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Richard Mather of Dorchester (Book Review)
Get PDFReviewed Title: Richard Mather of Dorchester, by B. R. Burg. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 1976. 207 pages
Richard Mather of Dorchester
No full textMather is a well-known name in the persons of Increase and Cotton Mather. Here for the first time is a biography of the father and grandfather, respectively, of those two great figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Richard Mather left few personal records of his life in the form of letters, diaries, or autobiographical writings. In his research, Mr. Burg sought out little used ecclesiastical records in England, pieced together events from inferences and deductions, and analyzed by sociological, psychological, and anthropological methods the life of this seventeenth-century divine. As a result, Mather here emerges from the historical evidence in brief but brilliant flashes, revealing a man with a desperate need to verify his own personal worth and to make valid the way he had chosen to direct his life and to worship his God. Through this study of Richard Mather, Mr. Burg illuminates the struggles of the first generation settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Mather was the author of a considerable corpus of unpublished and published writings. Ever seeking to enhance his reputation as a polemicist and biblical exegete, he spent much of his time penning theological treatises that set forth the true faith of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While he was sought out a number of times by his colleagues to defend the religious practices of the new colony to those who had remained in the mother country, the task of writing the major defenses of New England doctrine and polity was entrusted to clerics such as John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Thomas Shepard—a situation that continually irritated the Dorchester clergyman.
Mather’s career, although marked by minor victories, was in his own estimation characterized by major defeats. It was on those defeats, affronts, and rejections that Richard Mather built his life. The reconstruction of his experiences—both in England and in America—reveals a man of the preindustrial world whose very ordinariness makes his life significant. His biography provides a broader understanding of the ordinary pastors and teachers in seventeenth- century Massachusetts Bay.
B. R. Burg is associate professor of history at Arizona State University.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_new_religious_movements/1000/thumbnail.jp
Margery Vosse and Richard Mather , Ralph Pemberton, June 18, 1683; June 19, 1683
Get PDFLetter dated June 18 and 19, 1683 (June 8 and 9, 1683 Old Style) from Richard Mather and Margery Vosse to Ralph Pemberton
The Life and Death of That Reverend Man of God, Richard Mather, Teacher of the Church in Dorchester in New-England. A facsimile Reprint with an introduction ...
Get PDFWe most often turn to American Puritan prose to glean historicalor biographical data. If we seek a biography that spans the evolution of American Puritanism from its nadir in England through its zenith in the New England of the 1630\u27s to 1650\u27s, and to the beginning of its decline as symbolized by the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, we may turn to Increase Mather\u27s biography of his father, The Life and Death of That Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather. It includes the background for the elder Mather\u27s decision to emigrate to New England (events leading to his suspension from his ministry for nonconformity), his arguments for leaving England (to go from ministerial bondage to freedom), and his account of the voyage to Boston (including the episode of a storm at sea in which his ship was saved by God\u27s intervention). Increase also reflects on his father\u27s parish in Dorchester (in which his plain style of preaching was precisely the style demanded by his congregation), and limns a vivid portrait of the old man on his death bed attempting to convince him, Increase, that the Half-Way Covenant would be in the best interest of Puritanism. To be sure, the biography deals almost entirely with the elder Mather\u27s involvement in his religion and it may be read as a historical document, but it is neither ponderous nor boring and it possesses, as Kenneth Murdock says, a simple dignity that comes close to art (Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan). The author\u27s use of anecdote (Gillebrand\u27 s questioning of Richard Mather\u27s name); of direct discourse (the dying Puritan\u27s statement concerning the younger generation); and of excerpts from his father\u27s diary and will all help the biography escape the ennui-producing sameness that characterizes other Puritan biographies (see Kenneth B. Murdock Literature and Theology in Colonial New England).
The tone of this biography, while eulogistic, is one of compassion, understanding, or sympathy--the result of a son\u27s sincere appreciation of his father\u27s life and heritage--and it is this that accounts for the ease with which it may be read today. The author\u27s attitude leaves no room for the overt didacticism and pedantry and the overabundant use of religious allusions that are prevalent in many Puritan tracts, not the least ponderous of which are the biographical sketches in Cotton Mather\u27s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Increase Mather is peaceful and serene throughout, an unusual pose among Puritan writers whose works were influenced by the rebellious nature of their omnipresent religion. This biography shares with other Puritan biographies the trait of providing an impulse-~through its description of a visible saint --for errant sinners to come to God, but it differs from most of them since its purpose is neither to defend the religion against its antagonists nor to castigate the heathens. Instead, it is a tender--but not sentimental--eulogy of a man who embodied the whole of American Puritanism.
The Life and Death of· . Richard Mather has been published in its entirety only twice since its first appearance in 1670 (Collections of the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, 1850, 1874). A new edition of this biography--Increase Mather\u27s first work published in New England and the first biography published in America--is now offered in facsimile, that the charm as well as the content of the original may be shared. (Also reproduced here is the first woodcut print produced in America, John Foster\u27s Richard Mather, c. 1670.) This biography of Richard Mather does not constitute great literature, but there can be little doubt that it is, as Perry Miller says, the finest of the New England biographies (The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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