Cotton Mather: A Biography

by Barrett Wendell

"Ranks high among the efforts of modern scholarship towards a reconstruction, at once critical and understanding, of the life and thought, the struggles, errors, and achievements, of the grim but stalwart Puritans of New England."

Genres: Biography

392 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1981

About the author

Barrett Wendell was an American academic known for a series of textbooks including English Composition, studies of Cotton Mather and William Shakespeare, A Literary History of America, and The Traditions of European Literature.

In 1904 to 1905 he travelled overseas, and lectured at Cambridge University in England, the Sorbonne in Paris, and other French universities. After this visit he wrote The France of Today.

- Wikipedia

Reviews

[Joe Brown]

Should be titled: "A secular perspective on Puritans, with a brief history of Massachusetts." Not great. Speaks more to Barrett Wendell's time than it does to Cotton Mather's. If you want to know how turn-of-the-20th-Century scholars viewed the puritans, read it. If you want to know about Cotton Mather's life, turn elsewhere.

[Oliver Brauning]

Barrett Wendell accomplishes his main goal, letting Mather's personality seep through the pages so we can sympathize with him as a tragic figure. However, he should have tried to accomplish more in this book than just that. Many of the most interesting topics are sidestepped: we never learn which speech impediment he had or what it was like to be married to a madwoman or the psychology of culture that urges widowers to marry nearly as soon as the wives are buried or how Mather treated his slaves—Onesimus' role in leading him to smallpox inoculation is ignored. Besides these we never got the true sense of his literary talents. I wanted to know, were his sermons good or bad? What is his status among American intellectuals and writers? Was he a true intellectual or just an extremely learned and prolific writer? These are questions an entry The American Men and Women of Letters series ought to answer. Cotton Mather doesn't; but I suppose that's only because the ensepulchered civilization and the man who advocated it more than anyone remained, a full two centuries later, too large to be dealt with in any but an impassioned polemical spirit.

[Matt Howard]

This biography was originally published in 1891. The style seems awkward to a modern reader. Yet, the book makes it clear why so many of Cotton Mather's books are still available in modern editions, as the goodreads list clearly shows. A religious fanatic who approved of and condoned the Salem witch trials and executions, he was also a scientific literate who urged adoption of vaccination at a time when smallpox epidemics were recurrent catastrophes in New England. A book well worth reading.

[Raven]

Mather was a distant relative of mine, with his mother and my ancestor being siblings. I selected this book with the intention of gaining further insight into his life. What I got was a more insightful look at the time he lived in. For family research, that was cool.