Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts's Hymns to America; or, How to Perform a Hymn without Singing It

2012 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher N. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Cotton Mather

This essay reconstructs Cotton Mather's efforts to introduce Isaac Watts's hymns into New England print culture using sermon pamphlets and family prayer guides. These forms framed hymns as read rather than sung texts, but they also enabled the performance of hymns as expressions of personal faith during the Great Awakening.

‘A greater revolution’

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-230
Author(s):  
David Parrish
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
New England ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
High Church ◽  
Atlantic Empire

Letters to and from prominent Dissenting leaders and their political allies such as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman in New England, Archibald Stobo in South Carolina, and Robert Hunter in New York make it abundantly clear that the High-Church Tory ascendency during the final years of Queen Anne’s reign was a fraught period for religious Dissenters living throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire. While Tories were implementing policies designed to inhibit the influence of Dissent, a transatlantic Tory political culture was becoming far more antagonistic to the Hanoverian Succession and was increasingly associated with Jacobitism. Consequently, anti-Jacobitism became a pillar of the transatlantic Dissenting and Whig political and print culture.

SOME HORRIBLE WARNINGS OUR COLONIAL CHILDREN READ ABOUT IN BOOKS

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 874-874
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Cotton Mather

In Colonial America children read that they were born not to live but to die. This was largely due to the influence of the puritanical clergymen such as Cotton Mather, who dominated the intellectual activity of New England. Good examples of the horrible warnings children read about are the following: If by Undutifulness to your Parents you incur the Curse of God, it won't be long before you go down into obscure Darkness, even, into Utter Darkness: God has Reserv'd for you the Blackness of Darkness for ever. Though I am Young, yet I may Die And hasten to Eternity: There is a dreadful fiery Hell, Where the wicked ones must always dwell. The Lord Delights in them that speak The Words of truth; but ev'ry liar Must have his portion in the lake (of hell) That burns with brimstone and with fire.

Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

1987 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Revival Movements ◽  
British Colonies

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE RISING GENERATION LIVING IN NEW ENGLAND IN 1657

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-69
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
New England ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
The World

The modernity of Ezekial Rogers' remarks, although written in 1657, may surprise present day readers. In a letter to Cotton Mather, Rogers had this to say about young people: . . . I find greatest trouble and grief about the rising generation. Young people are little stirred here; but they strengthen one another in evil, by example, by counsel. Much ado have with my own family; hard to get a servant that is glad of catechising or family-duties: I had a rare blessing of servants in Yorkshire; and those that I brought over were a blessing: but the young brood doth much afflict me. Even the children of the godly here and elsewhere, make a woful (sic) proof! So that, I tremble to think, what will become of this glorious work that we have begun, when the ancient shall be gathered unto their fathers. I fear grace and blessing will die with them, if the Lord do not also show more signs of displeasure, even in our days. We grow worldly every where; methinks I see little godliness, but all in a hurry about the world; every one for himself, little care of public or common good. It hath been God's way, not to send sweeping judgments when the chief magistrates are godly and grow more so. I beseech all the Bayministers to call earnestly upon magistrates (that are often among them) tell them that their godliness will be our protection: if they fail, I shall fear some sweeping judgment shortly. The clouds seem to be gathering.1

First Impressions and First Arrivals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Hunter
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter relates the first decades of colonial interpretation of Dighton Rock after its markings were first described in 1680, mainly by John Danforth and Cotton Mather. It places the interpretation of the rock in the context of dispossession of Indigenous lands following the rebellion known as King Philip’s War. Erasure of Indigenous peoples from the history of colonial New England is discussed. It introduces contemporary theories rooted in Biblical hermeneutics of human migration and the relationship of Indigenous people to the rest of humanity, including ideas that they were descendants of Tartars, Canaanites, or the Lost Tribes of Israel. The author’s concept of White Tribism is explained.

The Traditioned Self

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-41
Author(s):  
Rhys S. Bezzant
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
Personal Formation

Edwards did not invent the practice of mentoring. In the premodern world, identity was received rather than created, and mentoring served this traditional means of personal formation. This chapter investigates the significance of the cultivation of virtue for a flourishing life, and the ways in which discipline functioned as a strategy for virtue formation in the post-Reformation world. The examples of Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather are presented as significant landmarks in that story. Edwards’s own upbringing in New England, with its Puritan expectations of life and ministry, is unpacked as a way of understanding the innovation Edwards would ultimately pursue in a ministry of mentoring.

The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England

1912 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 151-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Albert Christie
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spiritual History

In his Narrative of Surprizing Conversions, Edwards wrote: “About this time began the great noise that was in this part of the country, about Arminianism.” The context shows that the time in mind was about 1734. On the basis of this and similar allusions and because of Sereno Dwight's comments and Whitefield's invectives, it has been believed that before the Great Awakening the Congregational churches and ministers had to some degree adopted Arminian views. An investigation of this matter may contribute to the spiritual history of New England.

Jonathan Edwards, Enthusiast? Radical Revivalism and the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-739 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Winiarski
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Private House ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

It is difficult to imagine Jonathan Edwards countenancing the “Confus'd, but very Affecting Noise” that erupted in Suffield, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1741. Yet there he stood, his loud voice rising in prayer above the din that emanated from an assembly of more than two hundred boisterous men and women who had gathered to listen to his exhortations in the “two large Rooms” of a private house. On the previous day, the visiting Northampton, Massachusetts, revivalist had administered the sacrament to nearly five hundred Suffield communicants, ninety-seven of whom had joined the church that very day. It was an extraordinary event—quite possibly the largest oneday church admission ritual ever observed in colonial New England.

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