Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s brilliant monograph begins with a historical irony: “The first Spanish-language publication in what would become the United States” (2) was written by none other than Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the third-generation colonist and Boston minister frequently conscripted into mythic accounts of American (i.e., Anglo-Protestant and Anglophone US) exceptionalism that locate the nation’s origins in Puritan New England. Like any good historical irony, however, Mather’s authorship of a tract seeking to convert the Hispanophone populations south of Massachusetts proves less surprising than it seems, illuminating an underappreciated aspect of the past—and the reasons for its underappreciation. In Gruesz’s hands, the story of Mather’s La Fe del Christiano (1699) is not one about a literary “first” made possible by the teleological inscription of national borders onto a contingent colonial landscape (“what would become the United States”). Instead, it is a story about the dense geographic and temporal interconnections that informed...

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