Cotton Mather's ‘Biblia Americana: the sacred Scriptures of the Old and New Testament illustrated’ was one of the largest and most significant unpublished manuscripts of the early modern period. From 1693 till his death in 1728 Mather filled over 4,500 folio pages with commentaries drawn from a wide range of contemporary works and his own annotations to ‘reconcile new insights emerging from the nascent fields of textual-historical criticism, the natural sciences, and doctrinal teachings of his forbears’ (p. 15). This was the first extensive commentary on the entire Bible prepared in America. It is currently being edited and published by a team headed by Reineer Smolinski and Jan Stievermann. The plan is for ten thick volumes comprising over 10,000 pages. Four volumes have already appeared. The overall project has prompted a reevaluation of Cotton Mather and his role in Atlantic Puritanism, as well as Protestant theology and biblical studies in an important transitional period of intellectual history.
Jan Stieverman is the editor of volume v in the series, Proverbs–Jeremiah (2015), and the book under review reflects what he has learned from Mather's work on those Old Testament books as well as Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Isaiah. Stievermann offers a three-fold perspective. First, he seeks to establish how Mather engaged with these Old Testament books as Christian Scripture. Secondly, he uses Mather's work to develop new insights into ‘the development of New England theology and its engagement with the Bible, as well as the often misunderstood biblical orientation of American Puritan identity and culture during a period of change’. Third, the ‘Biblia’ commentaries on these five books of the Old Testament provide a window into
an understudied and underappreciated phase in the Protestant history of biblical interpretation situated before the rise of German ‘Higher Criticism’ but in which critical concerns and historical-textual methods were already well developed. (p.10)
Stievermann carefully guides the reader through the challenges to traditional readings of the Bible posed by Spinoza, Grotius and others and how Mather responded to them. He discusses the controversies over the authorship and provenance of the five books. He examines prefigurative approaches to the texts, typological readings and allegorical readings. Part v focuses on Old Testament prophecies – those believed to concern the history of the Church, the messianic prophecies and the eschatological prophecies. According to Stievermann, in ‘its design and format, combining scholarly, speculative, apologetical, and practical inquiries’, it provides ‘countless new possibilities for studying the development of biblical interpretation in America, and Mather's intellectual, cultural, and ecclesial world more broadly’ (p. 82). The popular judgement on Cotton Mather will be difficult to overturn. But in the course of this volume Stievermann makes a thoughtful case for Mather's importance.
