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America's Gothic Fiction
The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana
Dorothy Z. Baker
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Secretary to the Salem witch trials, Cotton Mather is the most reviled of our national historians.  Yet James Russell Lowell admitted that “with all his faults, that conceited old pedant contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on this side of the water.” In America’s Gothic Fiction, Dorothy Z. Baker investigates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, look to Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana at critical moments in their work and refashion his historical accounts as gothic fiction.
 
Cotton Mather’s 1702 Magnalia captured the imagination of its readers more than any other colonial history and impressed Americans with its message of American exceptionalism and God’s dramatic intervention on behalf of the country and its citizens. Poe, Stowe, and Hawthorne, who are rarely grouped together in literary studies, have radically divergent responses to Mather’s theology, historiography, and literary forms. However, each takes up Mather’s themes and forms and, in distinct ways, interrogates the providence tales in Magnalia Christi Americana as foundational statements about American history and identity.
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Bonifacius
An Essay upon the Good
Cotton Mather
Harvard University Press

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The Christian Philosopher
Cotton MatherEdited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Winton U. Solberg
University of Illinois Press, 1994
 
Published in 1721 by the prominent Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher was the first comprehensive book on science to be written by an American.  Building on natural theology, Mather demonstrated the harmony between religion and the new science associated with Sir Isaac Newton. His survey of all the known sciences from astronomy and physics to human anatomy presented evidence that both celestial and terrestrial phenomema imply an intelligent designer.
 
Winton Solberg's introduction places Mather's treatise in its widest historical context. In addition to tracing the origins and sources of Mather's work, Solberg analyzes the book's contents, its reception, and its significance in American intellectual and cultural history. This edition affirms Mather's importance to American thought as a deeply religious intellectual who introduced the Enlightenment to America.
 
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Cotton Mather
The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 1663–1703
David Levin
Harvard University Press, 1978

The first modern biography of Cotton Mather, David Levin's narrative makes clear the development of Mather's character and experience during forty years in which he was able to identify his own personal life with the fortunes of Congregational New England. On his relationship to his eminent father, the Puritan divine and Massachusetts statesman, Increase Mather, the history and cure of his stammer, his experience as a child prodigy at Harvard, his religious conversion, his vision of an angel, his leadership in the Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts, his encounters with the Devil during the witchcraft crises in Boston and Salem—on all these matters and more, Levin's account provides new interpretations that make this permanently controversial and legendary figure accessible and comprehensible in human as well as historical terms.

It is the triumph of Levin's biography that his subject's personal and literary lives are more closely woven into the fabric of the political history of his place and time than in any previous study. Mather's character, though seen sympathetically, develops in a narrative that deliberately avoids the constraints of prosecution and defense.

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Magnalia Christi Americana
Books I and II
Cotton Mather
Harvard University Press, 1977


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