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Reviewed by:
  • Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic 1550–1700
  • Thomas O. Beebee
Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic 1550–1700. By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiv + 327 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paperback, $24.95.

Those contemplating reading Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s latest book (his third from Stanford University Press) might wish to take the following self-test, observing which of the following statements they would either agree or take exception with:

  1. 1. “‘Creole’ patriotism in Spanish America was largely responsible for spreading the discourse of the colonial regime as demonic” (75).

  2. 2. “‘Americans’ need to look to Mexico for the true ancestors of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny” (80). [End Page 378]

  3. 3. “No analysis of early modern European colonization can afford to study Iberian and British sources separately (or French and Dutch ones for that matter)” (118).

  4. 4. “Iberian demonological views of Nature should inform any interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (ca. 1611) as a colonial text” (121).

  5. 5. “[T]he United States and ‘Latin America’ (that opaque and seemingly homogeneous space south of the Rio Grande, comprising dozens of nation-states and peoples) are in fact ontologically different” (214).

Statement no. 5 is—you guessed it—a trick, a bit of free indirect discourse taken out of context. Clearly contrasting with statement no. 3, it summarizes the supposedly dominant mode of historical thinking about the Americas that Cañizares-Esguerra attempts to deconstruct with this book. To that end, the author wants us to agree with statements 1 through 4, and his book presents a tenacious and richly evidenced argument for us to do so. Thus, the action of “Iberianizing” the Atlantic in the book’s subtitle is carried out by the author (and, presumably, by his readers who will end up convinced of theses 1–4). Literature provides much of the evidence in favor of these theses.

Demonology in various forms—Satanic epic (35–82), demonological discourse (83–177)—haunts the main part of the book, with a positive note introduced in the last evidential chapter with the idea of spiritual gardening (178–214) as metaphor for the construction of New Jerusalems in the New World. With the term “Satanic epic,” the author wishes to draw attention to the hitherto neglected role of Satan as a character in many of the New World epics in both Spanish and English—Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–89) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1677) are perhaps the best-known works to be discussed under this rubric. A key question concerns not so much the depiction of Satan as his choice of allies, which are shown to include Amerindians, Spaniards (in English accounts), conversos, and Nature. The chapter also notes how the English took clues from the earlier Spanish New World epics for their own versions, while inverting the paradigms of saved vs. damned to include the Spaniards in the latter. The Spanish conquest that had been a saving grace for the world appears as hell on earth in many English epics. Conversely, the use of Elizabeth in the discourse of English national providential election parallels the symbology of the Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain as a sub-plot of the Satanic epic. The shared element of demonological discourse, which Spaniards this time learned from Anglo-Saxons, was typology. Aztecs as inverted Israelites, Satan as the ape of [End Page 379] God, and exorcism with Cross and Bible are some of the figures Cañizares-Esguerra visits, before devoting an entire chapter to the perception of New World nature as inherently demonic, for which Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) serves as a master text.

Besides literature, graphic art provides much of the evidence in this handsomely illustrated book. More than fifty pictures are analyzed, frequently within the fine print of the captions. So frequent and extensive are these commentaries that they together provide a descant to the text’s main argument. The textual, iconographic, and ideational density of this book will make it a touchstone for ideas and sources; the importance this historian accords to literature in the overall ability of Europeans to “see”—and hence to master—the New World...

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