Agnès Delahaye, professor of American civilization at the Lumière-Lyon-II University, publishes Adventurers, pilgrims, puritans. The founding myths of the United States (Compound past tenses, 272 pages, 21 euros). In an interview with WorldIt traces the history of the English colonial project in America, in particular the epic story of the Pilgrim Fathers, a group of Calvinists who were prevented by the English crown from freely practicing their religion and who saw in colonization the opportunity to start from scratch. Those who were once pejoratively described as “Puritans” are today widely considered the Founding Fathers of the United States and still strongly permeate culture and politics.
How did the religious wars arise in the 16th century?my century, did they play a central role in the development of the English colonial project?
Agnes Delahaye: By the time England decided to enter the race for colonies, Catholic Spain had dominated the Atlantic for more than a century. The English colonial argument, which developed in the 1580s, positioned itself against a certain “black legend” of the Spanish conquest. Bible The Spanish colonyof the Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), plays a key role. The text, which tells how soldiers failed in their Christian duty, was published in English in 1583. Several stories in English about the violence of Catholic conquistadors toward Native Americans subsequently circulated.
In it Discourse on settlements in the West (1584), the English chaplain and geographer-cosmographer Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) thus places English colonization in direct competition with the Spanish Catholic empire. Hakluyt believes that Queen Elizabeth Id (1533-1603) embodies the “true religion” and that we must go to America with an alternative model of colonization.
In England, the official religion – which is not yet called “Anglicanism” – is a compromise between the Protestant cult and the Catholic rite, under the authority of the Crown. However, in colonial arguments, the fundamental opposition is, in fact, that between Catholics and Protestants. For Hakluyt, Protestantism, benevolent and convincing, would not fail to convince the Native Americans. His text also suggests sending all nonconformists, those Protestants who reject the queen’s authority, to the colonies. So, we’ll kill two birds with one stone.
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