This document and many other Mather manuscripts and books are housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society library in Boston.
Cotton Mather's early education was in the classical tradition, and he was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard College. He was a melancholy child and suffered from a stammer that plagued him throughout his life as a minister. He was apparently never very popular with his peers at school or with his congregations, and he was thought by most to be a pedant and a selfrighteous prig, the modern stereotype of the New England Puritan. All of the Mathers are unfortunately (and often inaccurately) identified with a false image of New England Puritanism and its harsher doctrines, but Increase and Cotton Mather were unusually enlightened colonists and were responsible for the acceptance of the smallpox vaccination in New England when it was introduced in the early eighteenth century. Cotton Mather was married three times, and he was the father of a large family of children, most of whom he buried as the result of loss to disease or tragedy. He lived an extremely full and varied life and was hardly, in an intellectual or historical context, a biblical fundamentalist or pulpitthumping revival minister.
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