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While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective intervention by looking at Cotton Mather’s unpublished (1693–1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary to be authored in British North America. More specifically, the essay examines Mather’s response to critical interrogation of the canon and the Biblia’s numerous revisions of King James translation in light of recent philological scholarship. What connects these two issues is that they both concern the “givenness” of the Bible, which, in Mather’s day, was being fundamentally challenged. Behind the discussions about the canonicity of diverse books and over how to render the Hebrew and Greek texts into modern languages always lurked fundamental questions regarding the divine authority, integrity, and perspicuity of the Bible. Examining a broad range of examples from across the Biblia, the essay demonstrates how Mather’s work defies clear-cut categorization as either precritical or critical. In response to the intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment, Mather pioneered a new type of deeply learned, historically conscious but apologetically-oriented biblical criticism in America. The clearly reflects the challenges brought on by the deepening historicization of Scripture and the destabilization of texts and meanings through a new type of criticism. More widely read in current European scholarship and in many ways more curious and daring than any other early American exegete, Mather joined the infinitely complex and open-ended quest for better translations. Moreover, he was the first in New England to seriously address hard questions about the canon of the Bible and its historical development. But he always did so with the aim of providing constructive answers to these debates that would ultimately shore up the authority of Scripture, stabilize the scriptural foundation for what Mather regarded as the core of Reformed orthodox theological beliefs, and offer improved interpretations of the biblical texts, which would lend themselves even better to devotion and illuminate for Christians, with the help of the most up-to-date scholarship, the full riches of God’s Word.

In this classic work of American religious history, Robert Middlekauff traces the evolution of Puritan thought and theology in America from its origins in New England through the early eighteenth century. He focuses on three generations of intellectual ministers—Richard, Increase, and Cotton Mather—in order to challenge the traditional telling of the secularization of Puritanism, a story of faith transformed by reason, science, and business. Delving into the Mathers' private papers and unpublished writings as well as their sermons and published works, Middlekauff describes a Puritan theory of religious experience that is more creative, complex, and uncompromising than traditional accounts have allowed. At the same time, he portrays changing ideas and patterns of behavior that reveal much about the first hundred years of American life.

The theme of generational religious decline has been a staple of New England Puritan historiography. Yet while scholars have examined these issues at the larger cultural and ecclesial levels, few have looked at the small-scale manifestations of such “declension” within Puritan parent-child relationships. This article looks at Cotton Mather’s perceptions of the causes of and potential solutions for male youth waywardness in colonial New England. Attempting to provide pastoral wisdom for distressed parents in his congregation, Mather also had to deal with this issue in his own home. His rebellious son, Increase, served as a very personal example of a vexing public issue, and Mather worked hard to put his pastoral ideals into “fatherly” practice. As he confronted these challenges, Mather located the causes of male youth rebellion in the perilous nature of “youth,” the failures of Puritan parents, and the inscrutable sovereignty of God. In the end, I argue that Mather was ultimately hopeful about God’s work and purposes in the midst of youth declension. His belief in God’s providence meant that the afflictions attending youthful rebellion could be perceived as God’s means of spurring repentance and renewal, addressing parental sin, bolstering godly childrearing, and arousing youth themselves in the pursuit of righteousness.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was America's most famous pastor and scholar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. People today generally associate him with the infamous Salem witch trials, but in this new biography Rick Kennedy tells a bigger story: Mather, he says, was the very first American evangelical. A fresh retelling of Cotton Mather's life, this biography corrects misconceptions and focuses on how he sought to promote, socially and intellectually, a biblical lifestyle. As older Puritan hopes in New England were giving way to a broader and shallower Protestantism, Mather led a populist, Bible-oriented movement that embraced the new century -- the beginning of a dynamic evangelical tradition that eventually became a major force in American culture. Incorporating the latest scholarly research but written for a popular audience, The First American Evangelical brings Cotton Mather and his world to life in a way that helps readers understand both the Puritanism in which he grew up and the evangelicalism he pioneered. Watch a 2015 interview with the author of this book here:

(Williamsburg, despite the College of William and Mary's signal role in the formation of some of the early republic's founding political intellectuals, never became an intellectual capital the way Boston did.)3 Second, John K. Nelson's study of Anglican parish life in late-seventeenth-century through late-eighteenth-century Virginia argues for the robustness of its religious practice and organization, contrary to stereotypes of the Church of England as moribund and ripe for non-conformist evangelical picking during the Great Awakening, as little more than the planter class at prayer. Nelson also points out that Anglican churches in Virginia provided a variety of charitable services, including those to the acutely sick and the chronically infirm, supported by substantial and mandatory tithes.5 In our age of hyper-specialization and professionalism, the phe- nomenon of the amateur scientist-or the amateur physician-may strike us as quaint.\\n Epidemic disease for Mather provides not only an opportunity for repentant self-examination on its cause (Original Sin and the in- dividual's particular sins) but also the occasion for Christian charity.

