The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
by Kenneth Silverman
Summary
Kenneth Silverman's biography follows Cotton Mather from a childhood so precocious that he entered Harvard College at eleven, the youngest student the school had ever admitted, through his ordination alongside his own father, Increase Mather, at Boston's Old North Meeting House, where Cotton Mather would preach for the rest of his life. The book follows Mather's staggering output, close to four hundred separate published works over his lifetime, including Magnalia Christi Americana, his sprawling ecclesiastical history of New England, and an ambitious unpublished commentary on the Bible that tried to reconcile Christian scripture with the new science of his own day.
Silverman does not avoid the episode that has defined Mather's reputation ever since, the Salem witch trials of 1692, when Mather, without holding any official role in the proceedings, published Wonders of the Invisible World defending the court's actions even as he privately urged judges not to rely on spectral evidence alone. The book gives equal weight to Mather's later advocacy for smallpox inoculation during Boston's 1721 outbreak, a position he adopted after learning of the practice from an enslaved man named Onesimus, and one so controversial that someone threw a lit grenade into Mather's own house in retaliation, even though the numbers he cited afterward proved inoculation dramatically reduced deaths.
Silverman writes as a literary and cultural historian rather than a theologian, tracing how a single, genuinely brilliant and genuinely contradictory man could help drive a wave of executions in one decade and champion a lifesaving medical innovation in the next. Reading the book means following a Puritan intellectual whose reputation still swings between witch hunter and public health pioneer, and it suits a reader who wants both halves of that reputation taken equally seriously rather than one used to excuse the other.
Historical Context & Significance
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Bancroft Prize; that year's finalists were Howard M. Feinstein for Becoming William James and Michael Mott for The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Silverman, a New York University professor of colonial American literature, had already built a scholarly reputation studying the period before turning to Mather as a subject dense enough to carry a full biography.
Silverman went on to write acclaimed biographies of Edgar Allan Poe and Harry Houdini, but his Cotton Mather remains his most honored work and a standard modern account of a Puritan figure whose historical reputation had, for generations, been reduced almost entirely to his role at Salem. The book helped restore the fuller, stranger picture of Mather that later colonial historians have continued to work from.