Concept

Cotton Mather

Overview

Cotton Mather (; February 12, 1663 – February 15, 1728) was a Puritan clergyman and author in colonial New England, who wrote extensively on theological, historical, and scientific subjects. After being educated at Harvard College, he joined his father Increase Mather as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House in Boston, then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he preached for the rest of his life. He has been referred to as the "first American Evangelical".

A major intellectual and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped lead the successful revolt of 1689 against Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of New England appointed by King James II. Mather's subsequent involvement in the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693, which he defended in the book Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), attracted intense controversy in his own day and has negatively affected his historical reputation. As a historian of colonial New England, Mather is noted for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

Personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England, Cotton Mather unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Harvard College. After 1702, Cotton Mather clashed with Joseph Dudley, the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whom Mather attempted unsuccessfully to drive out of power. Mather championed the new Yale College as an intellectual bulwark of Puritanism in New England. He corresponded extensively with European intellectuals and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1710.

A promoter of the new experimental science in America, Cotton Mather carried out original research on plant hybridization. He also researched the variolation method of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox contagion, which he learned about from an African-American slave whom he owned, Onesimus. He dispatched multiple reports on scientific matters to the Royal Society of London, which elected him as a fellow in 1713. Mather's promotion of inoculation against smallpox caused violent controversy in Boston during the outbreak of 1721. Scientist and United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who as a young Bostonian had opposed the old Puritan order represented by Mather and participated in the anti-inoculation campaign, later described Mather's book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good (1710) as a major influence on his life.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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In the person of Cotton Mather, until recently considered a bigoted incarnation of the "Puritan spirit ... become ossified," are discovered forces which, when divorced from Puritan theology, were to become the sharpest wedges splintering the deep-rooted oak of the Old Way. These forces were the authority of reason and science. In _The Christian Philosopher_,[i-29] basing his attitude on the works of Ray, Derham…
Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
Opens on Cotton Mather; names Cotton Mather.
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This agreement lasted until 1642, and, by renewal at intervals, until 1672, when it was at length denounced; and in 1675 a quarto English Bible was printed _at the Theater_, and a beginning made of what has become an extensive and highly technical process of manufacture and distribution. Early in the eighteenth century the Press acquired, with a new habitation, a name still in very general use. The University was…
Oxford University Press, Some Account of the Oxford University Press, 1468-1921
Close in meaning to Cotton Mather; the term itself is not named.
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The royal governors found in this board ready sympathizers, and were not slow to report their grievances, and to insist upon more stringent regulations for enforcing obedience. Some of the retaliative measures employed were the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the abridgment of the freedom of the press and the prohibition of elections. But the colonists generally succeeded in having their own way in the end…
Edmund Burke, Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America
Close in meaning to Cotton Mather; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Cotton Mather

John Amos Comenius

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Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition

Part of American philosophy.

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