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 of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.

"Recent scholarship on early modern Europe has shown how, contrary to the sharp contrasts of historical folklore, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations dreamed comparable dreams, and promoted comparable forms of political, economic, and social development. Now Professor Caizares-Esguerra completes the picture for the Americas of roughly the same era; in a book notable for skillful deployment of a rich visual material, he shows how Spanish and Puritan clerics, at opposite ends of a mutual anathema, dreamed comparable dreams, and shared common fears of an advancing kingdom of the devil." - University of Minnesota

"Puritan Conquistadors is a powerful and timely reminder that the two main traditions of early European expansion in the Americas Iberian Catholic and Anglo-Saxon Protestant were not, as we invariably assume, marked only by irreconcilable difference. In a study that is both pan-Atlantic and pan-American, Jorge Caizares-Esguerra boldly dismantles the confessional and national stereotypes of existing historiography by exploring what was common in the mentalities and discourses of Iberian and Puritan colonizers alike. Biblical narratives and typologies, millenarian and apocalyptic expectations, and the heroic idioms of epic struggle, crusading, and the transformation of the wilderness are restored to their original prominence. Above all, this is the most comprehensive and exciting version yet of the satanization thesis of early colonization as applied demonology. Professor Caizares-Esguerra shows brilliantly and conclusively that, whether in Massachusetts or in Mexico and Peru, clerical conquistadors saw themselves first and foremost as exorcists, expelling demons from the inhabitants and the landscape of the New World." - Swansea University

"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 master—the New World through their millennially tinted glasses, and his continual calls for a comparative approach to American history should gratify comparative literary scholars." - Comparative Literature Studies