A short life of the author
Cotton Mather was the most prolific writer, the most learned scholar, and the most powerful clergyman in colonial New England — a man who published over 400 works, who mastered seven languages, who corresponded with the leading scientists and theologians of Europe, who played a central role in the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, and whose vast Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) remains the single most important literary work produced in colonial America. He is also, after two centuries of caricature, one of the most misunderstood figures in American history — remembered primarily as a witch-hunting fanatic when the historical record reveals a far more complex and more intellectually formidable man.
The Mather Dynasty
Cotton Mather was born in Boston in 1663, the eldest son of Increase Mather and the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton — both founding ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was, in effect, Puritan royalty, born into the most powerful clerical dynasty in New England. He entered Harvard College at the age of eleven (the youngest student ever admitted) and received his MA at eighteen. He overcame a severe stutter through disciplined practice and was ordained as colleague to his father at Boston’s Second Church (North Church) in 1685, where he preached for the rest of his life.
Salem and The Wonders of the Invisible World
Mather’s role in the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 has been debated for three centuries. He did not sit on the Court of Oyer and Terminer that tried the accused witches, and he privately cautioned the judges against relying on “spectral evidence” — the testimony of accusers who claimed to see the spectral shapes of the accused tormenting them. But he enthusiastically endorsed the prosecutions in principle, attended the execution of George Burroughs (a fellow minister), and published The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), a defence of the trials that argued that Satan had launched a conspiracy against New England and that the court had acted correctly in suppressing it.
The book was attacked almost immediately by Robert Calef in More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), which portrayed Mather as a credulous fanatic. Calef’s characterisation became the dominant image of Mather for subsequent generations. Modern historians have partially rehabilitated Mather, noting that his behind-the-scenes caution was real and that his published defence was partly a political act designed to protect the new charter government of Massachusetts. But the stain of Salem has never been fully removed from his reputation.
Magnalia Christi Americana
Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702) is Mather’s masterpiece and the most ambitious work of American literature before the Revolution. Published in London in a massive folio of over 800 pages, it is a history of New England from the Puritan migration to the 1690s, organised into seven books: the settlement of New England, the lives of governors, the lives of famous ministers, the history of Harvard College, the history of the New England churches, remarkable providences and divine judgments, and the wars with Native Americans and the French.
The Magnalia is not a work of modern historiography — it is a providential history, written in the conviction that New England was a new Israel whose story revealed God’s purposes for humanity. Its prose is dense, allusive, ornate, and saturated with classical and biblical learning. It is also, despite or because of its peculiarities, a work of extraordinary literary power — a monument of Baroque prose that captures the Puritan imagination in all its grandeur and intensity.
Science and the Christian Philosopher
Mather was not merely a theologian and historian but a genuine scientist — a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1713) who wrote over eighty letters to the Society on natural phenomena. The Christian Philosopher (1721) was the first comprehensive work of popular science published in America, an attempt to reconcile the new natural philosophy of Newton and Boyle with Christian theology. During the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721, Mather championed inoculation — having learned of the practice from Onesimus, an enslaved African in his household — against fierce opposition from physicians and the public. His promotion of inoculation was one of the most consequential public health interventions in colonial American history.
Later Life
Mather’s later years were marked by personal tragedy — the deaths of two wives and thirteen of his fifteen children — and professional disappointment. He was passed over for the presidency of Harvard, a position he felt was his birthright. He died in 1728. His unpublished manuscript The Angel of Bethesda, a comprehensive medical treatise, was not published until 1972.
Collecting Mather
The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1693) and Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702, folio) are two of the most important books printed in or about colonial America. Both are rare and valuable. Mather’s more than 400 published works — sermons, treatises, pamphlets — constitute one of the largest bibliographies of any American author before the nineteenth century, and examples in original binding are eagerly collected by specialists in early American printing.