TEXT 1: PURITANISM

Puritanism was a religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in the late sixteenth century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World–a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Puritanism, however, was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New England; it was also a way of being in the world–a style of response to lived experience–that has reverberated through American life ever since.

The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name “Puritans” (they were sometimes called “precisionists”) was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the process through which Puritanism developed had been initiated in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. But the Church of England retained much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism and seemed, to many dissenters, to be insufficiently reformed.

TEXT 2 : COLONIAL AMERICA

Benjamin Franklin once noted that the business of making a nation restricted literary activity in Colonial America. Franklin seemed to think that people needed a stable government and economy before they could make great advances in cultural pursuits such as literature, music, and painting. Indeed, between the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and the treaty ending the American Revolution in 1783, Americans did lag behind their English contemporaries in the production of epic poetry, drama, and fiction. Still, Colonial America did produce an impressive body of literature, much of it in the form of nonfiction prose, such as autobiography and sermon.   

Some central themes emerge from this literature. Because of the nature of their endeavor, for example, Captain John Smith and other chroniclers of settlement in the 17th century often addressed the subjects of will and work, the relationship between humans and nature, and the differences between European and Native American cultures. In this same century, Puritans such as Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop wrote about their spiritual feelings and quests, Bradstreet in very personal poems and a journal, Winthrop in both a famous public sermon and an intimate journal. This tradition continued into the following century, when Puritan Jonathan Edwards and non-Puritans such as Phillis Wheatley and John Woolman reflected on their faith in poems and journals. Other writers, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, produced more public literature designed to entertain people or further their political aims. In its emphasis on human potential and reason, much of this literature reflects the prevailing sentiments of its era, often called the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.