Mather, Cotton:

$13,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA: OR, THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRST PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620. UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN ... The first edition of what Streeter calls "the most famous American book of colonial times." Mather's opus is an indispensable source for the history of New England in the 17th century, both for its biographies and its history of civil, religious, and military affairs. As Mather biographer Kenneth Silverman explains, the Magnalia, as published in the first London edition of 1702, "was unmistakably a grandly imagined and formidable work: about eight hundred folio pages of double columns, divided in seven substantial books - history of the settlement of New England; lives of the governors; lives of the leading ministers (the longest book); history of Harvard College, with the lives of eminent graduates; account of the New England manner of worship; 'Remarkables of Divine Providence'; and a history of the invasion of the New England churches by heretics, Andros, devils, Indians, and others. Mather gathered this information industriously and from many sources: surviving diaries, letters, and other papers; his father's correspondence; the manuscript histories of New England by William Hubbard and William Bradford; personal acquaintance with surviving members of the earlier generations, the sermon notebooks in which he had taken down their words firsthand, informants who had known them." Far from being a dull chronicle of

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