Cotton Mather, The Barbary Shores and American Exceptionalism

Abstract

This research seeks to explore the religious, cultural and socio-political dimensions ofMather’s Thanksgiving sermon-cum-captivity narrative The Glory of Goodness … 1703 and a related pastoral letter,Letter to the English Captives in Africa, both of which addressed to American colonial captives in Meknes, Morocco during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Taking its theoretical bearings from cultural materialism, historicism, and cultural anthropology, it contends that Mather’s sermon-captivity and pastoral letter are tentative attempts at the redefinition of a colonial American identity at a time of crisis through the celebration of American Exceptionalism within the Puritan Salvationist theology. Keywords: Cotton Mather, American Exceptionalism, Barbary Captivity, Puritanism.