Reiner Smolinski

• PhD
• Professor at Georgia State University

An authoritative selection of the writings of one of the most important early American writers. “A brilliant collection that reveals the extraordinary range of Cotton Mather’s interests and contributions—by far the best introduction to the mind of the Puritan divine.”—Francis J. Bremer, author of Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism. C...

Edgar Allan Poe's political conservativism can be traced in some of his best short stories and sketches, including Fall of the Houses of Usher

Cotton Mather’s mythic image rests largely on his involvement in the Salem witchcraft debacle (1692–93) and on his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693). The work aims at several purposes. On the one hand, Wonders is New England’s official defense of the court’s verdict and testimony to the power of Satan and his minions; on the other, it is Mather...

We don't know if the father of psychoanalysis and formulator of the pro-verbial Oedipus complex appreciated the implicit irony of symbolically "kill-ing" the father of monotheism – in denying Moses his Hebrew parentage. There is no doubt, however, that for Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries more than mere curiosity in the mythic founder of Judais...

All early Americanists owe a great debt to the faithful labor of William J. Scheick, who for nearly three decades prepared this chapter. Those of us too young to remember scouring through well-thumbed card catalogues and reams of journals before computer technology, online databases, and amazon.com put the fun back into the paper chase can hardly i...

Cotton Mather (16631728), New England's Puritan polymath, participated in a global academic network. In his immense commentary Biblia Americana, a significant untapped resource of American intellectual history, he evaluated early Enlightenment scholarship as he weighed in on such hotly debated issues as the creation story, Noah's flood, and the Mos...

The difference of opinion between John Cotton and Roger Williams on the separation of church and state in early Massachusetts can be explained on the basis of their diverging millenarian ideologies.

The study of late Reformation eschatology is frequently bogged down in a quagmire of terminology which can be as puzzling to novices as it is to those who plumb its depth. All too often modern assumptions about, and definitions of, the terms “premillennialism” (whose adherents place Christ’s Second Coming at the beginning of the thousand years duri...

Sir Isaac Newton is commonly praised for his originality in developing a systematic key (or rule) for unlocking the mysteries of prophetic language and the hermetic symbolism of the Bible’s prophetic style.1 In collating the Book of Nature with the Book of Scripture, Newton developed a rigorous taxonomy that allowed him to juxtapose “natural object...

This anthology, The Kingdom, The Power, & The Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature, seeks to redress some of the problems of access to texts of early American literature by providing a thematic approach to one of colonial America’s most trenchant ideologies: the rising glory of America. The selections included represent a wide...

The following questions are designed to help each student focus on crucial issues in each text during the initial reading process, stimulate class discussion, and suggest essay topics for term papers. For the most part, the answers to these questions require no other reading than the General Introduction and close analysis of the selections themsel...

Cotton Mather was a lifelong millenarian whose eschatological theories evolved over a 40-year period. His holograph manuscript 'Triparadisus', here published for the first time, is his final word on the issue of the First Paradise, the ubi sunt of the souls after the death of the body, the conflagration, of the earth at the Second Coming, the condi...

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 894-908). Microfilm.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 1987. Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 894-908). Photocopy. s

Typescript (lithograph copy). Thesis (M.A.)--Oklahoma State University, 1981. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-105).