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“What Went You Out into the Wilderness to See?”: Nonconformity and Wilderness in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Ursula Brumm
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Extract

By the end of the seventeenth century, the beginnings of the new world were already history. They found their historian in Cotton Mather, one of the original settlers' most prominent descendants. Mather is an important source for our understanding of that early period, but for a long time his principal role has been that of the ugly Puritan. He was, as a third-generation Mather and a representative of the Puritan establishment at the end of the seventeenth century, an irritation and an annoyance to his contemporaries. Posterity has gathered together all its charges against Puritans in general and heaped them on his head. Mather seems in fact to have been well qualified for the scapegoat's role: ambitious and sensitive, vain and extraordinarily diligent, greatly learned and fond of showing it, all the while acutely conscious of his reputation and eager for the admiration of his contemporaries. All these traits have been so many points of attack for his critics and despisers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 6 , October 1981 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

NOTES

1. David Levin investigates the development of this ugly and unpleasant image of Mather in “The Hazing of Cotton Mather,” in In Defense of Historical Literature (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), pp. 34–57Google Scholar; see also, by the same author, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer 1663–1703 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).Google Scholar An older but still useful account of Mather's life is Wendell, Barrett, Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, with a new introduction by Heimert, Alan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963).Google Scholar

2. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Cotton Mather,” in Emerson, Everett, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), pp. 93–149.Google Scholar

3. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

4. See Van Cromphout, Gustaaf, “Cotton Mather as Plutarchan Biographier,” American Literature, 46 (1974–1975): 465–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. All quotations from the Magnalia Christi Americana have been taken from the second edition (Hartford, Conn.: Andrus, 1820).Google Scholar Parenthetical and bracketed references are to pages in that edition. All italics in original.

6. John Cotton's dismissal is described in Mather's life of him as a “thing little short of martyrdom” (p. 241).Google Scholar

7. Cf. Seaver, Paul S., The Puritan Lectureship. The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

8. “He afterwards gave this account of himself, That in the time of his agonies, he could reason himself to the rule, and conclude that there was no way but submission to God. and lying at the foot of his mercy in Christ Jesus, and waiting humbly there, till he should please to perswade the soul of his favour: nevertheless when he came to apply this rule unto himself in his own condition, his reasoning would fail him, he was able to do nothing” (p. 303).

9. Bercovitch, , “Cotton Mather,” p. 143.Google Scholar

10. See below.

11. See Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origin of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 133.Google Scholar

12. See Carroll, Peter N., Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, and George H. Williams's introductory essay, “The Idea of the Wilderness of the New World in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana” in Murdock, K. B., ed., Cotton Mather: Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 49–58.Google Scholar

13. That is, John Cotton, John Norton, John Wilson, John Davenport, and Thomas Hooker.

14. Cf. “The flock of my pasture are men” (Ezek. 34:31), “Feed the flock of God” (1 Pet. 5:2), and “Who fed you in the wilderness with manna” (Deut. 8:16).

15. Mather uses it in several forms; see, for example, pp. 213, 217, 228, 275, 422.

16. Cf., for example, I, 223, 257, 261, 336.

17. I cannot agree with Busch, Frieder, Natur in der Neuen Welt (Munich: Fink, 1974), p. 44Google Scholar, in reducing Bradford's account of nature to a concept of theology.

18. See Busch, , Natur in der Neuen Welt, Chaps. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

19. The phrase in Deuteronomy 32:10 “waste howling wilderness” has not been explained, so far as I know. Luther, refers to dürre Einöde, in der es heultGoogle Scholar (“a bleak solitary place, where howling is heard”). Whether the howling is that of the woods, the wild animals, or the wilderness itself is not made clear.

20. See Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 36.Google Scholar

21. “Poise” here evidently is used in the sense of “weight” (Oxford English Dictionary, sv I, 1).Google Scholar

22. See Jung, C. G., “Christus, ein Symbol des Selbst,” Aion: Beiträge zur Symbolik des Selbst: Gesammelte Welke. Translated by Lawrence Rosenwald 9/II, ed. Jung-Merkur, Lilly and Rüf, Elisabeth (Olten und Freiburg: Walter Verlag, 1976), pp. 46–80.Google Scholar