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

Puritan Conquistadors presents an imaginative, comparative history of ideas focused on early colonial religious themes in Spanish and British America. The subtitle announces the author's objective to demonstrate the formative role of Iberian artistic themes and literary tropes for the early modern Atlantic world. Cañizares-Esguerra argues strenuously against the biases that assume the intellectual initiative of Anglophone ideas and literary references and the derivative quality of Hispanic artistic and literary representations in the period of empire building that spanned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His thesis creates parallel typologies for Hapsburg Spain and Elizabethan England, mirrored in Spanish America and the Puritan colony of New England, to demonstrate that both the Protestant Reformation and the Tridentine Counter-Reformation targeted the New World colonies as spaces in need of spiritual purification.

Puritan Conquistadors uses interdisciplinary methods drawn from literary criticism, art, and history. The author reads the images like texts, but he does not analyze their aesthetic qualities or contextualize them from the point of view of art history. The book is richly illustrated with fifty-five figures, explicated with detailed citations and notes, representing the religious artwork—paintings, woodcuts, and book illustrations—that circulated in the Spanish American and British colonies. Cañizares-Esguerra's descriptive analysis shows that conquerors and colonists actively embraced the idea that their worldly exploits were favored by spiritual armies engaged in cosmic battles with Satan's dominions in the New World. He constructs the intellectual genealogy of texts and images to establish the primacy of Iberian works in creating the religious and political ethos of the early modern Atlantic world. Cañizares-Esguerra does not place the sources that he has chosen in historical context; rather, he uses them to "reconstruct the logical structure, the grammar, of a discourse" that emerges through the typologies of demonology and gardening to convey the European sense of Satan's power among the Amerindian peoples and the divine destiny of their conquests (17).

Cañizares-Esguerra builds a complex history of ideas, following their movements through different literary texts and art works in the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America and through the British, French, and Dutch colonies of the New World. He begins this study by juxtaposing the seventeenth-century extirpation campaigns of Peru— exemplified by Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez of Lima and the Cuzco School (anonymous) painting of The Conquest of Peru—with Edward Johnson's "True Narrative" of Puritan New England (Wonder-Working Providences of Zion's Saviour in New England), written in 1654. Similarly, he compares the cult of the Virgin Mary, enshrined in the Mexican image of Guadalupe, with Elizabethan images of their Virgin Queen and analyzes William Shakespeare's Tempest (1610 or 1611) and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) in reference to the Iberian satanic epic.

The final chapter, "Toward a 'Pan-American' Atlantic," departs from the chronological and thematic sequence of Puritan Conquistadors, reading more like a stand-alone essay in which Cañizares-Esguerra applies his interpretation of the colonial histories of British and Spanish America to modern historical production. Reiterating his critique that U.S. historians have interpreted their colonial past in teleological terms, focused on the nation-state, and that Latin American(ist) historians have juxtaposed histories of failure in the southern continent with those of economic success and political power in the north, Cañizares-Esguerra challenges scholars in both fields to transcend these intellectual boundaries through paradigms that go beyond the global and the transnational in their understanding of the cultures of colonial America. The essay is forceful, but repetitive, leaving unclear what these new paradigms may be and how to weave together the colonial and postcolonial continental developments that both unite and divide the nations and peoples of the Americas.