Peoples of the Book

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700, while not without its problems, is a fascinating and enjoyable study of the points of convergence between Catholic Iberians in Central and South America, and Puritan English in New England in North America. Despite the evident, and usually highlighted, differences between the two, Esguerra argues for numerous similarities and common trends in the ways that both societies understood and depicted their colonizing efforts in the Americas. Paramount, Eguerra argues, was the employment of demonological tropes in constructing both the indigenous peoples and the New World, and the opposing sides in the attempt to control the new lands on the west side of the Atlantic.

This common approach stems from a shared Western Christian intellectual culture and common discourse, built in great part through the reading, exegesis, and localized employment of the Bible. Esguerra brings up numerous examples of direct exegesis of the Bible in behalf of colonizing endeavors; even more frequent are more subtle background traces of a shared Christian discourse established through centuries of Western European contact and engagement with Christianity and especially Christianity’s sacred text. Whether through the lens of crusading or further refracted through such values as chivalry, certain ideas about and ways of seeing the world came to be established, in both Iberia and England, through a long history of this engagement with Christianity and the Bible. As a result, both societies employed their common heritage, reflected through their particular post-Reformation trajectories, in justifying and speaking about and understanding their conquest and control of the Americas.

In establishing all of this Esguerra is quite convincing. It goes a long ways towards supporting his contention in the final chapter that the Americas should be viewed as a whole- he implies as uniformly Western, not as a dichotomy of West versus the Rest, with the Rest including Latin America (how a region with that most Western of appellatives, Latin, could be other than Western, I have never understood…). Some of his attempts to point out parallels in discourses fall a little flat, usually because of the superabundance of convincing evidence on one side alongside a marked lack on the other. Sometimes I suspect that what he implies to be influence is better interpreted as a working out of similar deposits, a common trajectory, without a great deal of later interpenetration. Sacred texts in particular have a great deal of textual power; there are exegetical moves and interpretations that are common, more or less, in medieval Christian communities from Central Asia to the western coast of Ireland, with no actual influence between them, just a shared sacred text and some shared methods of interpretation.

On a related note, sometimes the focus on the demonic felt a little forced, conditioning the material- perhaps a broader focus would have been helpful. Certainly the material covered is broad: from depictions of the New World as a demonically diseased garden in need of weeding and renewal, to the existence of signs of God in the very vegetation of the Americas: the range of discourses Esguerra covers is truly broad, which, if nothing else, keeps this book continually interesting. And Esguerra is generous with illustrations, but not simply as breaks in the text- he actually does a good job integrating them into the argument of the text, reminding us of the visceral quality of even highly intellectual arguments, as the intellectual discourses met and materialized in the Americas, whether under Iberian or Puritan control.