SOURCE: "Cotton Mather Revisited," in Massachusetts Studies in English, Vol. I, No. 2, Fall, 1967, pp. 30-8.

In the essay below, Duffy reviews Mather's treatment by historians and argues that modern scholars should reconsider the unattractive stereotype that has prevailed.

One may rummage around among the characters of American history for a good long time without finding a figure who has been so badly treated as Cotton Mather, that old New England puritan divine about whom Barrett Wendell said, "There is still good ground for believing that it was a good man they buried on Copp's Hill one February day in the year 1728."¹ But those who have written about Cotton Mather during the past one hundred years have cut that good ground right out from under him in what might almost appear to be a conspiracy of unkindness or even malice. But in his own time, the late seventeenth and...