New Light on Cotton Mather

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

KYLE ROBERTS: My name is Kyle Roberts, and I’m the Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives.

Welcome to today’s virtual discussion, “New Light on Cotton Mather.” It is so wonderful to have so many of you joining us virtually today. I would say that Cotton Mather is a perennial favorite here at the Congregational Library.

To begin with, I want to acknowledge that the Congregational Library & Archives resides in what is now known as Boston, which is in the Place of the Blue Hills, the homeland of the Massachusett people, whose relationships and connections with the land continue to this day and into the future.

For those of you joining us for the first time, the Congregational Library & Archives is an independent research library. Established in 1853, the CLA’s mission is to foster a deeper understanding of the spiritual, intellectual, civic, and cultural dimensions of the Congregational story and its ongoing relevance in the 21st century.

We do this through free access to our research library of 225,000 books, pamphlets, periodicals, and manuscripts—and I should note a large collection of printed material by the Mathers—as well as our digital archive, which has more than 100,000 images, many drawn from our New England’s Hidden Histories project.

Throughout the year, we offer educational programs and research fellowships for students and scholars, churches, and anyone interested in the history of Congregationalism’s influence on the American story.

Please do check our website, congregationallibrary.org, to learn more about what we do and for news of forthcoming events.

So let me now go ahead and bring up my colleague, Dr. Tricia Peone, who is the new Project Director for New England’s Hidden Histories. Tricia is gonna be our moderator today, and she’s going to take it from here. Thanks so much, Tricia.

TRICIA PEONE: Thanks, Kyle.

So New England’s Hidden Histories is a digital project of the Congregational Library & Archives, which preserves and provides access to early New England church records. These records provide endlessly fascinating information, as well as context about communities that can help us to understand the lives of people in early New England.

I want to quickly highlight some of our materials related to today’s program.

On our website, you’ll find an annotated bibliography of Cotton Mather resources.

And I’m also delighted to share that we’ve just digitized some new Cotton Mather manuscript materials from the Mather Family Papers at the American Antiquarian Society as part of our New England’s Hidden Histories Project. These include some of his sermons, several of his sermon notebooks from the 1690s, and two volumes of his “Quotidiana.” And these things were not previously available online. So it’s an exciting new resource, and you can find them by searching for Cotton Mather on the New England’s Hidden Histories main page.

So it is a pleasure to introduce our speakers today, and we’ll bring them up now, too.

Dr. Reiner Smolinski is a professor of English at Georgia State University, and he’s the general editor of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana. And Dr. Ken Minkema is editor of “The Works of Jonathan Edwards” and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.

And so, Reiner, thank you for joining us today. And I’d like to just ask you to start by telling us a bit about the project and a bit about the Cotton Mather Reader and perhaps some of your favorite selections of texts.

REINER SMOLINSKI: All right. Thank you very much for these wonderful introductions.

And let me, you know, address my thanks, first of all, to Kyle Roberts, and Tricia Peone, and Jennifer Banks from Yale University Press, the senior executive editor, and, of course, my co-editor and friend, Ken Minkema.

This project started in many respects a long, long time ago, more than 20 years, when I first conceived of the idea of the impossibility of the, let’s call that… idiocy, perhaps, of turning to Biblia Americana as a possible source for research material to be edited.

And out of this whole project of looking for co-editors and volume editors, Ken Minkema, Jan Stievermann, and a whole bunch of others who will, whose names will appear a little later on the screen, joined me in 2010 to edit the various volumes of the Biblia Americana. And they’re ten volumes all together conceived.

Biblia Americana, America’s, Colonial America’s… I should say, English Colonial America’s first comprehensive commentary on all books of the Bible, contains about 3 million words, indeed, 3 million words… more than that, actually. And is going to be finished in 2026 when all ten volumes will have been published.

To date, seven volumes have appeared, and they’re all around 1000 pages of print each. So that in itself might give you some sort of foretaste of what this Biblia Americana, Cotton Mather’s mighty work, was all about.

I should say that related to Biblia Americana, of course, the idea of how do we make this material available to interested readers? And this is how the idea of the reader came up.

