The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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title
:
The Mathers : Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
author
:
Middlekauff, Robert.
publisher
:
University of California Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0520219309
print isbn13
:
9780520219304
ebook isbn13
:
9780585079103
language
:
English
subject
 
Mather, Richard,--1596-1669, Mather, Increase,--1639-1723, Mather, Cotton,--1663-1728, Puritans--Massachusetts--Biography, Massachusetts--Intellectual life--17th century, Massachusetts--Intellectual life--18th century.
publication date
:
1999
lcc
:
F67.M47M53 1999eb
ddc
:
285/.8/0922744
subject
:
Mather, Richard,--1596-1669, Mather, Increase,--1639-1723, Mather, Cotton,--1663-1728, Puritans--Massachusetts--Biography, Massachusetts--Intellectual life--17th century, Massachusetts--Intellectual life--18th century.
Page iii
The Mathers
Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
Robert Middlekauff
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
 
Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
First University of California Press paperback, 1999
Preface to new edition © 1999 by Robert Middlekauff
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Middlekauff, Robert.
The Mathers: three generations of Puritan intellectuals,
1596-1728 / Robert Middlekauff.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-520-21930-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mather, Richard, 1596-1669. 2. Mather, Increase, 1639-1723.
3. Mather, Cotton, 1663-1728. 4. PuritansMassachusetts
Biography. 5. MassachusettsIntellectual life17th century.
6. MassachusettsIntellectual life18th century. I. Title.
F67.M47M53 1999
285'.8'0922744dc21                        98-50840
[B]                                                                 CIP
 
Page v
For Edmund S. Morgan
 
Page vii
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
When I wrote
The Mathers
(1971), the study of Puritanism was well established; indeed, it constituted a subfield in both the history of religion and intellectual history. Some historians considered it virtually a field in and of itself, set off by the depth and sophistication of its scholarship. Several of the great American historians of this century had given it a wonderful foundation and enormous energy.
An obvious beginning point in what became a flood of scholarship on Puritan experience in seventeenth-century New England does not exist, but the splendid studies of Kenneth Murdock and Samuel Eliot Morison can surely serve as exemplary texts. In 1926, Harvard University Press published Murdock's
Increase Mather
, a biography that is still worth reading. Morison provided books and articlesamong them studies of Harvard, Puritan ideas, and the founders of New Englandthat suggested how fertile a field the study of Puritanism in America might become. Both Murdock and Morison attracted students eager to study at their feet and bothMorison in particularwrote with such clarity and grace as to draw educated laymen to their writings.
1
Morison and Murdock had broad interests and their work was
 
Page viii
not confined to any single line of study. To a certain extent this is also true of Perry Miller, who arrived at Harvard as a young man from Chicago determined to make the study of Puritanism his own. He succeeded in extraordinary ways and today the study of Puritanism still bears the impress he first began to make on it in 1933 with his brilliant book on church polity,
Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
.
2
Whatever one might say about Miller's range of interests, he was primarily an intellectual historian and the books, articles, and editions of Puritan writings he produced in the twenty years following the publication of
Orthodoxy in Massachusetts
fall largely into the field of American intellectual history. The greatest of Miller's works appeared on either side of World War II under the general title
The New England Mind
.
3
In defining the field, Miller gave Puritan theology, and what happened to it in the hundred years between 1630 and 1730, a central place. In fact, he insisted that these subjects deserved attention above all others because they shaped more than anything else what would now be called Puritan culture. He was not, as his critics have claimed, indifferent to social history, but his method of extracting it from such sources as sermons and tracts left something to be desired. His method of discovering what was happening in the society of New England was to rely on indirection, on hints in sources not ordinarily the grist for the mills of social historians, and then, invariably, to point out how far actual social development deviated from the intentions of those under study. Obliqueness and irony have their uses in historical works, but they cannot provide a full or satisfactory account of society. Yet Miller's conclusions, especially as presented in
The New England Mind
, were not only original and exciting, they were indispensable to an understanding of the early history of New England.
Since Miller's death in 1963, Puritan studies have ranged widely over the literature and society of Puritan New England. Virtually all of this scholarship owes something to his inspiration. Even the studies of towns and families that began to pour out in the 1970s are in Miller's debtsome, to be sure, in a peculiar way insofar as they repudiate his method and his focus on the mind.
A worthy field in its own way, social history has thrown up a serious challenge to traditional conceptions of the study of New England Puritanism. The most important of these works have
 
