Magnalia
Christi Americana | Cotton Mather
Overview
A history of God’s providential workings in America in the
17th century. Biographies of great Americans and an epic history of
New England. Wonders what went wrong in plan to create the Kingdom of God in
the New World.
Author and date
- Cotton
Mather (1663-1728) – wrote in 1702
- Leading
Puritan thinker
- From
one of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s leading families
- John
Cotton
- Increase
Mather (1639-1723)
- Something
of a contradiction
- Went
to Harvard at age 12 – youngest ever
- Graduates
3 years later
- Thesis:
“Hebrew vowels are of divine origin”
- 7
languages
- 3
wives and 15 children
- wrote
450 books
- promotes
public charity for poor and infirm
- supported
education of girls
- Sort
of the Ben Franklin of the 17th century
- Hard
to live in shadow of father, Increase
- Didn’t
follow him to presidency of Harvard
- Ended
up working to found Yale
- Did
follow him in the pulpit of the Second Congregational Church in Boston
- Had
a role in Salem Witch Trials
- Not
just NE, but Europe
- King
James I writes book advocating death penalty for witches
- Law
passed in 1604
- Same
in NE
- People
with illnesses such as epilepsy were denounced as witches
- Mather
writes Wonders of the Invisible World to defend existence of
witchcraft
- Also
testifies as an expert at witch trials
- But
not anti-science
- Issac
Newton – large numbers of books on astronomy
- Mather
elected member of Royal Society
- Supported
smallpox inoculation later in life, in 1721, when a smallpox epidemic
broke out in Boston
- Believed
that studying nature was a way in which to worship God
- Foreshadows
Transcendentalists
- Belief
in witchcraft was linked to his belief in afterlife and existence of
immortal soul
- Enthusiastic
witch hunter
- Wanted
to expose methods of Devil and thus benefit mankind
- His
father, Increase, returns to New England in the Autumn of 1692 and says
that the real work of the Devil is making us paranoid, back-stabbing, and
harming innocent people (old woman had been hanged)
- This
puts an end to the hysteria
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