We know, of course, about Cotton Mather and all of the poor press he has been receiving over the years. And in many respects, this is what kept him alive in the minds of historians and certainly even college educated individuals.

But how does one best give the uninitiated readers a sense of the spectrum of issues Mather dealt with, apart from and beyond the common and perennially interesting discussion of witchcraft?

And this is where our reader came in, where we felt we need to show what Mather indeed accomplished and how widely he spread his ideas and works that are still of interest today, perhaps even more so again of interest today thinking of COVID-19 and the Boston, Massachusetts smallpox inoculation crisis almost to the date of 300 years earlier–what is it? 200? 300 years earlier?

So here we see in many respects how a reader, such as the one we have conceived of, is really targeting an audience that wants to see how Mather goes beyond the standard sort of insights.

And I think I should now pass on the baton to Ken Minkema.

KEN MINKEMA: Thank you, Reiner. Thank you very much.

I suppose it might be of use to kind of balance out what Reiner was saying with kind of my own personal journey to Mather, if you want to put it that way.

You may know, many in the audience may know me as the editor of the “Jonathan Edwards Papers.” And it was in the course of my dissertation work in the 1980s that I first engaged with Cotton Mather, and his father Increase to some extent, but mostly Cotton through the work with the Edwards. And to my surprise, I found out that nearly a quarter of their family library consisted of titles by the Mathers, and yet they hardly ever anywhere actually cited the Mathers.

And I think this was maybe kind of indicative because the Mathers were so ubiquitous that they hardly needed to be cited in order for people to know that they were, in fact, being referenced in some way or alluded to in some way or another. And that included the Edwards.

And so, I found that endlessly, endlessly fascinating. And I continued to explore Cotton Mather. He stands as a representative of his time and place, but he also kind of stands apart. And kind of the erudition that he achieved. And I think the observatory powers that he had.

So he’s this very interesting window into that particular culture. But he stands alone, too, as this fascinating, absolutely fascinating personality.

His personal life itself is… it’s interesting to see how he examined himself, presented himself, but also the arc of his family life and so forth, the seemingly endless number of activities.

And I don’t know how this guy could… would manage to compress so much work into a single day. It’s quite, quite amazing.

And the perspectives that he provides. We tended to see him more, well, for the most part, more local and provincial. But I think with the turn in, away from meta narrative and grand narratives, we now see him in a much larger international perspective, just as the town in which he lived, Boston. We’re seeing that now in different kinds of imperial contexts.

So I remember, still remember Reiner, that email I sent to you way back when saying, “You know, I’m kind of interested in this, and would you be able to use my services?” And your, “Yes, yes, please!”

And so I had the, I had the great, great pleasure of working for and with Reiner on one of the volumes of the Biblia Americana. And then we’ve subsequently been going on into doing other things, particularly the “Curiosa Americana,” which are Mather’s letters to the Royal Society in London from 1712 to 1724.

And what this work has shown me is these very, this very different side of Mather than what we traditionally think of him as. Not just the witchcraft stuff. Yeah, I mean, there’s that… but, but other things as well, what we have stereotyped Mather as.

And this, these things show a very different side of him as this endless, endless curiosity that he had. The again, the very acute observatory powers that he had. His ability as a chronicler, and as an examiner, and so forth. So these were just some of the things that intrigued me and continue to intrigue me about Mather, and I look forward to talking more about these and other things as we hear from the audience.

TRICIA: So we’re getting a bunch of great questions already, but I wanted to start with one.

You’ve, you’ve talked about this a bit. But I want to just dig in a little bit deeper because we know that the way that many people know about Mather is probably just through the Salem witch trials, right?

So let’s just dig into how his reputation has changed over time.

If that’s the incident that he is most famous for, still today probably most closely associated with, how has his reputation changed over time? What were the opinions of his contemporaries? Was he concerned about his own reputation? In what ways was he concerned about it?

And what is this reassessment that you’ve, you’ve alluded to? What has shifted in the way we understand him? And then, you know, what’s shifted in the way we understand how he understood these things, like you’ve already mentioned: witchcraft, science or natural philosophy, slavery, so much?

REINER: Yes, Salem witchcraft is perennially interesting, especially during Halloween. And anyone who watches television, especially ghoulish kind of movies dealing with the supernatural.

