Letter from Cotton Mather to William Stoughton, September 2, 1692
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In a letter dated September 2, 1692, Cotton Mather wrote to William Stoughton. Among the notable things about this letter is the provenance: it seems to be the last important correspondence from Cotton Mather to surface in modern times, with the holograph manuscript not arriving in the archives for scholars to view, and authenticate, until sometime between 1978 and 1985. [1]
1985: A Notable Year in the Mather Historiography
There are some indications that the arrival of this letter was not exactly welcome among certain twentieth century scholars of the colonial period. [2] David Levin points out that the letter demonstrates the timeline used by both "Thomas J. Holmes and Perry Miller" is off by "three weeks." Another problem would seem to be the substance of the letter and whether it agrees with the popular twentieth century view of Cotton Mather. [3] Writing in the same year, as Levin, Harold Jantz had submitted an essay describing various frauds and fakes and he included the AAS typescript copy of the September 2 letter calling it a "nasty, pathological" forgery. But in an addendum to the essay, Jantz writes that just before publication "barely in time for this added note, new information reached me about the letter... at present the manuscript is firmly labelled as 'original' and 'holograph'" [4] Yet as Jantz continues the essay, he still seems to harbor suspicions, referring to the letter's "author" instead of Cotton Mather. [5]
The same year as the Jantz essay, 1985, Kenneth Silverman had been awarded a Pulitzer and a Bancroft Prize for a biography of Cotton Mather published the year before, 1984.[6]Unlike Jantz, Silverman's introduction to the September 2, 1692 letter in his book of Cotton Mather correspondence (1971) does not directly dispute the authenticity of the letter beyond saying the holograph could not be located, but his basic assessment of Cotton Mather ("he did not want to defend [the trials]") [7] suggests that Silverman, like TJ Holmes, Perry Miller, Jantz (and perhaps also Levin who published a biography of Cotton Mather in 1978), did not believe the typescript copy of the letter was authentic and this likely affected their work published prior to their knowledge of the holograph in 1985.
Establishing the Authenticity of the Holograph
According to Jantz, the original manuscript of the letter was sold by the widow of the collector who once owned it to the Boston College and David Levin had reaffirmed the authenticity and "double checked with some of the experts who had verified Mather's handwriting at the time of acquisition..." and found the paper "of the right age." Neither Jantz nor Levin seem to have noted that the letter could be further verified by a line of handwriting by William Stoughton[8] (the AAS typescript also contains this line at the end, copied with a pen) a paraphrased version of this opening line was reprinted by Cotton Mather in his book some weeks later. [9] Stacy Schiff, writing thirty years after Jantz and Levin, seems to be the first person on record to take notice of this fact, "Stoughton began his fulsome reply on the verso." Schiff also notes the location of the holograph at Boston College. [10]
Recent Notice of the Letter
In the 30 years between 1985 and 2015, there appears to have been little notice of the letter or its location and availability for scholarship in the archives.[11]
Clive Holmes in an essay from 2016 underscores the importance of the content of the September 2 letter and makes note of the typescript at AAS (but not the holograph at Boston College) and suggests Silverman's abridgment of the letter in 1971 was overly severe.[12] If Silverman was working within a lineage that distrusted the authenticity of the AAS typescript, as the 1985 essays by Jantz and Levin suggest, it would be understandable why his reprint of the letter in 1971 was truncated.
Digital copies of the letter are now available via email from both AAS (original typescript) and Boston College (holograph).
References
- ^ David Levin provides this range of dates in note 19 of his 1985 essay (available as PDF from AAS) "DId the Mathers Disagree About the Salem Witchcraft Trials" p 36. Levin's note also discusses the typescript copy that was the only version available to scholars previous to K. Silverman's reprint of the letter 1971. Levin does not offer provenance date for the AAS typescript copy. I have been unable to find a single reference to this letter previous to Silverman in 1971. (For further discussion see Talk page of this article.)
- ^ Levin "Did the Mathers Disagree" p. 35.
- ^ Also see Jantz essay for further reflections on TJ Holmes.
- ^ Harold Jantz, "Fictions and Inventions in Early America" in Mythos und Aufklarung in der Amerikanishen Literature (Erlangen, 1985) p 6-9, 16-19
- ^ Jantz, Fictions p 17
- ^ For a 2017 description of the book, see (NYTimes Obituary)
- ^ Silverman, Letters p 31
- ^ Verified by script expert Margo Burns via email April 30, 2017.
- ^ Cotton Mather "Wonders of the Invisible World" ed SG Drake, (1865) Vol. I. Stoughton letter is p 5-6. This volume and the other two in Drakes "Witchcraft Delusion" series (volumes II and III being a full reprint of Robert Calef's book) can be found online, including here.
- ^ Stacy Schiff, "The Witches" (New York, 2015) Chapt IX, p 286.
- ^ A recent websearch (Aug 10, 2017) for the letter brought up a copy in online Salem archives (copyright 2010 Benjamin Ray) seems to match K. Silverman's abridged reprint of the letter and is correctly addressed to Stoughton but is missing any reference to Cotton Mather. (I have a screenshot.) Bernard Rosenthal's "Records of the Salem Witchhunt" (2009) only notice of the letter is a non-sequitor folded into an unrelated note with no citation or location information for the letter. Emerson Baker in "Storm of Witchcraft" (2014) mentions the date and information that would seem to come from the letter without citation or location information.
- ^ Clive Holmes, "Reconsiderations" in New England Quarterly, December 2016
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