Although Cotton Mather, the Boston divine whose career spanned the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is often cited as paradigmatic for the history of Protestantism in New England, we have not had a suitable and accessible anthology of his work until now. Mather has been taken—often selectively—to illustrate several, often contradictory, facets of what we might think of as late-stage puritanism: rigid Calvinist orthodoxy, anti-witchcraft hysteria, bourgeois moralism, imperial patriotism, proto-evangelicalism, scientific dilettantism, and Enlightenment epistemology. Smolinski and Minkema, each accomplished scholars of Mather, have admirably given readers selections that represent a full range of Mather's quite varied and, indeed, paradoxical, writings from 1681 to 1727.
This book, then, will serve well for historians who wish to gauge the mindset of an important figure in New England's intellectual and religious history, and for students who require an introduction to the ambiguities and complexities of New England Protestantism at the turn of the eighteenth century. The excerpts from Mather's vast corpus are of varied length, from diary paragraphs to a twenty-page selection from Mather's history of New England. Most remarkable is the range of issues, nicely organized into overall topics: spiritual meditations (with an engaging essay on fire), New England's history, domestic and gender matters, science, medicine (including a fascinating argument for smallpox inoculation), fiscal and monetary policies, biblical interpretation (with a surprising defense of atomism), witchcraft, enslavement of Africans, Native Americans, world missions, and millennialism.
The notes and introductions provided by the editors are salient and lucid. Although they sometimes sound an overly apologetic tone for Cotton Mather, they give plenty of reasons to dive into these texts and ponder what the New England mind was like as turn-of-the-century Protestants accommodated themselves to Britain's imperial agendas, the cosmopolitan and scientific culture of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of post-puritan forms of Protestantism such as pietism, rational religion, and proto-evangelicalism.