It’s very interesting, though, that the bad reputation that Mather received over the two centuries following was really not in existence during his own time period.

Yes, of course, Robert Calef published this sort of comic, highly critical, More Wonders of the Invisible World, alluding to Mather’s witchcraft book, Wonders of the Invisible World. But after that hubbub was over, you know, there was really silence and everyone spoke of him very highly—certainly the clergy throughout New England.

Interestingly enough, even those who were about to be executed in Salem, and this is, I think in August 8, 1693, this was the only time that Cotton Mather attended any of the executions. Those who were about to be hanged, eight altogether, asked him for prayers, and support, and, and showed their liking for him, not blaming him at all. And that, I thought, was very interesting.

So for a long time, I think things were quiet about Mather’s reputation, until the early 19th century, when American historians began to rediscovery the past… rediscover the past. This is natural during the early Republic when historians suddenly realize, oh my gosh, the colonial period is over.

And one of the first ones to really gear up interest and stir up interest was Charles Upham, the Rev. Charles Upham of Salem, Massachusetts, who was also running for public office in the statehouse and subsequently in Washington, DC. And he published his famous lectures on Salem in 1823, which aroused tremendous interest.

Even Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared and listened to him. By the way, Hawthorne called Upham “that unctuous man of God.” Well, that says it all, I suppose.

So following, of course, his famous lectures, where he singled out Cotton Mather as being the principal orchestrator and advocate, the Witchfinder General, so to speak, that was enhanced by Upham’s two volume Salem Witchcraft, 1867. A humongous thing.

Long story short, George Bancroft, our all mighty George Bancroft—and I found passages that he verbatim lifted, or a very close paraphrase to Upham’s lectures–that became part of George Bancroft’s ten volume, 20 times reprinted edition of American History.

From there, of course, once, you know, the negative view of Mather as the witch doctor had spread, Emma Willard, the famous American educator, especially for women, who wrote a very popular history of American… of America that became sort of a school book version of it. And her book was adopted by many school and educational boards throughout the United States.

And was very interesting, of course, how she focused in on the accusations. And at the bottom of her text, which was then copied by many others, the students were to rehearse the materials through a question and answers. How many people did Cotton Mather lead to execution? And a right answer, wrong answer. That sort of school book approach became popular all the way… Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous educator, and I think he was also a Supreme Court member, derided Cotton Mather. I should add that Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes was also a medical doctor. He had looked into Mather’s medical handbook, in manuscript at the time, The Angel of Bethesda, and ridiculed him for, you know, the homeopathic kind of material that was as outlandish as anything puritanism had ever developed, so to speak.

I should then also point out very briefly, before I hand over to Ken, that the famous controversy in the 1805 to 1825-35 period, the controversy in Congregationalist circles that ultimately split the Orthodox from the Unitarians, the famous Wood and Ware controversy over orthodoxy versus liberalism, centering on the issue of Arianism, meaning is Jesus Christ part of the Trinity? Or was Jesus Christ essentially a human, a human being—at best, a savior for all–but a human being, not God as such?

And we know, of course, that this controversy over three, four decades, that it included Ralph Waldo Emerson as well, led to all sorts of conflicts in the Congregationalist churches of New England, leading to splits within these churches so that the Unitarians were forming their own, by definition, their own ideology, or shall I call that their own dogmas?

And the Orthodox, mostly under Jedediah Morris and Stewart Morris, I believe, and various others were, you know, founding Amherst, not Amherst College, but Andover Seminary, because Harvard had been taken over, the theology department had been taken over by the Unitarians, with Henry Ware being the first candidate as a Unitarian to the Hollis Chair of Theology, famously endowed chair.

And so the Orthodox under Jedidiah Morris founded Andover Seminary and subsequently Amherst College as well, was founded as a conservative institution as a reaction to the Unitarians.

So I mean, having said that, I should then give my dear friend and co-editor a chance to talk about Perry Miller and all the sins that the doyen, the dean of American colonial history perpetrated and how that affected Mather’s reputation for ever and ever, so to speak.

