Cotton Mather and a Medieval American Mythography

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) is recognized as one of early America’s most prolific authors, and he wrote histories, religious and political pamphlets, as well as biblical commentaries. He is perhaps best known for Magnalia Christi Americana (The Mighty Works of Christ in America), completed in 1702, which describes the origins and development of religion in New England. The work is filled with obscure references from the broader western intellectual tradition, to the extent that in 1818 William Tudor famously described the work as “a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds . . . interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface.” Mather’s overuse of quotations is perhaps a result of his desire to prove himself an educated writer; however, the obscure references also carefully frame early America as the rightful, divine heir to European thought.

Lost amidst the chaos is a brief quotation from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731) which testifies to Mather’s desire to create a religious mythography embedded in English Christian identity. Bede, who was a monk in northern England in the early eighth century, is considered one of the great thinkers of the medieval world and the father of English history. Bede, therefore, by extension also acts as a founding figure for England’s own national identity. Though Bede’s writing does not frequently appear in the Magnalia, Mather certainly wished to model himself after Bede as an author and historian. After a new edition of the Magnalia was released in 1977, E.R. Hardy described Mather as “The Venerable Bede of New England,” though Mather’s desire to imitate Bede’s Historia is perhaps most vividly reflected in his decision to supplement his history’s Latin title with the English subtitle “The Ecclesiastical History of New England from Its First Planting in 1620, until the Year of Our Lord 1698.”

Bede writing, from a 12th-century copy of his Life of St Cuthbert (British Library, Yates Thompson MS 26, f. 2r)

Without doubt, Mather saw himself as participating in the intellectual traditions that produced Bede, but more specifically as part of Bede’s own lineage of Christian scholar-historians. For Bede, writing history was more than an intellectual or antiquarian pursuit. As historian Alan Thacker writes, “To study and to write history was to participate in a dynamic process: the unfolding of God’s purposes for mankind as the world moved towards final judgement and the end of time.” To this end, Bede uses hagiography throughout the Historia to demonstrate how individual lives participate, even unknowingly, within this broader divine purpose that embeds God’s plan within England’s national identity. Mather likewise draws extensively on hagiographic conventions throughout the Magnalia, setting up early American figures such as William Bradford and Edward Winslow as pseudo-saints through whom God’s will for the nation comes to be enacted. However, while Bede’s Historia spans nearly 700 years of history, from the Roman settlement of Britain to his own present, Mather’s history can only address a period of eighty years, merely a generation or so of American lives. Mather writes his history in part as a record of early American life, but more importantly to establish an archive of American identity.

The Magnalia frames the foundation of American identity as an extension of English Christian history—a history that itself can be traced to the arrival of Christianity in a land of “savages.” Just as the early chapters of Bede’s Historia attest to the persecution of Christians in Britain by ruthless pagan kings and the subsequent conversion of the British peoples, Mather opens his Magnalia stating that “the wonders of Christian religion, flying from the depravations of Europe to the American strand . . . hath irradiated an Indian wilderness.” Later in the Magnalia he writes that the “Lord Jesus hath more of a visible interest in New England than any of the outgoings of the English nation in America” because the gospel had been preached to and accepted by “the poor barbarous, savage heathens there.” Here we see one locus in which ideas of American exceptionalism take root under the banner of conquest and conversion.

The parallel narratives of colonization and conversion bind English and American Christian history, and the intersection of conquest and religion serve as the backdrop for Mather’s only citation from Bede’s Historia. The Magnalia often focuses on the power of God in places of power, and Mather’s life of Sir William Phips (which appears under the running Latin title Pietas in Patrium) depicts the fulfillment of God’s plan through Phips, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.  He describes Phips’s journey from New England to Britain, which he undertakes to settle political disputes in the court of King William III. Phips wished to discuss a number of concerns before the king, including French Canada’s threat to New England. According to Mather, the king’s stake in America was at risk because “the New Englanders were now grown too feeble: their country being too far now, as Bede says England once was, Omni Milite & Floridae Juventutis Alacritate Spoliata” (despoiled of young and lively soldiers). Mather is here referencing Bede’s description of the Britons who, after the departure of the Roman military, were unable to defend themselves against the Scots and the Picts. Bede writes of this moment:

Exin Brittania in parte Brettonum omni armato milite, militaribus copiis uniuersis, tota floridae iuuentutis alacritate spoliata, quae tyrannorum temeritate abducta nusquam ultra domum rediit.

(From that time Britain, or the British part of it, which had been stripped of all its armed men, its military supplies, and the whole flower of its active youth, who by the imprudence of tyrants had been carried away, never to return.)

Through this reference, Mather depicts Phips as urging the king to recall his obligations in America and not to act as the Roman tyrants who abandoned the British to plunder and conquest. Mather’s account of Phips in King William’s court uses Bede to link New England’s current military shortcomings to early English history, evoking a precedent for New England’s own precarity while also reminding the reader of God’s divine interest in British America. According to Bede’s Historia, the inability of the Britons to defend themselves against the Picts and Scots, themselves wicked pagans, instigated a cycle of moral decay, famine, and plunder that would not be brought to a close until the invasion of the Saxons around 450. Consequently, for Bede, and arguably for Mather as well, military success evidences divine affirmations, while failure is a precursor to moral decay and indicative of God’s abandonment.

Mather’s description of Phips’s appeal for aid in the colonization of French-held Canadian lands suggests also an appeal to imperialist fantasy. Bede portrays the Saxon conquest of the British, who were too morally and physically weak to fight back, as an act that was Domini nutu dispositum esse constat ut uenerit contra inprobos malum (ordained by the will of God, so that evil might fall upon the evil). As N.J. Higham reminds us, Bede’s depiction of the conquest that brought about English rule in Britain portrays the English “as exercising imperium over the Britons, and they were in that respect being portrayed as an imperial race . . . The Britons were, by contrast, damned as obstinate heretics . . . subject to the power of the English as well as an unyielding and anglophile God.” Mather’s appeal to Bede is, in the end, an appeal to Western imperial continuity in which those who conquer do so under the protection and blessing of God’s divine judgment ruling in favor of or against a people.

Pilgrim Grace by Henry Mossler

Mather’s history is not history per se, but rather, as Sacvan Bercovitch wrote in 1966, a recasting of “fact into image and symbol,” through which the story of new England is raised “into a heroic world.” Mather frames America’s origins within a divinely sanctioned plan of military conquest and imperialism, and in doing so he hopes to set the tenor of whatever American history might follow in the centuries to come. Mather’s pseudo-hagiographic narratives in the Magnalia lay the groundwork for an American mythology of exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and global military presence. His Magnalia is a good reminder that history is never past; it is always present. This is especially striking when the only recently passed present is deliberately construed to evoke a history that feels much further removed than it actually is. By reaching back to Bede’s description of righteous conquest, Mather also casts American origins as something deeply rooted in time and tradition—an inheritance that cannot be revoked.

Breann received her PhD in the English Department, Medieval Studies program, at the University of Connecticut in 2018. She specializes in early English literature and language (700-1300), material culture, archive theory, and queer temporality.