Page ix
concentrated for the most part on small-scale studies of towns, counties, families, women, and the law. E. S. Morgan's
The Puritan Family
, first published in 1942, is in part responsible for some of this interest, though family studies have taken different directions from his book and wandered into the social sciences in ways his book did not. For example, John Demos'
A Little Commonwealth
considers the family in old Plymouth Colony with Erik Erickson's psychology of identity clearly affecting its argument. On another track, Philip Greven's books on Andover and on the Protestant temperament provide superb studies with a blend of traditional and social science methods.
4
But the most remarkable of all the recent social histories of New England, David Hall's
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment
, turns the study of religion in New England in a new direction.
5
Puritanism as historians have understood it is not missing from his book, but it is not at its heart. Instead Hall gives us popular religion, a folk religion, a religion that existed alongside and sometimes within the formal worship of the Puritan churches. Hall's achievement is to make plausible a religious scene in which ministers and laymen alike shared belief in a world of wonders of tales, providences, and magic. His book shows that the occult was accommodated to the Puritan version of Christianity; it did not replace it.
The books by Demos, Greven, and Hall are examples of fresh and different approaches. Along with a multitude of others on aspects of New England society, they have relevance for more traditional understandings of Puritanism even though such a relevance was not usually a part of their authors' intentions. But the fact is that they provide a richer context for study of colonial New England in all its aspects.
That study has proceeded apace and with a continuing emphasis on Puritanism. There has been valuable research into Puritan churches, for example. Perhaps the most provocative example is E. S. Morgan's
Visible Saints
(1963), on the importance of the requirement Puritan churches imposed on candidates for membership that they give evidence of their conversions.
6
Morgan argues that compromise in admissions of members soon followed stringency. Robert Pope has told the story of the Half-Way Covenant in all its fascinating detail; especially valuable is his finding that laymen initially opposed the extension of baptism to the children
 
Page x
of the unregenerate and that ministers led the way to reform.
7
Ministers and church polity, as the studies of Miller and E. S. Morgan forecast, proved to be major subjects for study and over the years a spate of such works has appearedstudies of John Cotton, the Winthrops, Thomas Hooker, and Samuel Willard, for example.
8
There have also been several valuable books on worship, religious experience, and "radical" religion. Among such studies, several stand out: Charles Cohen's
God's Caress
, E. Brooks Holifield's
The Covenant Sealed
, and Philip F. Gura's A
Glimpse of Zion's Glory
.
9
In addition, many have attempted to provide a larger look, a kind of post-Miller synthesis, albeit on a smaller scale and in a less dramatic style: Sacvan Bercovitch, Harry Stout, Stephen Foster, and Theodore Dwight Bozeman.
10
Their studies are impressive and all deserve close readings. Several are innovative in research and argument. Harry Stout, for example, has studied an impressive number of sermons in manuscript and reminds us that sermons in manuscript may reveal more of the Puritan spirit than the carefully wrought preaching that made its way into print. Bozeman challenges much in current scholarship on Puritan millennialism by insisting that the Puritans looked back to the New Testament for the model of their churches. Stephen Foster suggests, by implication at least, that many studies of Puritanism have begun in the wrong placethat New England Puritan culture has to be seen as an extension of Puritanism in old England. And Sacvan Bercovitch argues in several books that much of American identity and in nineteenth-century culture can be traced to the seventeenth-century movement.
Most of the ideas and the subjects found in the books I have discussed here can also be found in biographies. For example, in the case of popular religion my own book on three generations of the Mather family points to the ways in which both Increase and Cotton Mather used the "Wonders in the Works of Creation" Increase's words in
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences
to reinforce the sense of mystery in life which was at the center of popular religion.
11
More importantly, all of the biographies of the three Mathers that were published after my own treat the major problems first opened up in the studies of Miller, Morison, Murdock, and Morgan.
There have been two excellent biographies of Increase Mather

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