KEN: Yes, not, not just Perry Miller, the famous Harvard historian, but his colleagues as well, with some exceptions, were pretty consistent… in dismissing Mather as this kind of repressive, retro, retrograde, medieval kind of figure who had no place in kind of a modern, progressive, democratic America.

That leaves aside, though, many of the, these activities and, and pastimes that Mather engaged in. Of course, his primary role was as a preacher and a pastor.

And I think one thing that doing this reader has impressed upon me is how significant that role was for him. He saw himself primarily as a pastor and a preacher, and he was hugely popular.

One thing we say in the introduction is that before there was George Whitfield, who could attract thousands of people, there was Cotton Mather. And whenever Cotton ventured outside of Boston on one of his preaching tours, thousands of people would come to hear him, and they would often demand another sermon from him. They wouldn’t let him leave.

That is an indication of, I think, the… how, how attractive he was as a speaker. He was incredibly witty. He had all of this knowledge at his command. He was a wonderful conversationalist. That’s one thing that his… caught… his acquaintances impressed upon us. And he brings us over into his public delivery and into his personal life, into his pastoral life, and into his acquaintance in some fascinating ways.

So what gets lost in the whole translation of Mather from his own time through the 19th and into the 20th century… We lose that sense of Mather as pastor preacher. We lose that sense of Mather as the scholar, who, as far as we can tell, read nearly everything that had been published, or at least everything he could get his hands on at a time when that was still possible to read everything that was printed.

The Biblical commentary, the commentator, the philosopher, he has an entire volume on the Christian philosopher. He’s a reformer, engaged in countless reform activities in which he often takes the lead.

He’s an ecumenist as well. He’s reaching out to representatives of other Protestant movements to try to establish contact with them and to coordinate activities.

So his reach, his depth, I think, and his influence on, on his time, he really helped make Boston, he helped to put Boston on the map in some senses.

But that part of it, that part of his contribution really was downplayed and lost. And I think it’s only now that we’re beginning to get this back and get a reappraisal of Mather.

This reappraisal, you know, began several decades ago, we can argue, with books like Robert Middlekauff’s, multi-generational study of the Mathers, and Kenneth Silverman’s award-winning biography of Cotton Mather, and so forth.

And new generations of scholars, like Reiner and others, have kind of taken up that gantlet and have carried it forward. And so we’re beginning to see again some of these lost, these lost attributes of Mather. And as a result, some of these, really these lost influences of Mather.

Of course, there’s, you know, he’s… no, nobody’s perfect. And that is certainly true of Mather. And, you know, he’s… in terms of reputation, you know, he had some concern for his reputation. You know, he was publishing all that, those works and putting himself out there. And yet at the same time, he’s remarkably self-effacing. So he’s, he’s at once kind of the most selfless person you could meet, but also in some ways the most selfish person you could meet.

You know, he has these human tensions within him that we all have. But in the case of Mather, they’re all on display because they’re in his writings, and they’re in his personal writings that have since been published. And so they’re kind of all there for us to see, and to engage with, and to try to understand this very complex, very complex individual.

TRICIA: Those are, those are tremendous answers.

I want to mention, too, that we have recently digitized his “Curiosa Americana.” But they’re very interesting to read for anyone interested in history of science.

So a couple of… we got some wonderful questions already coming in, and a couple of them are revolving around the same theme.

So I’m gonna put this question to you first, which is: How did you make your selections for the reader? And someone asks: Was there much that you left out that you wanted to include? And how did you make those choices? How did you narrow it down?

And then, also just, how is this, how is, how were your choices reflecting this reassessment of of Mather and his work?

REINER: Yeah, I think there was twice as much material that I would have liked to include than that actually did make it into our Mather reader. And I want to thank Ken for, you know, holding my reins, so to speak, and cutting out all those things which I had implanted into this idea. But you know, it had to be cut down to a manageable size that was cost effective.

So we were interested most definitely in women. How did Mather portray women? Did he put them down? Or indeed, as we found and included in our selection here, he was very outspoken to advocate education of women.

By education, I’m not just talking about reading and writing, but indeed in the sciences, in medicine. He had, one of his daughters studied medicine for homeopathic reasons, obviously.

