cotton mather the wonders of the invisible world sparknotes

The existence of La Fe del Christiano and the conditions that shaped its production and legibility help situate early New England intellectual life as deeply embedded within a transnational American hemisphere. Gruesz, a renowned scholar of early American and Latinx literature, asks a series of provocative questions that Mather’s almost entirely forgotten book inspires: What does it mean that Mather cared about Spanish America? How did he even learn Spanish in Massachusetts, a provincial English colony? What intellectual, material, and interpersonal circumstances surrounded the writing and printing of a book in that language? Gruesz is at the forefront of comparative methodologies in early American literary study and is well positioned to answer these questions. With Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons, Gruesz uses the insights of Latinx Studies to explode the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time. With this book, Mather wanted to distill Protestant teachings in order to convert Catholics further south in the Americas. Known for his writings on Salem and for patriotic epics like Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather was also the author of the first Spanish-language book printed in the geographic area that later became the United States: La Fe del Christiano, or The Faith of the Christian, a small pamphlet that appeared in Boston in 1699. It is a surprising move, but her book begins with compelling material evidence. But in her revolutionary new book, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas, Kirsten Silva Gruesz sets aside Mather the witch hunter to center him instead in a fascinating new story about race. Mather was among the most articulate defenders of the Salem witch trials, an unfortunate choice that has largely defined his place in American history. He had much to vex him during his life, including the devil himself, who rose up in Salem at the end of the 17th century with a “Hellish Design of Bewitching, and Ruining our Land,” as he put it in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693). COTTON MATHER LIES at rest with other Puritans at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End.

Cotton mather the wonders of the invisible world sparknotes