Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550 – 1700

Abstract

This is an enthusiastically argued, highly informed, and most stimulating study that aims to underline the common cultural heritage of both halves of the American continent in colonial times. The central subject is the role of demonology in the literature published by those who took part in the colonial enterprise, a theme recently pioneered by several scholars, including Fernando Cervantes’s The Devil in the New World (Yale Univ. Press, 1994). Cañizares-Esguerra goes further by juxtaposing evidence from the Spanish side with that from Puritan New England. He argues 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” (p. 9). “The Puritans and Spaniards,” he contends, “saw the world of colonization in remarkably similar terms,” both out to combat “the satanization of the American continent” (p. 16). Since demons were the staple of sixteenth-century European literature, Cañizares-Esguerra has little problem sweeping every significant author and event of the period into his thesis, in an argument so packed with information, both textual and iconographic, that it left this reviewer almost giddy. He emphasizes the common cultural background of Spaniards and Englishmen, rooted in medieval Christianity and European culture that was “obsessed with demons” (p. 31).Much of the argument is valid, but the conclusions are more debatable. The author weaves a rich tapestry made even richer by digging up every incident, literary reference, and work of art that might refer to exotic and diabolic aspects of America in support of his overarching narrative. Thus, he devotes a page to describing a 1662 palace pageant in Paris to prove that “it was widely believed” that America was “in the hands of demons” (p. 138). The example, of course, illustrates his theme, but it is rather removed from either Puritans or Spaniards, and it does not demonstrate anything relating to French beliefs about America. Doubts about the author’s approach may be classified under two main headings. First, he has collected an impressive amount of literary references about demons and America, but it is not evident that the references and imagery are, within their historical context, much more than ideological or literary artifice. He has carried out an impressive exercise in the myths and metaphysics that accompanied contact with non-European worlds, but he does not demonstrate how those myths were relevant to the mechanics of colonization. The second main doubt concerns the way he identifies Puritans and Iberian Catholics with each other. It is not surprising that the worldviews of Englishmen and Spaniards should have had shared many attitudes and presuppositions. But did they come together at any point? Cañizares-Esguerra attacks scholars who assume that the two groups went their own way, did their own things, and developed in separate directions. But he himself fails to demonstrate a convergence of culture.This does not deter him making some bold claims. He suggests that “for all the confessional differences, the English and the Spaniards were ultimately cultural twins” (p. 76). One example he chooses is to argue that Queen Elizabeth was for the English what the Virgin of Guadalupe was for the Spaniards. We know, certainly, that a strongly patriotic sentiment was fostered around the queen in the sixteenth century, but comparing her role to that of a settler myth invented by a creole priest 70 years later, long after the conquest period, seems rather forced. This does not prevent him making similar parallels of uncertain validity: for example, claiming that Milton’s Satan was “modeled on a Spanish conquistador” (p. 81) or suggesting that the Puritan effort in New England was “an epic struggle of reconquista against the devil.”In a final enthusiastic and vocal peroration, he denounces scholars who study the Anglo and Hispanic traditions in the New World as separate realities and affirms forcefully that they were instead the same, due to the “common roots of Spanish and British American discourses of colonization” (p. 34). For him, the “common roots” can be identified not only in the demonology myth that he has studied but hopefully also in “all levels of historical analysis” (p. 214), including economics and politics. It may be significant that his wish to create a fusion (or maybe a mestizaje, to use the fashionable ideological term) between Anglo and Hispanic traditions in North America is explicitly related to his disagreement with Samuel Huntington, whose work he firmly rejects. In sum, he has produced a brilliant book, but the argument is pressed in so many confused directions that readers will find it difficult to go all the way with him in his conclusions.