So we knew, of course, that the COVID issue was very much on people’s minds. How did the United States people react at the time when COVID was out there? People going hysterical, and certainly the… what, 1721 smallpox inoculation crisis became a major issue by way of comparing this with what Mather did 300 years ago and what we did in the same sort of hysterical kind of response to things.

We were of course, interested in historical aspects. His Magnalia Christi Americana has natural philosophy. And there I’m very much interested in how he re-read the creation account in Genesis 1, the mosaic creation accounts, through atomistic prisms. By way of explaining this, not in terms of first, second, third, but rather he tried to use Cartesian mechanism and Lucretian materialism as a way of explaining how the divinity, how God might have created and formed the Earth and the, the constellation of the stars through atomistic conglomerations. And that I found mind boggling for someone who is a clergyman who wants to emphasize the authority of the Bible and its accuracy.

Mercantilism was an interesting thing as well in terms of the value of money. Inflation. How do they keep inflation down? Mather was one of the individuals who advocated the introduction of paper money when there wasn’t enough hard currency– the Spanish pieces of eight, the silver coin–available anymore.

Certainly slavery. He has much to say on slavery. Interestingly, unlike many of his peers in the 19th century and even his contemporaries, he denied that Noah cursed Ham, or Canaan, rather, and that Africans are descended of a cursed individual… Or that, let me back up here for a moment… that race or skin color is a result of that curse. He said, no, that’s wrong. That’s that’s not at all. That’s a misreading of the Bible. And he explained this through concepts of climate, of heat, its impact on the skin, on the scar of skin. And so that was an important element. He brings in science to discuss racial differences.

Another aspect, and we have this included here as well, is his international missions, going as far as India. Corresponding with August Hermann Francke of Halle, Germany, the Pietists. And he advocated a union between Lutherans, Baptists, Congregational puritans, Presbyterians, Anglicans on the basis of three principal major issues: the Trinity, Christ as Savior, and do unto others as you would like to have done to yourself.

In other words, he was trying to cut through the sectarian divisions and unite the major Protestant denominations in Europe and America under the one umbrella of his three maxims of piety. Putting aside all the other minor issues that are individually important to congregations, but not really contributing to the whole concept of a universal Protestant, international, so to speak.

So well, yeah, this is, these are some of the things that led us to include material pertaining to these subjects.

And his attitude toward Native Americans, which was not one of the most positive, needless to say, considering that he experienced Indian warfare, especially King Philip’s War, and then King… Queen Anne’s War, where the French Indians were involved as well.

He had firsthand experience. His cousin was abducted by one of the Indian tribes. And he was privy to Mary Rowlandson when she was retrieved, or her freedom having been purchased. Mary Rowlandson stayed at Increase and Cotton Mather’s home at the time after they returned. So he had firsthand experience with all of those things.

So Ken and I felt we need to show what, what’s out there, the vast amount of knowledge, and history, and scientific understanding he brought to bear on his writings.

Ken, I’m sure I’ve left out many important things that you would add onto this.

KEN: Well, just briefly, for the sake of getting more questions for us.

Doing a reader presents its challenges, as Reiner has laid out, and especially when you have a writer who’s produced so much. Mather printed over 400 separate titles. It’s massive. I think, that’s the most before Isaac Asimov. Am I correct about that, or something like that? The most of any of an American author before Asimov. And then he left, you know, a massive manuscript, many manuscript materials behind as well. And so to try to distill all of that, it was a real process.

And, you know, there are several criteria you have to bring to that.

First of all, you have to find, we had to find selections that were representative of Mather’s overall thought, but one… but selections that brought that together, that distilled as much as possible within the space of a few pages.

Another criteria might have been to just… a unique document, something that may not be so, “representative.” But that’s just really important for its own sake, because it’s… it is such a unique and important statement.

So I think, for instance, of his address, of his declaration in 1688, upon the arrest of the hated Edmund Andros, the royally appointed governor. And the local leaders placed him under arrest upon word of the Glorious Revolution in England and the ascension of William and Mary to the throne.

And they needed someone to speak on their behalf to justify what they had done. They chose Cotton Mather. And Mather wrote out the declaration. And he delivered it on the steps of the Boston Town House.

And it’s, in many ways, it’s, it’s kind of a precursor to the Declaration of Independence. Because it lists… it’s a list of grievances, just like the Declaration was. It’s quite, it’s quite remarkable.

