In this remarkable work in Atlantic history, Jorge Cañizares-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...
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 of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.