Cotton Mather spent most of his working life as co-pastor of Boston's Old North Meeting House, sharing the pulpit with his father Increase Mather. He was, by any measure, an insider to New England's Congregational churches, not an outside observer of them. In 1702 he put that vantage point to use and published Magnalia Christi Americana, "The Glorious Works of Christ in America," a seven book attempt to write down the whole story of his own tradition before it could be forgotten.
The book is not a devotional tract. It is a history, running from the Plymouth Pilgrims' 1620 arrival through 1698, built out of roughly fifty biographical sketches of the ministers and magistrates who had planted and governed New England's congregations. It names figures like the missionary John Eliot and the colonial governor Sir William Phips alongside dozens more, treating their individual lives as the material out of which a tradition's history is actually made.
The book's own path is a small history in itself. It was printed first in London in 1702, and despite documenting American churches, an American edition did not appear until 1820, more than a century later. Manuscripts and copies connected to Mather remain, today, among the holdings the Congregational Library and Archives considers nationally significant, an institution that describes its own mission as serving the Congregational Christian tradition Mather wrote about from the inside. Historians still turn to it, organizational shortcomings and all, because no one closer to the events ever wrote the fuller version.