So those are some of the criteria that we bring to that.

I should also acknowledge we had the help of some very hard working students to help us go through all of these pieces. And I want to particularly named Griffin Black and Andy Junkno, who at that time were students at Yale Divinity School, for helping us out.

So thanks if you’re watching, Griffin and Andy. Thank you very much.

Next question, I think.

TRICIA: Okay, so we’ve got tons of questions. I’m gonna ask you two at once.

Reiner, one just quick one for you is… three people so far have asked for more information about the biography you’re working on, on Cotton Mather.

And I know this is hard to put someone on the spot, but a potential completion date? Publication date?

REINER: You shouldn’t ask a question that puts me on the spot.

TRICIA: I know. It’s hard, but we’ve got three people who asked that question.

REINER: I’m breaking out in sweat here… listening to this.

I’m working on this very hard and steadily, and it’s coming along. And I do plan to stick by the deadline for submitting the manuscript in January of next year. And that’s all I can say at this stage.

There is so much material that I need to condense into a relatively short biography of only about 160,000 words. And to do justice to this.

But worst of all, or best of all, perhaps to compete with the likes of Kenneth Minkema, my goodness, who am I to, you know, even fathom this? I mean, Kenneth Minkema has written a biography which is going to last for a long time.

And how can I beat this in 160,000 words, which is about 300 pages, to his nearly 550 pages?

KEN: Silverman?

REINER: Sir?

KEN: You mean Silverman?

REINER: Silverman.

KEN: Yeah, not me. Not me. Silverman.

REINER: Yeah. Kenneth Silverman, of course. Yes.

So I’m working on it, and I’m enjoying every minute. It’s sort of a delightful discovery process.

And so 2024 is what I’m aiming for. And, you know, cross my heart, and my fingers, and all of that.

TRICIA: Good. We’ll ask everyone to stay tuned, and we’ll have you back then for a discussion.

REINER: Okay. Very good.

TRICIA: Can’t get enough Cotton Mather.

And we’ve gotten several historiographical questions, so I’m going to, Ken I’ll put this first to you. I’m gonna read you two questions, and you can take them in whatever order you like.

So Michael writes, many years ago, I read The Last American Puritan, written about Cotton’s father, Increase. What’s your take on how Cotton was different than his father and how the culture in New England was changing at the time in regards to Michael Hall’s idea about the end of puritanism?

And then similarly, a question about… another historiographical question about Kenneth Silverman’s Mather biography, describing him as the American gargoyle. And do you do you hope that books like the Cotton Mather Reader will help to mend his reputation?

KEN: Michael Hall’s biography of Increase Mather, I think, still stands as the, as the best. And so if anyone is interested in the audience in reading a… reading about Increase Mather, that’s an excellent work to go consult. What?

But then there’s always The Last American Puritan. Oh, that’s an interesting claim to make. Jonathan Edwards has been also characterized as the last American puritan.

But as far as Cotton Mather is concerned, I think you can see him as a very transitional figure. And we’ve tried to emphasize this through, even just today, as you… I hope you pick that up, that in the course of his life, he is, I think, really widening and changing his focus in the development of the maxims of piety, and his widening correspondence network, and in his ecumenism, and so forth.

And so if Cotton is no longer a puritan, I mean, let’s face it, by the time he came of age, you know, puritanism as a political experiment was over and done with. But as a religious culture, of course, it endured. And Cotton Mather very much embodied and brought that forward.

But he also signifies how that culture was changing and adapting to new times and new demands, including religious pluralism, including changing political conditions. That’s another topic we could talk about: Mather’s political involvements and his hatred of the Dudleys and all of that, but that might be too much of a sidebar.

So all of these things come together to show how really in his time, in his person almost, Mather is a representative person for these changes in, in puritanism.

TRICIA: The next question is from Stephanie, and she asks: Can you elaborate… I think, Ken I think this was you… can you elaborate what you meant when you said Mather was simultaneously self-effacing and selfish? Can you give an example?

KEN: Oh, boy. Well I’ll ask for Reiner to help here, too, because I’m sure he has many right to hand.

