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Clio in the Wilderness: History and Biography in Puritan New England*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
In the spring of 1697 the Reverend John Higginson of Salem finished writing a laudatory “Attestation” for Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. Higginson was enghty-one. He had lived in New England for nearly seventy years, and sixty of them had been devoted to the ministry. He had, he worte, “seen all that the Lord hath done for his people” in the Puritan colonies and rejoiced that a younger colleague had recorded it in a volume of history and biography, because he was sure that the book was, in substance, purpose, and scope “according to truth” and would be of “maninfold advantage and usefulness”. In elaboration of this he listed in his “Attestation” some ways in which he thought the Magnalia would serve “great and good ends”.
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References
1. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford, 1855), I, 15.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., I, 15–16.
3. Ibid.
4. Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), especially pp. 100 ff., 302–303;Google ScholarMiller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas H., The Puritans (New York, 1938)Google Scholar, Chapters I and V; Murdoek, Kenneth B., Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapter III.
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27. Ibid., I, 28.
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29. Ibid., I, 239.
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34. Ibid., I, 3–4.
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39. Ibid., I, 113, 114.
40. Ibid., I, 118, 131.
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46. Ibid.
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51. Keach, Benjamin, Tropologia, or A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (London, 1681–1682) Book IV, p. 391.Google Scholar
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53. Ibid., I, 17.
54. Ibid., I, 16.
55. Johnson, , Wonder-working Providence, p. 248.Google Scholar
56. The quotations from Dr. Oppenheimer are from the New York Times for Desember 27, 1954.
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