Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703

Harvard University Press, 1978-10-18. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Harvard University Press, 1978. Hard cover, 360 pp. First Edition. Very good in very good dust jacket. Grey cloth covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small chips and tears and light creasing along the edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations. [From jacket flaps] The first modem biography of Cotton Mather, David Levin's narrative makes clear the development of Mather's character and experience during forty years in which he was able to identify his own personal life with the fortunes of Congregational New England. On his relationship to his eminent father, the Puritan divine and Massachusetts statesman, Increase Mather; the history and cure of his stammer; his experience as a child prodigy at Harvard; his religious conversion; his vision of an angel; his leadership in the Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts; his encounters with the Devil during the witchcraft crises in Boston and Salem - on all these matters and more, Mr. Levin's account provides new interpretations that make this permanently controversial and legendary figure accessible and comprehensible in human as well as historical terms. It is the triumph of Mr. Levin's biography that his subject's personal and literary lives are more closely woven into the fabric of the political history of his place and time than in any previous study. Mather's character, though seen sympathetically, develops in a narrative that deliberately avoids the constraints of prosecution and defense. The book, which ends wit the death of Mather's first wife, Abigail, is a major contribution to the literature of American Civilization.