Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (review)

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has spent most of his career attempting to bring Latin America into the mainstream of early modern intellectual history. His first book, How to Write the History of the New World (2001), demonstrated among other things that there was an Hispanic Enlightenment just as dramatic and important as its northern counterpart. In this new study, Cañizares-Esguerra goes a step further, using the tools of comparative history to illustrate the links and similarities between two distinctive colonial projects: the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Latin America, and the English colonial project to the north. The result is a courageous and fascinating book that strikes at some of the most treasured assumptions of North American history. Not all scholars will agree with the author's conclusions, but Puritan Conquistadors is a book that historians of both Americas ought to read and ponder.

The unifying character in this hemispheric drama is Satan. In Cañizares-Esguerra's view, both Spanish and English colonizers represented the conquest of the New World as an ongoing struggle against the devil, an attempt to Christianize a continent that had long suffered in antichristian darkness. He begins by identifying the "Satanic epic" as a central trope of early Hispanic literary representations of America, examining dozens of sixteenth-century narratives that all "follow the same basic structure, with the conquest of the New World cast as a cosmic struggle pitting God against Satan" (p. 49). This rhetoric soon appeared in the first Elizabethan descriptions of America, though enterprising Protestants redefined the Spanish as Satan's minions rather than heroes. The approach is literary rather than historical, focusing on the rhetoric surrounding colonization, and after the sixteenth century Cañizares-Esguerra depends on published accounts from Puritan New England to an extent that would make any North American scholar uncomfortable. After all, colonialists have spent much of the last few decades questioning the significance and typicality of the Puritan experiment. Nonetheless, the author presents persuasive and compelling evidence, showing how in spite of their anti-popery, Protestant authors depended on the narrative structure and even some of the iconography of their Catholic counterparts—like the ultra-Protestant Theodor de Bry's lifting of images from a Catholic book celebrating the Spanish discoveries.

In presenting this evidence, Cañizares-Esguerra challenges a historiographical contention that he traces from William Prescott to Samuel Huntington: that the Spanish and English colonization processes were distinct and antagonistic and created two incompatible worlds. By demonstrating that theorists of colonization in both Americas described the process in identical terms, Cañizares-Esguerra casts the two colonizing nations as "cultural twins" who "each created similar epic narratives of providential national election" (p. 76), and urges historians of North America to more fully integrate the Iberian story into their research and teaching—though the recent popularity of borderlands and comparative approaches suggests that much of this work has already begun. More subtly, he also suggests that this common origin story suggests a unity in American history, and he aims directly at conservatives in the United States who classify Latin American Catholics as inassimilable outsiders.

In some ways, however, Cañizares-Esguerra makes his case too well. In both Catholic and Puritan accounts, the devil is so ubiquitous as to become virtually meaningless. Practically anyone or anything could be diabolical: Indians, of course; but also the Spanish (for the English); the English (for the Spanish); criollos as well as peninsulares; conversos, Jews, or Muslims; Antinomians, Quakers, and other sectaries; old ladies; slaves or Africans in general; even wild animals and earthquakes. What this rhetoric actually meant for the historical development of the Americas is not at all clear, but most certainly it did not inspire any solidarity between Iberian Catholics and English Protestants. To the contrary, Catholics and Protestants engaged in a violent struggle for the Americas that began almost soon after the Spanish conquest and continued at least...