SOURCE: "Reformation Is Our Only Preservation': Cotton Mather and Salem Witchcraft," in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, April, 1972, pp. 281-90.

In the following essay, Werking discusses Mather's role in a Boston witchcraft case of 1688 and explores the role Mather sought to play in the "Puritan mission in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts. "

Accounts of Cotton Mather's connection with the Salem witchcraft episode are hardly new. From Robert Calef's denunciations of the younger Mather in the 1690s to Chadwick Hansen's efforts in the 1960s to vindicate him, historians have expended considerable effort either attacking or defending his behavior in the Salem affair.¹ Charles W. Upham, politician and Unitarian minister at Salem in the mid-nineteenth century, was particularly vociferous in his attacks on the Puritan clergy in general and Cotton Mather in particular. He accused Mather of "getting up" the Salem tragedy by publicizing a case of witchcraft that...