SOURCE: "Verbal Patterns in Cotton Mather's Magnalia," in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, December, 1961, pp. 402-13.

In the essay below, Manierre focuses on the Magnalia in his analysis of Mather's writing style and suggests some of the consequences of "appropriating to the written language techniques apparently more suited to the spoken."

In 1702, at the age of thirty-nine. Cotton Mather, champion of Puritan orthodoxy ("Puritan Priest," Barrett Wendell called him), third and last of Boston's great ministerial triumvirate of Mather,¹ indefatigable preacher of sermons, most prolific of all American writers and a conscious stylist in all that he wrote, enjoyed, after more than four years of nervous anticipation, his first sight of the published version of his masterpiece, the monumental church history of New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana.² In this vast work, which covers in seven books the settlement of New England, the lives of...