Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1500–1700 (review)

"The fox knows many things," the poet Archilochus says, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors is written with the sensibility of the hedgehog. Its main thesis is "that British Protestants and Spanish Catholics deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies within and without" (9). Cañizares-Esguerra speaks of "this common demonological discourse" (14) as the "satanization of the American continent" (18), and despite his statement that the paradigm sprang from origins deep in the Christian past, he attributes its dissemination primarily to the work of Catholic missionaries in Spain's American territories and to commentaries by their fellows in the Iberian peninsula. For these puritanical conquerors the planting of colonies amounted to a crusade for the de-satanization of the Americas in the name of the one true God. Hence the neologism in the book's subtitle: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700.

In arguing thus, Cañizares-Esguerra engages in his own battle with the idea "that the United States and Latin America are two ontologically different spaces, the former belonging to the 'West' and the latter to [the] 'Third World'" (216). His aim is to create a "Pan-American Atlantic" by placing "the Spanish Atlantic at the center of U.S. colonial history," making it "normative" (215).

Among hedgehog historians, some are what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has called "parachutists." In contrast to archival "truffle hunters," they survey the landscape as a whole rather than unearthing finds one at a time. Others are what J. H. Hexter identified as "lumpers," scholars who see uniformities, where "splitters" see particularities and complexities. A parachutist can more easily pick out broad features than diversity. The risk is reductionism, emphasizing similarities and downplaying or ignoring differences. The risks in "lumping" are greater, since the method often leads to "source-mining," in which the historian locates or redescribes passages to support the thesis and ignores what will not.

Regrettably, Cañizares-Esguerra falls victim to these hazards. He treats the two hundred years he covers synchronically without regard to change over time; flattens out the lives and experiences of native peoples; overlooks differences in topography, climate, social and political forms, and cultural practices, and generally treats the Americas as a single geographical entity. Even though he is aware that "using categories such as 'Iberians' and 'Puritans' is . . . reductive" (17), his book also fails to take into account the range of viewpoints, practices, and beliefs that existed within each of the camps. For him, it is enough that all groups viewed "the threat posed by Satan as enemy of polity" as an orthodoxy, despite evident and significant differences (18).

These problems become more worrisome as a result of Cañizares-Esguerra's source mining. At the heart of his argument is the claim that for the Spanish and for the British, America before its discovery by Christians was intrinsically Satan's territory — "the domain of the devil" (18). Whether the demons were indigenous or imported makes little difference here. The fact that "English Protestants first found the devil among the Spaniards" (27) and Bartolomé de las Casas held a similar view stands alongside works that place the devil among the Amerindians. All that is important is Satan's presence. But surely it makes a difference whether the Spanish are viewed as the agents of God against manifestations of the Antichrist embodied among American natives or as demons tormenting the latter.

Even more puzzling is Cañizares-Esguerra's interpretation of the work of Theodore de Bry, who he says "took the devil very seriously and thought that Satan had reigned undisturbed in America." However, he quotes de Bry as seeing great differences in the practice of religion between some American natives who worship "God the Creator of all...