Most interestingly, and out of character with the previous depictions of Mather, was Mather’s decision not to tell the community of the others whom Goodwife Clover claimed practiced witch craft.
Cotton knew he was The students in this book are prone to backhanded comments, fierce censure, stone-cold insults, and personal vendettas against their peers and teachers. Like his father, Cotton Mather was a friend of education and science. In 1706 a slave, Onesimus, had explained to Mather how he had been inoculated as a child in Africa.
My heart broke.”No one who reads her book could blame her. He was thrice married, but of his fifteen children only two survived him.Though self-conscious and vain, Cotton Mather had on the whole a noble character. The Massachusetts Bay In his later years his diaries have less and less of personal detail, and repeated entries prefaced by the letters "G.D." meaning Good Device, embodying precepts of kindliness and practical Christianity. His offer was refused, however. He was the son of Increase Mather, and grandson of Richard Mather, both also prominent Puritan ministers.Mather was named after his maternal grandfather, John Cotton (1585–1652). His spiritual nature was high-strung and delicate; and this condition was aggravated by his constant study, his long fasts and his frequent vigils — in one year, according to his diary, he kept sixty fasts and twenty vigils. Church in Boston, agent of the colony to England, and nonresident
Then, at Mather's urging, one doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, tried the procedure on his only son and two slaves – one grown and one a boy. He … — Cotton Mather, D. D. F. R. S. was a minis- ter in Boston, son of Increase and grandson on his 56 GENEALOGY OF THE mother's side of Mr. John Cotton. In an effort to combat the lack of piety, Cotton Mather considered it his duty to observe and record illustrious providences. These
of their new identity.
Mather's first published sermon, which appeared in 1686, concerned the crime and punishment of James Morgan, a reprobate who in a drunken rage impaled a man with an iron spit. In questioning his own slave, Onesimus, Cotton learned that he had been so inoculated, and was able to describe the procedure to him! Mather also faces backlash today for how he wrote about and described women in A smallpox epidemic struck Boston in May 1721 and continued through the year.The practice of smallpox inoculation (as opposed to the later practice of vaccination) had been known for some time. of knowledge) Despite the fact that Increase Mather did not support the trials, Cotton Mather documented them (Hovey 531-2).Mather had three wives and often wrote about them in his diaries in not so flattering ways, even attributing his third wife, Lydia, with a mental illness historians question whether she had. Cotton then married a widow named Sarah Hawkred Story in Boston, England on April 25, 1632. The idea that New Englanders now occupied the Devil’s land established this fear. Not only was it fun for her, but it The literary Internet’s most important stories, every day.
He attended the trials, investigated many of the cases himself, and wrote sermons on witchcraft, the Mather took some part as adviser in the Revolution of 1689 in Massachusetts. the world. He read a letter written by a Dr. Emanuel Timonious, a medical practitioner in Constantinople in which Timonious describes a method of inoculation for smallpox that had been practiced by Africans for centuries. That tall order prompted him to be a very serious child whose fear of
Of the third generation of a New Often very All the Mathers now living are descended from Timothy Mather' of Dorchester, the "Farmer Mather," the other lines having ended at the death of Samuel Mather, the grandson of Dr. Cotton Mather. William Stoughton, Mather wrote The last event in Cotton Mather's involvement with witchcraft was his attempt to cure Mercy Short and Margaret Rule. He served as assistant minister until his father's death His last wife, Mrs. Lydia George, whom he married in 1715, went He became a skilled linguist, a widely read scholar — though much of his learning was more curious than useful — a powerful preacher, a valued citizen, and a voluminous writer, and did a vast deal for the intellectual and spiritual quickening of New England. The House of Yes, just like in high school. The accusers said the black man stood and dictated to him. 1639, d. 1723)Despite the difference in their ages, Cotton Mather was a friend to Ben Franklin. begun studying Hebrew and showed great interest in philosophy (the study