Compare John Winthrop and Mary Rowlandson's writings with reference to the concept of the jeremiad.

In his famous study of Puritan rhetoric, The
American Jeremiad (1978), cultural critic Sacvan Bercovitch argues that the
jeremiad was the prevailing rhetoric mode of American literature from colonial times
down to the nineteenth century. According to Bercovitch, the jeremiad "helped sustain a
national dream through two hundred years of turbulence and change". It was a ritual
which aimed at joining "social criticism" and "spiritual renewal". Although different in
topic, both Winthrop and Rowlandson's writings described the American experience as part
of a providential design to counter moral decay. The Puritan minister and the female
captive share a providential interpretation of natural and historical occurrences whose
ultimate meaning is always religious. The foundation of the Massachussetts Bay Colony in
1630 and the eleven weeks Rowlandson spent as a prisoner of the Algonquian Indians share
the same redemptive end which is reached through the complete dependence on
God.