Editing Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (1693-1728): America’s First Bible Commentary and Storehouse of Early Modern Learning

Join us for a hybrid lunch and learn at the Congregational Library & Archives with Dr. Jan Stieverman and Dr. Theodore Delwiche to learn more about their most recent volume of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana and the work of creating critical editions of important religious texts more generally.

This volume of the Biblia Americana (1693-1728) contains Cotton Mather's annotations on the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. A mixture of pious explications and historical-textual criticism, the annotations are a treasure-trove for scholars interested in the development of Reformed theology and biblical exegesis during a decisive period of intellectual change in the early modern Atlantic world.

Drs. Stieverman and Delwiche will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of creating this critical edition, part of a ten-volume series begun in the early 2000s to make Mather’s important unpublished 4,500-page manuscript accessible. One of the most significant untapped sources in American religious and intellectual history, Mather’s commentary not only reflects the growing influence of Enlightenment thought and the rise of the transatlantic evangelical awakening, it also marks the beginning of historical criticism of the Bible as text in New England.

There are a limited number of seats for the in-person presentation at 14 Beacon Street. The talk will also be livestreamed on Zoom.

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIOS

Dr. Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the US at Heidelberg University. He has written books and essays on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history, culture, and literature, including a comprehensive study of the theology and aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson (in German; Schoeningh, 2007) and Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). In the scholarly edition of the Biblia Americana manuscript, he is responsible for volumes 5, 10, and 7 (2015; 2023; forthcoming in 2026), and serves as the executive editor of the whole project. His articles have been published in leading journals, including William and Mary, Early American Literature, Church History, and Religion and American Culture. Among other multi-authored volumes, he co-edited A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (Oxford, 2014), the Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (2021), The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism (Penn State University Press, 2022), and two volumes forthcoming with Oxford on James W.C. Pennington, one a critical anthology of Pennington’s writings, the other a collection of essays on his life and work.

Dr. Theodore (Teddy) Delwiche is a post-doc at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. He earned his doctorate in early American history at Yale, his master's in early modern European history at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), and his bachelor's in classics at Harvard. His research interests lie at the intersection of early modern European intellectual history, colonial America, and classical reception studies. He is the author of roughly 20 different articles, reviews, and chapters on, among other topics, early modern shorthand, the culture of the classics in early America, and the history of alchemy. In addition to serving as a co-editor of a forthcoming volume of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana, he is revising his first monograph on classical education in colonial America and plotting his next book-length project on the history of Americans studying abroad.