Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has written a work of scholarship and advocacy. The scholarship is apparent on every page: he has identified seemingly every sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian, Spanish American, English, and Anglo-American text and image that reflects a persistent belief in the existence of demons and the fact that Europeans tended to believe that the devil had long since taken up residence in the Western Hemisphere. The advocacy is ubiquitous too: Cañizares-Esguerra frequently pleads for a unified Atlantic perspective, even if it means challenging long-standing historical views about the confessional differences between Iberian and English interpretations of the peoples, religions, flora, and fauna of the Americas. As Cañizares-Esguerra puts it, “This book seeks to place the Spanish Atlantic at the center of U.S. colonial history” (215).

The persistent belief in the devil in the early modern age will come as no surprise to scholars of the British world who are long familiar with such ideas, best described in Stuart Clark's magnificent Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997). But no scholar to date has managed what Cañizares-Esguerra has accomplished here. Through intensive analysis of texts and images, he has revealed underlying commonalities between Europeans bent on laying claim to the Americas. He goes to great lengths to show similarities in what he labels “the Christian Atlantic world,” a place where, as he puts it, “for each fortification Satan had in the New World, Christians built one of their own” (178). This notion is based on Cañizares-Esguerra's core argument 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 within and without” (9). Puritan Conquistadors emphasizes the idea that “early modern Europeans enjoyed a long history of shared cultural values, harkening back millennia” (29). Yes, the Reformation mattered, but it mattered less than certain core ideas that survived the division of Christendom.

According to Cañizares-Esguerra, Iberians initially believed that the devil had had centuries to establish his dominion in the Western Hemisphere. They laced their texts with their pursuit of him and created a complex visual apparatus that showed how they succeeded in their contest with the devil. This belief in demons and the need to vanquish them appeared everywhere: in botanical texts emphasizing the demonic qualities of certain plants, in epics of the conquest painted in the language of chivalric romances, and in Bartolomé de Las Casas's natural history (in addition to his more famous Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). Colonization itself was, as he writes, “about expelling demons from the land” (83). Eventually American creoles would invert this paradigm and view “peninsulares as demons” when it met their own interests (71).

The English too saw the devil in residence in the Americas, but for them, like the Spanish American creoles, it was the Spanish who were his minions. Cañizares-Esguerra focuses especially on Puritans, who saw in the conquest by the Iberian Catholics the spread of demonic power. Yet, he also identifies similarities in the language that the English used to explain and justify their conquest (which they typically referred to with the less emotionally charged words “colonization” or “plantation”). Like the Iberians, the Puritans believed it necessary to exorcise the demonic—not only in their famous witch hunts (which merit scant treatment here) but in the ways that they conceptualized their task of gaining possession of New England. “For all the confessional differences,” he writes, “the English and the Spaniards were ultimately cultural twins” (76).

The argument unfolds in five fascinating chapters, including a very long introduction, and then in analyses of the idea of what Cañizares-Esguerra terms the “Satanic Epic,” the structural similarities that he sees in the rhetoric of Iberians and Puritans, and two stimulating chapters on nature, including one devoted explicitly to flowers and gardens. These chapters contain scores of images since, as Cañizares-Esguerra argues, Europeans expressed their ideology visually as well as in words, especially the Iberians. Some information can only be gleaned from analysis of these pictures, which Cañizares-Esguerra often presents in the form of long captions. Unfortunately, Puritans and other English or British colonizers were not as inclined to provide visual clues relating to their conquest of North America.

Puritan Conquistadors has an ambitious argument and should be read by every early modern Atlanticist. Yet, there are areas where the reader might be frustrated too. Cañizares-Esguerra focuses on the Puritans and takes his narrative as far as the Great Awakening. But the focus on New England and its ministers largely ignores the much larger number of English and British migrants who went elsewhere. Does the desire to rid the American landscape of demons figure centrally in other works, such as John Lawson's interpretation of Carolina, Robert Beverly's history of Virginia, any of the commentators about early Pennsylvania, or the writings by Richard Ligon or others who described the West Indies? Only systematic analysis of such works would reveal whether the demonological imperative found in Puritan writings ran as strong (or even existed) in other British sources. In addition, the text does not analyze the issues raised by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, a rebellion that featured explicit anti-Catholic elements. How did the Spanish react to such violence, and in what ways did it alter their view of the contest with the devil? Further, Stanford University Press could have done a much better job presenting the visual evidence here. Some images are too small to be examined, especially when jammed together (as in the case of a montage of five images on a quarter of p. 67). Finally, the last chapter is historiographical and argues with a range of contemporary historians; this might have worked better as a stand-alone essay and not as the capstone to one of the more imaginative recent books of Atlantic historiography.

In the end, Cañizares-Esguerra has written a compelling book that will make readers think again about the dark forces Europeans frequently thought they jousted against in the Americas. I hope that it also makes readers think about the forces of darkness that Iberians and the English unleashed in their conquest of the Western Hemisphere.