But, you know, Mather had this fascinating kind of tendency to want to be involved in everything. And yet, when you read the personal writings, you know, he would come from the person, from the public sphere and all this involvement, and then he would come home to his diary and he would he would just, you know, execrate him… He would just lambast himself for that.

So there’s these constant shifts, these highs and lows in how he did.

So he would, he would be all involved in public activity and in recognition and so forth. But then he comes home, and it kind of comes crashing in on him, and he has to face that.

And before his God, right? He’s usually meditating or, or conversing with his God and trying to come to terms with that, you know, and he recognizes his pride and wants to abase himself. And, you know, he rolls on the floor of the study and, and all of that, and in his shame and this attempt to humiliate himself.

So this constant back and forth in that.

Maybe, you know, Reiner, I’ll send that over to you. Maybe you can talk…

REINER: Very briefly, I think the problem with Mather’s reputation, in part, modern reputation, is that he wrote the largest colonial diary of roughly 1200, 1500 pages of print and an autobiography, which was recently published.

And Mather was honest to himself. He didn’t lie to himself. So today we go to a psychiatrist or shrink to unburden ourselves of whatever problems emotional and otherwise we encounter. Mather had his diary for that and his autobiography. And this is where he recorded it.

And this is the point. This was private material, not meant for public consumption.

Now, we today, since the early 20th century, have access to his thoughts, his most intimate fears and anxieties, sexual desires, when he, his second wife has died, and he’s worried that he might be tempted and all of that.

And, of course, this is something that modern historians go for, right? Here he is, and here’s the proof, right? So, you know, Mather was honest to himself. He didn’t lie to himself.

And yet, I feel there is a human heart beating when I read his material, which shows that he is conscious of his flaws and wanting to do better.

TRICIA: Reiner, I’m gonna direct this next question to you because you were talking about Mather’s opinions on race. And so we’ve got a couple of questions.

One is, if you could speak more about what was Mather’s understanding of slavery and how he justified that?

And also a question from Nicholas. If there’s… if we’ve got any more information, has more information come to light within recent research about the enslaved people, the people that Mather himself enslaved in his household?

REINER: Right. This is, of course, a fascinating sort of question and topic. And Mather wrote several documents on the issue of slavery.

Briefly, he was a man of his time. Slavery, indentured servitude of various types, were part and parcel of the world in which he lived. We should remember that slavery wasn’t abolished in America until 1864-65, right?

So, we should therefore be very careful how we from a 21st century perception, we look at the colonial period in which slavery, indentured servitude, a hierarchical structure of society—the lower ones kowtowing toward the upper ones—was customary, was accepted, was expected.

Long story short, he looked at the biblical evidence and argued that, Africans are not cursed by God, as is claimed and as it has been argued.

He had two African servants at different times in his home as personal servants. Onesimus is one of the… the most famous one.

He allowed his slaves to purchase their own freedom, educated them in reading and writing, and most of all wanted to bring them to a conversion. I think the Onesimus was, if I’m not mistaken, a member, a full member of his church as well.

That said, he also condemned wholeheartedly in public and from… in his sermons of the abuse that Africans, Native American servants as well, were subjected to. He frequently said, you treat your slaves worse than you treat your animals.

And he had a long debate, even with Samuel Sewell, of course, who is known for his “The Selling of Joseph,” which is frequently hailed as the issue of… well, look at this abolitionism as early as 1700s.

But Mather was right there. He called slavery “man stealing.” He wasn’t opposed to slavery as a concept, meaning servitude, but he was opposed to having ships sent to Africa, giving gifts to local kings and tribesmen, who then sell their neighbors into slavery. And then they’re being shipped to America. He called that man stealing. And he outright condemned this.

But again, we need to remember, he was a man of his time. He was not a follower of Martin Luther King or the abolitionist movement in the modern sense. And this is the most difficult thing that many students have in my classes, I experience, to understand. We cannot put ourselves into that time period.

Having said that, boy, he… As a matter of fact, one thing… he blamed Joseph. You know, the famous Joseph of his miracle coat in, among the Egyptians, for having actually introduced slavery based on forcing individuals to sell themselves into servitude in Egypt because of the starvation period in which the Bible… about which the Bible speaks.

