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

Abstract

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.