Cotton Mather as Plutarchan Biographer

Abstract

S TUDENTS OF COTTON MATHER have repeatedly emphasized that he was a fervent admirer of Plutarch.' Like his fellow Puritans, Mather venerated Plutarch as pagan moralist whose precepts and reflections were nearly compatible with Christian teaching. Plutarch also appealed to him as a great historian. The Puritans shared Renaissance passion for history; and, though they interpreted first in terms of divine teleology, they had no quarrel with humanist view that was also philosophy teaching by examples.2 Plutarch's Parallel Lives admirably provided both history and philosophy; they satisfied Renaissance intellectuals' boundless curiosity about ancient heroes and taught moral lessons. For Mather, Plutarch held still another attraction: he was, to use Boswell's phrase, the prince of ancient ;3 and he provided seventeenth-century biographers with their most winning ancient model for handling of material.4 Mather's concept of history, as Peter Gay has pointed out, was essentially biographical.5 The Puritan view of human soul as battlefield of Christ against Satan predisposed Mather to regard Weltgeschichte as microcosmic Heilsgeschichte. Though Magnalia Christi Americana contains much material not biographical in nature, its major crises and essential developments are largely dramatized in its forty-odd biographies (varying in length from 2,000 to approximately 40,000 words) and innumerable biographical sketches.6 His concept of biography Mather owed to two great