Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather (born February 12, 1663 in Boston ; died February 13, 1728 there ) was a Puritan clergyman and scholar. Intellectually and politically he was probably the most important figure of the third generation of English settlers in New England .

life and work

The son of Increase Mather , nephew of Samuel Mather, and grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather , who were in turn among the leaders of the second and first generation of Puritans in Boston, it is not surprising that he followed in their footsteps. When he was only twelve he began to study for the priesthood at Harvard ; his father was the president of the college. He received his bachelor's degree at fifteen and his master's at eighteen . In 1680 he preached his first sermon to his father's congregation in Boston's Old North Church . In 1685 he completely took over the pulpit of this church. In 1688 he interfered in the politics of the colonies; after the ousting of King James II , he was one of the ringleaders in a successful revolt against Edmund Andros , the royal governor in the New England colonies.

In more than 450 books and pamphlets, Mather wrote against the softening of Orthodox Puritanism and the secularization of the American colonies. At the Salem witch trials he was not represented on the judges' panel, but influenced many guilty verdicts with his advice. He defended his unyielding stance in the trials in 1693 in his Wonders of the Invisible World ("Miracles of the Invisible World"). In this work, based on Joseph Glanville's Sadducism Triumphatus (1682), he reinforced his belief in the work of witches and other messengers of Satan in the world.

Despite all the superstitions, Mather was a thoroughly progressive and scientific scholar in other matters. In 1716 he published a study on the hybridization of different maize varieties; he also advocated general variations against smallpox . His essays To Do Good may have inspired Benjamin Franklin's social reform activities.

Magnalia Christi Americana

Around 1693, Mather began work on his main work, Magnalia Christi Americana , which is still considered the culmination of New England historiography. The seven “books” of Magnalia appeared in 1702 in London as a voluminous folio; The numerous biographies of the ecclesiastical and secular leaders of the New England colonies, representations of church history, the history of Harvard College and secular concerns such as the Indian Wars make the Magnalia an important source for historical research, but made the work appear overly pedantic and exuberant even to contemporaries . In England in particular, where Puritanism had exhausted itself as a political and religious force since the Restoration, Mather's work was perceived as an anachronism; Only the Presbyterian-dominated University of Glasgow honored Mather with a doctorate in 1710. The criticism of the Magnalia was directed on the one hand against the pompous abundance of references and quotations to the Bible and classical motifs, but also against Mathers amalgamation of salvation and world history. In New England, too, Mather's contemporaries turned increasingly to worldly matters, and Thomas Prince ousted Mather with his more sober Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals (1736–55) as the exegete of New England history.

It was not until 1820 that Thomas Robbins, the librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society, got a first American edition, which slowly but steadily sold; a second edition appeared in 1853. This American edition drew the attention of American romantics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville and especially Ralph Waldo Emersons to Mather. Critics like Sacvan Bercovitch have shown in the Mather reception of this time, on the one hand, the continuity of puritanical traits in American intellectual history and implied that Mather, in his salvation-historical exaggeration of New England history as American history, precisely the Christi Americana , since the foundation of the colonies not only strengthened the predominant belief in election of the New England Puritans, but gave it a specifically American character. Mather appears as an early as well as representative representative of exceptionalism , which pervades American intellectual history to this day.

literature

• Dorothy Z. Baker: America's Gothic Fiction: The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana. Ohio State University Press, Columbus 2007.
• Sacvan Bercovitch: The Puritan Origins of the American Self . Yale University Press, New Haven 1975. ISBN 0300017545
• Christopher D. Felker: Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance: Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard . Northeastern University Press, Boston 1993. ISBN 1-55553-187-3
• Richard F. Lovelace: The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism . American University Press, Grand Rapids, Mich. 1979. ISBN 0-8028-1750-5
• Robert Middlekauff : The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 . University of California Press, Berkeley 1999. ISBN 0-520-21930-9
• Philipp Reisner: Cotton Mather as Enlightenment: Faith and Society in New England in the Early Modern Age . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012. ISBN 3525570252
• Kenneth Silverman : The Life and Times of Cotton Mather . Welcome Rain Publishers, New York 2001. ISBN 1-56649-206-8
• Ronald D. Barley: Merciless America . Die Zeit, No. 47, 1999, p. 96, online .

Web links

• Digital copies of Cotton Mather's works in the Post-Reformation Digital Library