The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (2 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page xi
published in recent years: Mason Lowance's short but thoughtful
Increase Mather
(1974), and Michael Hall's
The Last American Puritan
(1988).
12
Hall does not explain why he considers Increase the last American Puritan, but this omission is of minor importance. Hall has written a superb study that makes full use of Mather's work in manuscript as well as in print, and his account of Increase's mission to England for a new charter is especially fresh. David Levin, in
Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1702
, has provided a balanced and sympathetic account of Cotton Mather's life up through 1702. The ending year saw the publication of Mather's great
Magnalia Christi Americana
; his assessment of that work is, in a sense, the most sophisticated of a variety of subtle insights in the book.
13
Unfortunately, Levin died before he could write a second volume. The only modern full biography of Cotton Mather was published by Kenneth Silverman in 1984.
14
It is a rich and complex book, full of careful and shrewd assessments, but perhaps on occasion it is unfair to its subject. Still, it is an extraordinarily valuable book and, together with Levin's, it is indispensable to our comprehension of Cotton Mather's life.
The Mathers
appears in this edition in its original form. For the most part, its main conclusions have held up. I refer to its interpretations of Puritan mission, the "invention" of New England by Increase Mather's generation, its emphasis on the importance of Cotton Mather's millennialism, his devotion to the spirit over reason, his transformation of covenant theology, and his pietism. On this last point, Richard F. Lovelace's
The American Pietism of Cotton Mather
has added much to our knowledge.
15
The Mathers and their Puritan colleagues are rich subjects for further study. We also need modern editions of many of their works. I trust that scholars coming into the field of Puritan studies will find much to do.
ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF
OCTOBER 1998
 
Page xii
Notes
1. Kenneth Murdock,
Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926); Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Founding of Harvard College
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935),
Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936),
Builders of the Bay Colony
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930).
2. Perry Miller,
Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).
3. Perry Miller,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939) and
The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953).
4. Edmund S. Morgan,
The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England
(Boston: Boston Public Library, 1944, book form, in
More Books
, 1942); John Demos,
A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Philip J. Greven, Jr.,
Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), and
The Protestant Temperament
(New York: Knopf, 1977).
5. David D. Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York: Knopf, 1989).
6. Edmund S. Morgan,
Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea
(New York: New York University Press, 1963).
7. Robert G. Pope,
The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
8. Larzer Ziff,
The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); Edmund S. Morgan,
The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
(Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1958); Sargent Bush, Jr.,
The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adven-
Page xiii
ture in Two Worlds
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Ernest Benson Lowrie,
The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
9. Charles Lloyd Cohen,
God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); E. Brooks Holifield,
The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Philip F. Gura,
A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).
10. Sacvan Bercovitch,
The Puritan Origins of the American Self
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Harry S. Stout,
The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Stephen Foster,
The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Theodore Dwight Bozeman,
To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

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