Cotton Mather: The Puritan Historian as Renaissance Humanist

Abstract

ODERN SCHOLARSHIP has come to recognize Renaissance humanism as essentially a phase in Western rhetorical tradition.' The humanists turned to classics because they were inspired by the firm belief that in order to write and to speak well it was necessary to study and to imitate ancients.2 They approached classical literature almost exclusively as style, and they valued style chiefly as a model for imitation.' Such statements do not mean that humanist writing consisted of rhetorical exercises or excursions into sophistry. Rhetoric was but a means of conveying sound doctrine and wisdom. Nevertheless, such doctrine or wisdom did not constitute a characteristic humanist philosophy: though sharing a classically inspired rhetoric, humanists applied that rhetoric to propagation of very different creeds and philosophies, among them Platonism (Ficino, Pico della Mirandola), skepticism (Montaigne), secularism (Machiavelli), and various forms of Christianity (Erasmus, More, Richard Hooker, Melanchthon, Calvin).' It is not surprising, therefore, that in England the puritans and humanists were quite often same people.5 Cotton Mather is most impressive exemplar of humanist tradition in American Puritanism. His magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana (I702), is not only a history of Puritan New England and a glorification of its faith; it is also a work whose style and rhetoric reveal his adherence to humanist literary prin-