So he was a man of his time, but he was also… Ken, would you agree?

KEN: Yes. Yes.

At the same time, it’s important to point out that we can’t exonerate. We shouldn’t try to exonerate him.

REINER: Oh, no, no.

KEN: Cause there were… because there were people during his lifetime who did not own slaves and who opposed slavery in all forms, right?

So he had, he had that witness there, you know, he knew about it and he confronted it.

REINER: That’s right.

KEN: But he still held, that enslaving persons was biblically ordained and legal under the current system. So it’s part of the truth, the hard truth and all the sad truth of Mather and of his times.

And as time went on, there was much more of a… as Reiner was pointing out, much more of a witness against enslavement and for abolition.

REINER: That’s right.

KEN: And those voices grow. Those voices grow both amongst African Americans, first of all, and then also amongst white thinkers as well, and activists. So…

REINER: If I may quickly add, he established a free school for Africans, paid for out of his own pocket. So that in itself speaks highly. And this free school for Africans also included Native Americans in as far as he could conceive of that at the time.

TRICIA: Are you saying then that Samuel Sewell and Cotton Mather were almost on the same page?

REINER: I wouldn’t say so simply because Samuel Sewell, even though he was known for his “The Selling of Joseph,” did engage in the slave trade.

I found a reference in one of the magazines, newspapers of the time, where Samuel Sewell, the son was offering slaves for sale.

So, you know, is it idiosyncratic? Yes, it is.

So they were in some respects on the same page, but it’s not a decision I can make. You know, each person has to read the material for him or herself to come to a, an understanding.

TRICIA: In the 2 minutes we’ve got left, I’ll ask you both a final question, and I’ll open it up to both of you to answer as quickly as possible.

What are the most compelling areas of Mather’s work that are as yet left still under-researched? And that Scott’s question.

REINER: This Is the first volume of Biblia Americana. The first of ten volumes, seven have been published so far, and we have here Cotton Mather’s commentary on all books of the Bible.

What is interesting here is trying to reconcile science, natural science, with religion.

He is not fully persuaded of miracles the way they are presented in the Bible. So he provides, shall I call that naturalistic kind of explanations for them? He covers all aspects of the Bible that were current at the time, and I can highly recommend this to anyone who’s interested in seeing the tremendous material that Mather invested in this project.

Not the Magnalia Christi Americana was his most popular or beloved work. But Mather himself says it is Biblia Americana that is my most important work.

And it is now being made public by Mohr Siebeck, a publisher in Germany, in Tübingen. And here are the ten volumes and the various editors who have been involved in this, most notably, of course, Ken Minkema and Jan Stievermann, who has been instrumental in helping us draw financial support for the project.

Ken?

KEN: I suppose a couple other areas that could be…

Now we mentioned that we’re editing the “Curiosa Americana,” and so hopefully that’ll appear in the not too distant future. And we look forward to people being able to read and use that.

A couple of other manuscript sources that Reiner points out in the introduction to the reader, I think would be the “Quotidiana,” which Trish mentioned earlier as having just been digitized.

And I think the sermons. Now, we haven’t really… I just kind of circled back to my emphasis on Mather as a preacher.

We haven’t… we can just study his sermons as perhaps showing his involvement in this or that cause, but we haven’t really kind of appreciated Mather as, as a preacher and the homoletician. And perhaps that and other approaches can be encouraged when, when and if we can gather his sermons together and make them available in some form.

Yeah, just a thought.

REINER: This is Amy Freed’s comic presentation, “Safe in Hell,” 2005 at the Yale Repertory Theater.

Now, though, this is meant as a criticism of Mather, the witchcraft doctor. Yet Mather was a fiery preacher. And this is, I think, what this image does capture as well. So, yes, Ken, he was a first-rate preacher.

I’ve never been… I’ve read more than 400 of his published sermons. I’ve never been bored, but once. And that happened to be my own writing, so.

[Laughter]

KEN: Okay.

TRICIA: Thank you both very much for your time this afternoon. I think that was a great discussion, and I hope we’ve left people with something to think about, about Cotton Mather. And we thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you to Reiner, and Ken, and to everyone in the audience. Thank you for your wonderful questions.