Richard Mather was a graduate of the University of Oxford and John Cotton a graduate of the University of Cambridge. His grandfathers were Richard Mather and John Cotton, both of them prominent Puritan ministers who had played major roles in the establishment and growth of the Massachusetts colony. Increase Mather and his wife Maria née Cotton. Early life and education Ĭotton Mather was born in 1663 in the city of Boston, the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the Rev. Scientist and US founding father Benjamin Franklin, who as a young Bostonian had opposed the old Puritan order represented by Mather and participated in the anti-inoculation campaign, later described Mather's book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good (1710) as a major influence on his life. Mather's promotion of inoculation against smallpox, which he had learned about from an African named Onesimus whom Mather held as a slave, caused violent controversy in Boston during the outbreak of 1721. He dispatched many reports on scientific matters to the Royal Society of London, which elected him as a fellow in 1713. Ī promoter of the new experimental science in America, Cotton Mather carried out original research on plant hybridization and on the use of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox contagion. He corresponded extensively with European intellectuals and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1710. Mather championed the new Yale College as an intellectual bulwark of Puritanism in New England. After 1702, Cotton Mather clashed with Joseph Dudley, the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whom Mather attempted unsuccessfully to drive out of power. Personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England, Cotton Mather unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Harvard College, an office that had been held by his father Increase, another significant Puritan clergyman and intellectual. As a historian of colonial New England, Mather is noted for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).
Mather's subsequent involvement in the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693, which he defended in the book Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), attracted intense controversy in his own day and has negatively affected his historical reputation.
Educated at Harvard College, in 1685 he joined his father Increase as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House of Boston, where he continued to preach for the rest of his life.Ī major intellectual and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped lead the successful revolt of 1689 against Sir Edmund Andros, the governor imposed on New England by King James II.
Cotton Mather FRS ( / ˈ m æ ð ər/ Febru– February 13, 1728) was a New England Puritan clergyman and writer.
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