A Cotton Mather Reader Unavailable

Cotton Mather has few modern admirers. In their introduction to A Cotton Mather Reader, editors Reiner Smolinski and Kenneth P. Minkema acknowledge as much about their “controversial” subject, derided as an “execrable and meddlesome Puritan priest” (xiii, xviii). Yet Mather's accomplishments are almost too numerous to count, and this collection of his writings provides an outstanding introduction to his work and world. Perhaps no figure embodied as many of early America's intellectual threads from the Puritan settlements to the Revolution. “By virtue of his wide-ranging involvements and writings,” Smolinski and Minkema write, “Cotton Mather is at once a unique voice and an invaluable window onto nearly every aspect of the colonial experience” (xxxvi). Over the course of his life from 1663 to 1728, Mather pastored a prominent Boston church; led a successful political coup d'état; championed smallpox inoculation; earned election to the Royal Society of London; organized benevolent societies; fathered...