Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a critique of the assumption about Protestants not having any art, examining instead the sites to which Protestant aesthetic energy shifted in the wake of the Reformation: language, more generally, and drama and realistic theatre, specifically. It traces a dimension of Protestant aesthetics shaped in direct polemical contestation with Catholicism through the evidence for a strong anti-Catholic theatrical culture in seventeenth-century English drama. The book is concerned with how “the material legacy of early modern iconoclasm ultimately contributed to a new aesthetics” marked by an emerging philosophical embrace of fragmentation, especially evident in modernist art. It explores the role of bodily ecstasy in the same revivals Isaac Watt’s music helped to shape. The book analyzes the aesthetic choices Mexican Oneness Pentecostals employed to transform ordinary space into sacred space in California agricultural communities in the 1940s and 1950s.