The lesser-known legacy of Cotton Mather
You probably know the name Cotton Mather.
He was the Boston-born Puritan minister whose name became synonymous with the phrase “witch hunt” for his connection to the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, who zealously fulminated against witchcraft and all those alleged to practice it—regardless of evidence to the contrary—and over time became an archetypal bad guy in the public imagination.
This image of Mather also entered pop culture. Marvel Comics once introduced a gaunt, scary-eyed supervillain with mystical powers named Cotton Mather (alias “The Witch-Slayer”) who brought the super-heroine Scarlet Witch back to 17th-century Salem in an unsuccessful attempt to execute her. The 2014-2017 supernatural horror TV series “Salem,” very loosely based on the Salem Witch Trials, portrayed Mather as caught between his Puritan faith—the source of his anti-witch fervor—and lustful desires; he winds up seduced by, then married to a witch.
Boston College doctoral student Andrew Juchno understands that this unfavorable interpretation of Mather is widespread. But a recently published book he co-edited, Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society, offers a reminder of Mather’s other legacy: his widely acknowledged contributions to medicine and science, notably his advocacy for smallpox inoculation.
The book comprises Mather’s dispatches between 1712 and 1724 to the Royal Society of London, a distinguished academy established in 1660 to promote excellence in science for the benefit of humanity. The more than 80 letters, known collectively as Curiosa Americana, contain Mather’s observations and theories related to natural sciences, astronomy, botany, medicine, and the nascent fields of embryology and epidemiology.
Mather presents a classic dilemma for historians and others who research and write about controversial figures: How to square a person’s positive contributions and good works with the troubling, objectionable aspects of his or her life? Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society is not intended to minimize Mather’s part in the hysteria over witchcraft, says Juchno—cautioning that Mather’s role in the witch trials has often been misrepresented—but rather to depict him as a prototypical Age of Enlightenment figure.
Andrew Juchno (Caitlin Cunningham)
Juchno and his co-editors, Georgia State University Professor Emeritus of English Reiner Smolinski and Yale University Jonathan Edwards Center Director Kenneth Minkema, assembled the Curiosa Americana correspondence from several different sources, including the Royal Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Harvard University. While historians have long written about and referenced Mather’s letters, the book represents the first complete, edited, and annotated collection.
To understand Mather, according to Juchno, it is useful to remember that the Enlightenment bridged philosophy, science, literature, history, economics, and other disciplines. Despite the Enlightenment’s largely secular character, even a devoutly religious man like the Harvard-educated Mather found a place within the movement.
Mather was greatly interested in microscopical anatomy, note Juchno and his co-editors, and having his own microscope enabled him to follow debates among European scholars on subjects such as how organisms like the “animalcules” (germs) in the blood, semen, or seeds of plants originated. He also weighed in on curious phenomena like Potentia imaginativa, the formative power of the imagination and its psychosomatic impact on pregnant mothers: He sought to explain how the imagination—especially with violent emotions such as anger, fear, revulsion, or unfulfilled cravings—exerted harmful vibrations on a fetus developing in a mother’s womb.
“The Royal Society was dedicated to gathering knowledge about the physical world and invited people from the colonies to share their thoughts about subjects related to weather, vegetation, and animal behavior, among many other things,” said Juchno. “Mather was very industrious in his correspondence, and offered detailed observations about natural phenomena, which the Royal Society appreciated.”
Among the more famous Mather letters concerned his efforts to combat the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston. A man he had enslaved, Onesimus, had told him of a long-used West African procedure which involved rubbing or scraping dried pus from a smallpox patient into the skin of a healthy person: The recipient would usually develop a mild case of pox that conferred lifetime immunity. Mather convinced a doctor to try this technique, and all but six of the 247 people he inoculated survived.
A storm of controversy followed Mather’s call for smallpox inoculation, with numerous doctors and local officials denouncing the procedure. At one point, someone hurled a lighted grenade into Mather’s house, but the device did not detonate. History did largely validate Mather, however, and it would be more than 75 years before Edward Jenner developed the cowpox vaccine that became the standard anti-smallpox treatment.
“Mather was brilliant in many ways, a polymath who could read in eight languages,” said Juchno. “He also was relentlessly driven by his religious views, and everything was refracted through his faith. That set him somewhat apart from the members of the Royal Society.
“For example, Mather studied thunder and lightning, and he gathered data on storms that was very useful. But then he added a second layer to it, which involved examples of divine providence and the evidence of sin. He wasn’t an outlier in his interests, but the force with which he communicated through his religious beliefs was quite profound.”
Juchno doesn’t expect the public image of Mather to be rehabilitated by Curiosa Americana, but then that isn’t the purpose of the book.
“The best we can do is to identify the instances where Mather helps push ahead our understanding of science and nature, even as he bears responsibility for reinforcing some unenlightened views. But the judgment of his actions and beliefs also has to be rendered in the context of that time—not as a way to excuse the behavior, but as a way of understanding human existence.”
For more on Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society, visit the publisher's website.