A Cotton Mather Reader

An authoritative selection of the writings of one of the most important early American writers

A brilliant collection that reveals the extraordinary range of Cotton Mather’s interests and contributions-by far the best introduction to the mind of the Puritan divine. -Francis J. Bremer, author of Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) has a wide presence in American culture, but very few people have ever read a significant portion of his work. The sheer volume of Mather’s corpus makes it challenging. In his sixty-five years, he was responsible for some of the most important contributions to history, medicine, and theology in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in addition to having written some 450 books and pamphlets, hundreds of sermons, and thousands of letters. This wide-ranging volume includes topical selections on autobiography and meditation; New England history; gender, childrearing, and education; natural science and medicine; mercantilism and paper money; biblical interpretation; Salem witchcraft; race, slavery, and servitude; Native Americans and captivity; and pietism, world missions, and millennialism. This reader will serve as both a reference for scholars and a textbook for students and should help bring renewed attention to this important figure.