For generations Americans have thought of Cotton Mather as the Puritan of Puritans, and that was not a compliment. Perceived as vain and ridiculed for his role in the Salem Witch Trial fiasco, Cotton Mather has been, as Edmund Morgan wrote, “the Puritan Americans love to hate.” That perception of Mather does not hold up under scrutiny, however, and recent historians have begun to reassess Mather's innovative thought and influence. This volume complements the ongoing scholarly publication and assessment of Mather's mammoth Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary written in America. This project, which will publish the work in a new edition of ten volumes, will reveal that Mather was a pivotal thinker at a pivotal time. No colonist surpassed Mather in engaging new, “enlightened” questions about biblical authority and the use of history.

This book is a companion volume to the larger project. In twenty chapters, based on papers presented at a conference at the University of Tubingen in October of 2008, this book is an insightful resource, not only for information on Mather, but for anyone interested in examining the Bible in early America. In all, the authors hope to inaugurate a reassessment of Mather, not to complete it. Because the work on the “Biblia Americana,” is closer to its beginning than its end, the authors realize that much more discovery is in store as researchers examine Mather anew. This book attempts, as Jan Stievermann wrote, “to re-examine the familiar ‘old Mather’ from different angles without claiming to have invented a definitive ‘new Mather’” (33). Even so, these essays offer substantial reappraisals of Mather, his reputation, and his thought in its international context. The chapters are divided into sections that cover Mather's reputation, his work in global context, Enlightenment rationalism and biblicism, historical methodology, gender, race, and slavery. Methodologically, most of these chapters approach Mather through intellectual and religious history, though some veer toward theological and literary appraisals. Regardless of method, these chapters excel in approaching Mather anew, unprejudiced by common misconceptions about Mather and his Puritan world.

No review can do justice to the exceptional breadth and rich detail of these chapters, so a few examples must suffice. Assessing the fall of Mather's reputation from highly respected intellectual in the early eighteenth century to Salem “witch doctor” in the mid-nineteenth century, E. Brooks Holifield argues that Mather's fall had little to do with the value of his writings and had much to do with polemics. In early nineteenth century debates between conservatives and liberals over church government in New England, liberals deliberately subverted Mather's views on church government by a large-scale attack on his character and intellect. As a result, “Cotton Mather shrank” in the nineteenth century as ministers neglected the breadth of his work and concentrated on his complicity in the witchcraft debacle at Salem. Along with neglecting Mather's breadth of knowledge, historians have also neglected his cosmopolitanism. Chapters by Francis Bremer and Oliver Sheiding move toward “deparochializing Mather,” understanding his extensive international correspondence, especially his mutually beneficial interchanges with August Hermann Francke of Halle.

Comparisons between Mather and Edwards are inevitable, often instructive, and usually conclude by touting the superiority of Edwards. In his chapter that compares the interpretations of Edwards and Mather on the epistle of James, Stephen Stein shows how Mather's exegesis was in some ways more extensive than Edwards's in that Mather, partially because he had access to a better library, was more philological, had more interest in the Greek text, and knew more about biblical scholarship and foreign languages.

Of particular interest are chapters dealing with Mather's thoughts on gender identity and race. Helen Gelinas argues that Mather was typically patriarchal in his views on gender roles, but that he did innovate in arguing that women were equal to men in intellectual ability and spiritual sensibility. He called for women to receive advanced education, and believed that women could be gifted authors who could contribute significantly to both church and culture. On the issue of slavery, Jan Stievermann argues that Mather was a biblical literalist, which meant that he accepted slavery as a biblically defensible institution. And yet this same biblical literalism led him to reject the slave trade as “manstealing.” He found no biblical defense for enslaving Africans based on their skin color. Moreover, Mather's traditional view of humanity's common origins conflicted with the emerging Enlightenment-based racial hierarchy. Mather was, therefore, an example of how conservative religious viewpoints could be racially progressive (568).

The Mather that emerges throughout these pages is far from the provincial Puritan and witch hunter of his historical reputation. Mather deeply engaged the major intellectual questions of his time, completing nearly four hundred writings on topics as varied as natural philosophy, eschatology, ethics, supernaturalism, spirituality, polity, history, biography, and children. Moreover, Mather engaged Puritan theology and the emerging modern worldview in the area that affected the most people: the authority and interpretation of the Bible. The authors claim that this book is not the definitive assessment of Mather, but that it is only the beginning of a larger project. Even so, this book contributes greatly toward a profound reassessment of a substantially unappreciated intellectual. If this book is only the beginning, the scholarly assessment of Mather has a bright future.