Puritan Conquistadors Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 [Paperback]

This book argues that the striking resemblances in Spanish and Puritan discourses of colonization as exorcism and as spiritual gardening point to a common Atlantic history. These resemblances suggest that we are better off if we simply consider the Puritan colonization of New England as a continuation of Iberian models rather than a radically different colonizing experience. The book demonstrates that a wider Pan-American perspective can upset the most cherished national narratives of the United States, for it maintains that the Puritan colonization of New England was as much a chivalric, crusading act ofReconquista(against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest. 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 masterthe New World through their millennially tinted glasses, and his continual calls for a comparative approach to American history should gratify comparative literary scholars. These chapters make for thrilling reading. Canizares-Esguerra writes with zest and an obvious love for the history of ideas. He brings to the reader's attention ideas central to European expansion in the Americas, enhancing our understanding of conquest and colonization. In this remarkable work in Atlantic history, Jorge Caizares-Esguerra demonstrates with lavish scholarship and visual imagery the European settlers struggle with Satanic forces that permeated the colonization and settlement of Europeans, both Hispanic and British, in the Western Hemisphere. He explores the epical narratives written in Spanish, Latin, and English, of that deeply embedded struggle, and shows how Christians in America thereafter fought to preserve a spiritual garden free of demonic forces. The struggle he describes in this original and challenging book, experienced by Christians of the time as heroic and inescapable,lCk