The Life and Times of
Cotton Mather
Kenneth Silverman
“
illain to history” and “national gargoyle”—these are two of
Silverman’s pungent phrases for Mather’s image. It’s true that
unless you’re a follower of the Cotton Mather band in Austin,
Texas, you probably scowl reflexively when you hear the name. If you
know only the stereotypes of Mather or his excesses, this book will
change you. It gives readers no horned demon, and certainly no haloed
saint—but a life-sized portrait of a complex human being. Although by
profession a theologian, Mather was also interested in telescopes and
microscopes and became the target of an assassination attempt because
of his support for smallpox vaccination. As a theologian, Mather held
a position on religious toleration, contends Silverman, close to that of
Thomas Jefferson.
Silverman calls Mather “the first unmistakably American figure in
the nation’s history.” If energy is an American quality, Mather qualifies.
In his sixty-five earthly years, he wrote around four hundred works,
kept a voluminous diary for more than thirty years, and corresponded
copiously—all this while being minister at Boston’s Old North Church,
composing and delivering lengthy sermons and prayers (one of the latter said to have lasted an hour). He found time for incidental tasks such
as persuading a member of the Church of England to give money to
found “an Academy for Dissenters,” now better known as Yale University in honor of that donor, Elihu Yale. In private life, he married three
times, and if anything can humanize Mather, it’s the account of his
third marriage, to the temperamental (“perhaps psychopathic”) Lydia
Lee George, a wealthy and worldly widow. She once left him in the middle of the night in what Mather called a “horrid rage,” not returning
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