, integrated, and understudied moriscos of Castile. In so doing, they have begun to call into question some of the fundamental assumptions that have long undergirded morisco studies—that the overwhelming majority of the moriscos either failed or refused to assimilate to the culture of the Old Christian majority population; that relations between moriscos and Old Christians were largely hostile; and that the expulsion was enthusiastically endorsed by the moriscos' neighbors and resulted in the complete removal of the hated minority population. Trevor Dadson's work on moriscos and Old Christians in Villarrubia de los Ojos and other small towns in the Campo de Calatrava (a region of La Mancha, in central Castile) has been a major landmark in this revisionist trend. In Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (siglos XV—XVIII) (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007), Dadson uncovered a Castilian town in which, far from existing at the margins, the morisco population was extremely well integrated into the larger community. While Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain incorporates Dadson's ongoing research upon the moriscos of Villarrubia and the surrounding area, it also draws upon this earlier work, both in its sources and in its conclusions, making them accessible to Anglophone readers.

Over the course of eleven thematic chapters, Dadson explores the assimilation and integration of Villarrubia's moriscos during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first three chapters examine the moriscos' relationship with the Inquisition and other courts, morisco literacy, and social mobility. The fourth presents an illustrative case study of the Herrador family, a morisco clan whose members, over the course of a hundred and twenty years, went from being prosecuted and convicted by the Inquisition for Islamic observances to attaining valuable lands, advanced educations, and key public offices in Villarrubia and elsewhere. The overarching picture is one of “a totally integrated society, in which there are no noticeable distinctions between one group and the other” (70). The remaining chapters all center upon the expulsion of the moriscos. Chapter 5 examines the rhetorical strategies deployed by supporters of the expulsion program to convince a skeptical Old Christian population, while chapter six focuses on opposition put up by clerics, nobles, royal officials, and others outside the morisco community. Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 consider morisco resistance to the expulsion, from the considerable numbers who found ways to stay behind, to the many more who, despite stiff legal penalties, returned from exile and resumed their lives in the towns of the Campo de Calatrava. Returnees turned to the courts to get restitution of lost property and even succeeded in regularizing their situation by winning royal reconfirmation of a longstanding privilege of legal classification as Old Christians. Through close readings of a selection of testaments and a failed prosecution by the Inquisition in 1628, Dadson demonstrates that Villarrubia's moriscos differed little from their Old Christian neighbors in their religious faith and devotional observances. The final chapter brings together the themes explored throughout the book to argue forcefully that “assimilation, coexistence, and tolerance between Old and New Christians in early modern Spain were not a fiction or a fantasy” (11).

In making this argument, Dadson offers a powerful counter to longstanding images of an intolerant Spain. This view stands alongside other recent rehabilitations, such as Stuart Schwartz's recovery of deep-rooted traditions of religious tolerance (not toleration) in the Iberian Peninsula and the far-flung empires of early modern Spain and Portugal (Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008]). Perhaps historians have indeed overstated the religious antagonism and polarization usually considered to be characteristic of the sixteenth century. Morisco/Old Christian relations in early modern Villarrubia de los Ojos appear almost as a continuation of an idealized medieval convivencia. Given that much scholarship in the past two decades has made clear that quotidian violence was an integral part of interfaith cooperation and coexistence in medieval Iberia, I have to wonder a bit at Dadson's rosy picture. These qualms aside, however, the book is important in the way it thoroughly upends many tired assumptions about morisco assimilation and relations between moriscos and their neighbors.

Methodologically, too, the book also breaks some new ground. Except for a handful of interesting case files, Dadson avoids the Inquisitional sources which have, perhaps, skewed historians' assumptions about the moriscos' lack of cultural and religious assimilation. Instead, he draws upon a wide range of documents, from letters to wills to lawsuits to sales records and more to reconstruct lives and careers of individuals and communities. At times, he gets a bit bogged down in the back and forth between different officials engaged in either prosecuting or resisting the expulsion, and the integration of the individual chapters is a bit disjointed. But in among the details are the flesh-and-blood people of the past in all of their contradictions, who testify to the on-the-ground tolerance and coexistence that predominated in the Campo de Calatrava—and, it seems likely, elsewhere in early modern Spain. These many merits should find this book a ready readership amongst the growing number of Anglophone students and scholars interested in early modern Spain and the Muslim world, the encounter between Islam and Christianity, and relations between cultural and religious minorities and majorities.