Puritan Conquistadors

"Two people – Che Guevara and my history professor at York, Gwyn Williams, who taught a module on guerrillas in the early 1970s. It was a fusion of political inspiration and academic interest. I think it’s a very enterprising history because it challenges the thesis of American exceptionalism – the idea that the Puritan tradition is so singular that it determines North America in contrast to Catholic and Spanish Latin America. What Cañizares does is look very closely at particularly religious texts from the time – which of course are now very much in the news again with all the discussion about Hitchens and Dawkins and so on. And he finds a greater convergence than mainstream belief normally recognises. He is deconstructing the languages used by the divines of both Christian traditions and he finds some remarkable similarities in terms of the signifiers. One of these, for example, is the concept of wilderness, which of course is biblical but can also relate to how one approaches nature, settlement and the native populations that don’t cultivate."