Description
Harvard University Press, Published 1978. Hardcover, xvi, 360 pp.; 24 cm; First Edition; illustrated with black-and-white plates (frontispiece mezzotint portrait and reproductions of period woodcuts, engravings, and manuscript pages).
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
111
Turn the pages with the arrows, keyboard, or a swipe.
Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Grey cloth boards, silver lettering on spine; light bumping and shelf wear to extremities. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small edge chips and short closed tears with light creasing along the edges. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover.The first modern biography of Cotton Mather (1663-1728), tracing the Puritan minister's first forty years against the fortunes of Congregational New England: his relationship to his eminent father, Increase Mather; the history and cure of his stammer; his precocious years at Harvard; his religious conversion and vision of an angel; his leadership in the 1689 Massachusetts revolution; and his entanglement in the Boston and Salem witchcraft crises. The narrative closes with the death of Mather's first wife, Abigail.David Levin (1924-2009) was Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of History as Romantic Art and In Defense of Historical Literature.Contents: A Covenanted Childhood; Harvard College; The Call of the Gospel and the Loss of the Charter; From Vision to Bereavement; Witchcraft and Revolution; Struggling toward the Millennium: War, Smallpox, Witchcraft; Two Brands, Two Deaths, and a Sadducee; The Lord's Remembrancer: The Value of Historical Uncertainty; Suffering and Doing: The Mystery of Particular Faiths and Deaths; Notes; Index.