European Protestant Letters & Music
Emphasized the Word (Bible text) over (Catholic) imagery: thus logocentric (word-oriented); written & spoken word
emphasis on education: reading, logic, and rhetoric appropriate to sermonizing and sermon-thought
Sermons and preaching the dominant literary form for much of early colonial Protestant North America.
Often show belief in supernatural world coexisting with the visible world.
Focus on death reminds of frailty of life:momento mori (“reminder of death”) or vanitas, a skull or winged hourglass -- death, like salvation, can come at any time
Often work through a “logic” based on Biblical thought.
EXAMPLES: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards; the New England Primer.
Music consisted mostly of hymns and working songs brought over straight from Europe.