1820 Cotton Mather, MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA. New England, Harvard History 1st

Description: 1820 Cotton Mather, MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA. New England, Harvard History 1st MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA OR, THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRST PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620, UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698 IN SEVEN BOOKS by COTTON MATHER IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME TWO ONLY FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FROM THE FIRST LONDON EDITION OF 1702. Hartford: Published By Silas Andrus, Roberts & Burr, Printers, 1820. First American edition. Volume 2 only of two-volume work. Hardcover. Full brown leather, octavo, 595 pages. Magnalia Christi Americana (roughly, The Glorious Works of Christ in America) is a book published in 1702 by the puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Its title is in Latin, but its subtitle is in English: The Ecclesiastical History of New England from Its First Planting in 1620, until the Year of Our Lord 1698. It was generally written in English and printed in London "for Thomas Parkhurst, at the Bible and Three Crowns, Cheapside." It consists of seven "books" collected into two volumes, and it details the religious development of Massachusetts, and other nearby colonies in New England from 1620 to 1698. Mather's first edition of the book was published in London in 1702. A second edition - the first published in the United States - was printed in 1820 in Hartford, Connecticut by Silas Andrus and Son, who also produced a third edition in 1855. Robbins reprinted an edition in 1852 and 1967, which is the only complete reprinting of the first edition. A 1977 reprint of small selections, with extensive footnotes, was produced for Belknap Press by Kenneth Ballard Murdock. Volume Two includes book 4, 5 6 and 7. Book 4: a history of the founding of Harvard College and complete "catalogus" of all the students who graduated from Harvard College. Book 5: a history of the Congregational Church in New England. Book 6: Thaumaturgus: vel Liber memorabilium : the sixth book of the New-English history : wherein very many illustrious discoveries and demonstrations of the divine providence in remarkable mercies and judgments on many particular persons among the people of New-England, are observed, collected and related. Book 7 treats of the "Wars of the Lord", namely against the devil, the Separatists, Familists, Antinomians, Quakers, clerical imposters, and the Indians. Cotton Mather FRS ( February 12, 1663 – February 13, 1728) was a New England Puritan clergyman and writer. Educated at Harvard College, in 1685 he joined his father Increase as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House of Boston, where he continued to preach for the rest of his life. A major intellectual and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped lead the successful revolt of 1689 against Sir Edmund Andros, the governor imposed on New England by King James II. Mather's subsequent involvement in the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693, which he defended in the book Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), attracted intense controversy in his own day and has negatively affected his historical reputation. As a historian of colonial New England, Mather is noted for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England, Cotton Mather unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Harvard College, an office that had been held by his father Increase, another significant Puritan clergyman and intellectual. After 1702, Cotton Mather clashed with Joseph Dudley, the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whom Mather attempted unsuccessfully to drive out of power. Mather championed the new Yale College as an intellectual bulwark of Puritanism in New England. He corresponded extensively with European intellectuals and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1710. A promoter of the new experimental science in America, Cotton Mather carried out original research on plant hybridization and on the use of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox contagion. He dispatched many reports on scientific matters to the Royal Society of London, which elected him as a fellow in 1713. Mather's promotion of inoculation against smallpox, which he had learned about from an African named Onesimus whom Mather held as a slave, caused violent controversy in Boston during the outbreak of 1721. Scientist and US founding father Benjamin Franklin, who as a young Bostonian had opposed the old Puritan order represented by Mather and participated in the anti-inoculation campaign, later described Mather's book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good (1710) as a major influence on his life. Cotton Mather was an extremely prolific writer, producing 388 different books and pamphlets during his lifetime.[69] His most widely distributed work was Magnalia Christi Americana (which may be translated as "The Glorious Works of Christ in America"), subtitled "The ecclesiastical history of New England, from its first planting in the year 1620 unto the year of Our Lord 1698. In seven books." Despite the Latin title, the work is written in English. Mather began working on it towards the end of 1693 and it was finally published in London in 1702. The work incorporates information that Mather put together from a variety of sources, such as letters, diaries, sermons, Harvard College records, personal conversations, and the manuscript histories composed by William Hubbard and William Bradford. According to Kenneth Silverman, an expert on early American literature and Cotton Mather's biographer, “...If the epic ambitions of Magnalia, its attempt to put American on the cultural map, recall such later American works as Moby-Dick (to which it has been compared), its effort to rejoin provincial America to the mainstream of English culture recalls rather The Waste Land. Genuinely Anglo-American in outlook, the book projects a New England which is ultimately an enlarged version of Cotton Mather himself, a pious citizen of "The Metropolis of the whole English America". Silverman argues that, although Mather glorifies New England's Puritan past, in the Magnalia he also attempts to transcend the religious separatism of the old Puritan settlers, reflecting Mather's more ecumenical and cosmopolitan embrace of a Transatlantic Protestant Christianity that included, in addition to Mather's own Congregationalists, also Presbyterians, Baptists, and low church Anglicans.

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