On Martha’s Vineyard there was a particularly long-lasting Puritan mission among the Native Americans. This article examines how the clergy there attempted to apply the Puritan ideal of the “visible saints” to the converted Indians and what implications Christianity should have had for their sensory experiences and sensual forms of expression. In a first step, the normative requirements that defined Puritanism around 1700 will be explained on the basis of Cotton Mather’s theology. Dealing with death and dying served as a litmus test for a successful “change of heart.” Using the example of the promotional treatise Indian Converts (1727) by the third-generation missionary Experience Mayhew, who was active on Martha’s Vineyard, the article explores the question of how the senses of hearing and seeing were evaluated in this context. Reading this source against the grain reveals normative conflicts and ambivalences that can deepen our understanding of how coexistence was enabled and to what extent sensory agency was possible for the Native Americans. Sur l’île de Martha’s Vineyard s’est déroulée auprès des Autochtones une mission puritaine particulièrement longue. Le présent article montre comment le clergé a tenté d’appliquer l’idéal puritain des « saints visibles » aux Indiens convertis et examine les implications que le christianisme a dû avoir pour leurs expériences sensorielles et leurs formes d’expression sensuelles. Dans un premier temps, les exigences normatives qui définissaient le puritanisme vers 1700 sont expliquées à la lumière de la théologie de Cotton Mather. Faire face à la mort et à l’agonie était la condition décisive d’un « changement de cœur » réussi. En prenant pour exemple le traité promotionnel Indian Converts (1727) du missionnaire de troisième génération Experience Mayhew, qui a exercé à Martha’s Vineyard, je me penche sur la manière dont l’ouïe et la vue étaient évaluées dans ce contexte. Une lecture à contre-courant de cette source révèle des ambivalences et des conflits normatifs qui peuvent nous aider à mieux comprendre comment la coexistence a pu s’instaurer et dans quelle mesure la liberté sensorielle était possible pour les Autochtones.

This article examines Cotton Mather’s contribution to an emergent genre of early evangelical verse: scriptural poems and hymns. These compositions were scripture-derived, but they went artistically beyond poetic Psalm translations and line-by-line metrifications of biblical passages, which had been exclusively used in traditional Reformed worship. Scriptural poems and hymns first appeared in British Dissenting churches during the last third of the seventeenth century. As recent scholarship has shown, this genre of religious verse came into its own during eighteenth-century transatlantic revivals and constituted an important dimension of early evangelical culture. Mather’s compositions reveal him as a transitional figure in two eras of early evangelical poetry and hymnody. Looking back to the worship policy of his Puritan forebears, he remained committed to using only Psalms for public worship services, but he also promoted the singing of scriptural poems and hymns in the context of private gatherings. He even composed a number of original scriptural poems and hymns himself. Published in devotional tracts, these works resemble those of his English correspondent Isaac Watts. But they also reflect Mather’s experiential approach to the Bible (heavily influenced by his contacts with German Pietism) and his specific eschatological expectations for an imminent restitution of the spiritual gifts, inspiring Christian poets to compose new verse that would be appropriate for public worship. These expectations in some ways anticipate the connection between poetry and prophecy that would be articulated much later in American Romanticism.

This article examines how late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century infanticide literature embraces positive reactions to the test of cruentation–spontaneous bleeding or flushing of a corpse at the approach of a suspected killer, known as the \"blood cry\"–as a form of recovered speech. By analyzing how the infanticide sermon and other execution literature deploys the \"blood cry\" as a metonym for postmortem investigation, it demonstrates how ministers, coroners, and laypeople leveraged the forensic test to amplify the testimony and voices of the murdered deceased, including prevocal infants, and, more often than not, to displace the bodies and voices of the accused. This analysis is supported by readings of early American infanticide sermons and their conventions, primarily by the Mathers, and by contextualizing early modern medicolegal and spiritual theories of testimony, including Van Belmont's interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel as the causal basis of cruentation. The article concludes by demonstrating how one adherent to these beliefs–Patience Boston–utilized her knowledge of cruentation conventions to direct her own narrative in the public eye.

There she remained for \"diverse weeks\" under Mather's care and counsel, his impressions of her condition culminating in A Brand Pluck'd out of the Burning, a \"possession narrative\" in the tradition of the captivity narrative Increase Mather (presumably) had shaped a decade earlier for Mary Rowlandson (1682). [...] we have for Mercy Short a particular kind of text we do not have for the girls in Essex County,1 a provocative early case history, which we might read as Cotton Mather's Dora. [...] Freud writes, what is \"so characteristic of hysteria\" is the \"resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust, and morality) and what seems like an instinctive aversion on [hysterics'] part of any intellectual consideration of sexual problems\" (\"Sexual Aberrations\" 255).