Reviving Puritan History: Evangelicalism, Antiquarianism, and Mather’s Magnalia in Antebellum America

By the time Cotton Mather died in 1728, his two-volume church history, the Magnalia Christi Americana, had all but vanished in England and America. As one of New England’s most prominent and controversial Puritan figures, Mather represented a generation of colonists and a theological stance that, like his book, was quickly receding into the past.¹ The Magnalia is an exhaustive historical account of colonial New England that includes descriptions of the founding of specific Puritan congregations and seminaries, accounts of spiritual trials and martyrdom, and celebrations of God’s providential care over the Puritans. But despite the prominence of its author, the usefulness of its records, and the optimism of its theological message, a complete American edition of the Magnalia did not exist until almost 120 years after its first printing in London in 1702.²

In 1820, the Magnalia was saved from obscurity by a Connecticut minister and antiquarian, Thomas Robbins. Robbins’s decision to publish the first American edition of the Magnalia was driven by his involvement in two significant national movements between 1820 and 1855: the Second Great Awakening and the emergence of American antiquarianism, or as David Van Tassel terms it, “Documania” (103). All who knew him felt that Robbins represented the spirit of the Puritan fathers in his duties as pastor and antiquarian. In a tribute to Robbins published in the Round Table on January 6, 1866, and appended to Robbins’s diary, Dr. Henry R. Stiles, a well-known Brooklyn historian and genealogist, wrote affectionately of an older Robbins pacing the halls of the Connecticut Historical Society, speaking with anyone willing to hear about his artifacts.³ Stiles depicts Robbins as “a venerable little white-haired man, in an old-fashioned costume of black, with small-clothes, white silk stockings, and knee-buckles” navigating the masses of “old portraits, old chairs and chests out of the Mayflower, Captain Miles Standish’s dinner-pot, Indian relics, worm-eaten manuscripts, old battle-flags . . . and scraps of ancient costume” (Diary 1081). All accounts of Robbins portray him as a kind of Puritan antiquity, “the last of a line of New England divines” (1082). In his obituary, Robbins is described as being “representative of the manners of the early generation of Puritan ministers” and a “connecting link between the present generation and the Puritan period of New England History” (Barnard 280). Surely Robbins’s commitment to the life of the Puritans (and his resemblance of that life) inspired his efforts to reprint the long-lost Magnalia.

While recent criticism situates the Magnalia reprints in the context of the American Renaissance and view its contributions as chiefly literary, I argue that the material circumstances of the book’s reprinting make it a participant in the multidimensional discourses of faith, history, and nation in antebellum New England. The Magnalia reprint affords the opportunity to see connections between two movements that we might assume are incongruent. The Second Great Awakening is known as an evangelically motivated movement marked by a millennialist theology and a commitment to social concerns like temperance and prison reform, while the antiquarian movement is seen as part of the “remarkable rise of historical consciousness” in the antebellum period that yielded a surge in historical fiction and nonfiction (Callcott vii). Yet evangelical revivalism and anti-quarianism possessed similar motivations and characteristics in the early nineteenth century, not the least of which was a desire to establish a sustaining historical narrative of America’s development from colony to nation. Robbins’s reprinting of Mather’s Magnalia demonstrates the close relationship between antiquarianism and evangelical revivalism in the 1820s, a relationship fostered by American print culture.⁴

By reprinting the Magnalia in 1820 and again in 1855, Robbins not only made the book accessible to a wider reading public but also circulated Mather’s ideas in the context of this emerging historical discourse and religious revival. In addition, changes made between the first and second American editions of the book denote the changing historical moments in which they were published. New features added to the 1855 edition suggest a...