Admired Adversary: Wrestling with Grotius the Exegete in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (1693–1728)

Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-235
Author(s):  
Jan Stievermann
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
British North America ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
Sensitive Topics

This essay examines the reception of Grotius’s pioneering Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (1644) in the ‘Biblia Americana’ (1693–1728), a scriptural commentary written by the New England theologian Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Mather engaged with Grotius on issues of translation, biblical authorship, inspiration, the canon, and the legitimate forms of interpreting the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture. While frequently relying on the Dutch Arminian humanist in discussing philological problems or contextual questions, Mather (as a self-declared defender of Reformed orthodoxy) in many cases rejected, ignored, or significantly modified Grotius’s farther-reaching conclusions on dogmatically sensitive topics. This strategy marks Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ as an exemple of a highly sophisticated but ultimately apologetic type of biblical criticism in the context of the early Enlightenment in British North America.

The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Covenant Theology ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
British North America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Historical Issues

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.

Cotton Mather's medicine, with particular reference to measles

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-37
Author(s):  
Paul E Kopperman ◽  
Jeanne Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Popular Medicine ◽  
Cotton Mather

While the vocation of Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was his ministry in Boston, he made important contributions to medicine, most famously in helping to introduce variolation to New England in 1721–22 and in writing The Angel of Bethesda (1724), the first medical treatise produced in Colonial North America. This article, however, focuses on an earlier initiative, Mather’s efforts to quell the epidemic of measles that struck Boston in 1713, killing among many others his wife and three children. Historians have devoted little attention to this episode or to measles in general, even though the disease was highly mortal during the colonial period. To help victims, Mather published a ‘letter’ on treating measles. Such a specific discussion of treatment would have been rare in Europe and it was unprecedented in America. The therapy that Mather proposed not only reflected popular medicine but also incorporated newer practices, notably those associated with Thomas Sydenham. In contrast to heroic therapies for measles, which were often dangerous but became more popular across the eighteenth century, Mather’s recommendations were moderate.

REFASHIONING PURITAN NEW ENGLAND: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA,c. 1680–c. 1770

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Success Story ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTThe position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

Resources Discovered

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Hudson River ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Southeastern Part ◽  
British North America ◽  
Middle Atlantic ◽  
Set Up ◽  
New England Colonies

The adventurers who entered Connecticut’s Western Lands in 1730 I began ironmaking more than a hundred years after colonists first exploited the ore and fuel resources of British North America. The early colonists who set about making iron for export met with ill fortune: in 1621 Indians massacred the artisans who had just completed a furnace and forge at Falling Creek, Virginia. Scarce capital, inadequate skills, and poor transatlantic communication bankrupted the proprietors of the Saugus, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, ironworks by 1675. When King George I got Parliament to restrain trade between England and Sweden in 1717, British manufacturers, cut off from their supplies of Scandinavian iron, began investing in American forges and furnaces. Conclusion of the seventeenth-century Indian wars had left large areas rich in timber and ore along the east coast safe for industry. New immigrants, primarily from Britain and Germany, brought their metallurgical skills to America, and colonists supported by British investors built ironworks first in Maryland and then in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey, to produce metal for the export market. Americans in the Middle Atlantic colonies made enough iron by 1750 to provoke British regulation of their trade. The colonists made themselves the world’s third-largest iron producers by 1775 and, despite the predominance of agriculture, had firmly established industry in British North America. New Englanders lagged behind the Middle Atlantic colonists in ironmaking. Artisans from the failed Saugus works in Massachusetts slowly reestablished smelting on a small scale and by 1730 were building new works in the southeastern part of their colony. In New York, Robert Livingston had by 1685 gained control of an enormous manor adjacent to northwestern Connecticut. In 1730 he wanted to add iron to his manor’s products so that he could ship metal down the Hudson River to colonial and overseas customers. However, neither Livingston nor the Massachusetts ironmakers had anything like the high-grade ore resources discovered by the adventurers in Connecticut’s Western Lands. Fifty-two years after English colonists established themselves in Connecticut, James II sent Edmund Andros to British North America to set up a unified government over the New England colonies.

Piracy in Colonial North America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark G. Hanna
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
North American ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
British North American

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers. Sea marauding in its multiple forms helped shape the economic, legal, political, religious, and cultural worlds of colonial America. The illicit market that brought longed-for bullion, slaves, and luxury goods integrated British North American communities with the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans throughout the 17th century. Attempts to curb the support of sea marauding at the turn of the 18th century exposed sometimes violent divisions between local merchant interests and royal officials currying favor back in England, leading to debates over the protection of English liberties across the Atlantic. When the North American colonies finally closed their ports to English pirates during the years following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), it sparked a brief yet dramatic turn of events where English marauders preyed upon the shipping belonging to their former “nests.” During the 18th century, colonial communities began to actively support a more regulated form of privateering against agreed upon enemies that would become a hallmark of patriot maritime warfare during the American Revolution.

Establishment of Canada as a sovereign state: from dominion to kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Сергей Котов ◽  
Sergey Kokotov
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
New France ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial

The history of the establisment of Canada as a sovereign state is inseparably linked with the history of the English (later British) colonial empire. Initially land amounting then to Canada, are peripheral areas of the continental possessions of the British Crown in North America. First of all, they include the possession of Hudson´s Bay, Nova Scotia peninsula and the island of Newfoundland. A stronghold of the British presence in the New World colonies were New England, which followed the metropolis actively at odds with the neighboring colonies of France. The long period of Anglo-French wars culminated in the defeat of France and inclusion of its holdings (Louisiana, New France) to the British colonial empire. The territory of the future of Canada became part of a vast political and legal space, which some researchers call the British-American colonial empire. On the socio-economic point of view nothing has changed - these lands were still underdeveloped periphery of the colonies of New England. There had no prerequisites to the formation here of their own institutions of statehood. In the course of the war for the independence of the inhabitants of the colony of Quebec (the former New France), the peninsula of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, for various reasons did not support the rebellious colonies, so many supporters of the unity of the British Empire (the so-called loyalists) moved to these areas. This led to the formation of a number of new colonies, such as Upper Canada, Nyubransuik, Prince Edward Island. Together, they accounted for British North America - in contrast to the United States. It is important to emphasize that even in the middle of the XIX century British North America remained a conglomerate of disparate, sparsely populated, economically underdeveloped areas, both in the immediate possession of the British Crown, and under the control of private companies. Their transformation into a self-governing federation certainly reflected the interests of the nascent trade and economic elite of these colonies. However, this was no less exposed to "US factor" and the liberal-democratic changes that took place in the metropolis itself. Exploring the complex of concrete historical factors that determine the character of the process of establishing Canada as a sovereign state, the author of this article analyzes the formal and legal aspects of the system of power and administration, established under the British colonial empire, as well as the key points of the doctrine of English law, refers to the institution of the Crown, Parliament and the status of imperial colonial government. Emphasized is the idea that the evolution of Canada from the set of "royal" to the self-governing colonies of the federation in the status of dominion and then gaining the status of the kingdom carried out on the basis of gradual development of constitutional conventions of political practice that leaves open to interpretation the question of when exactly Canada acquired the status of a sovereign state.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document