Writing "To Conquer All Things": Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana and the Quandary of Copia

While he thus devoured books, it came to pass that books devoured him.

—Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

Ever since its first publication in 1702, critics have regularly censured the Magnalia Christi Americana for being a vainglorious attempt at displaying the author's rhetorical brilliance and universal erudition. Mather's belated piece of colonial or "Puritan Baroque" (Warren 112) was often branded as an overly ornate conglomerate of learned references lacking in originality and coherence.¹ Taking up arguments already used against Mather in his own time, the derogatory judgment which William Tudor, the first editor of the North American Review, passed on the book in 1818 probably left the most enduring mark. His caustic comment on the Magnalia's "numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps [. . .] to deform the surface," and his consequent disapproval of Mather as a "pedantick, and garrulous writer" have continued to reverberate through the negative responses of many readers well into the twentieth century (Tudor 256, 272).²

It is only during the last few decades that representatives of modern literary and cultural criticism have begun to reevaluate Mather's so thoroughly discredited technique of intertextual composition. In their interpretations these scholars have explained the peculiarly florid style of the Magnalia in terms of Mather's stubborn adherence to a baroque notion of rhetorical and literary perfection which was already beginning to give way to the new aesthetics of neoclassicism when the work was published. From this historicist perspective, the Magnalia's verbal opulence has been rightly understood as originating in Mather's wish to fulfill the stylistic ideal of copia that was widely propagated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theories of letters, amongst which Erasmus's De duplici copia verborum ac rerum comentarii duo is the most prominent and influential.³ It has been acknowledged that the Puritan intellectual, like many European scholars before him, considered copious writing—in the original technical sense of the term—as a mode of approaching something like a universal science or "oneness of knowledge" (Manierre, "Cotton Mather," 154). Yet Mather scholarship has not undertaken an in-depth study of the underlying ideological or theological premises and motivations that make the stylistic ideal of copia so central to the entire project of the Magnalia. Intending to fill this gap, I will pay special attention to the specifically colonial or American dimension of the copia problem neglected by existing studies. Has the Magnalia, despite all the aesthetic criticism leveled at it over the centuries, not also frequently been interpreted as one of the initial texts of a genuinely American literary tradition? How, then, can this idea of Mather as an exemplary figurehead of a national literature avant la léttre, put forth by such renowned scholars as Sacvan Bercovitch, be harmonized with this diametrically opposed criticism? Thus, on the one hand, Mather's readers have frequently emphasized the highly intertextual quality of his writing, thereby implying the literary dependence of the Magnalia on, or its determination by, the numerous, and mostly European sources from which it borrows. On the other hand, we are confronted with the postulate that the Magnalia constitutes a genuine expression of the New World experience in the form of representative American (auto-)biography (Bercovitch, "'Nehemias'"). My suggestion is that this apparent aporia in the history of the Magnalia's reception is intimately connected with the contradictory nature of the ideal of copia itself and the particular way Mather defined it as the basis of his ambitious literary project. In order to investigate the central role of the copia problem for a deepened understanding of the work and its ambivalent reputation, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will (re)consider Mather's own statements about the representational goals of the Magnalia in the numerous metatextual commentaries of the book. Second, I will examine how these self-defined goals are intertwined with the notion of copious writing, and how they are simultaneously problematized and even undermined by the very same ideal. Finally, having established this...