Exploring Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana

Join us for the Congregational Library & Archives’ 2026 Cotton Mather Lecture. This year’s program will feature a roundtable with scholars Dr. Reiner Smolinski, Dr. Ken Minkema, and Andy Juchno, editors of a new critical edition of Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana letters.

This volume presents the first complete, scholarly edition of Curiosa Americana, offering transcriptions and annotations that illuminate Mather's contributions to natural philosophy. His observations—ranging from smallpox inoculation and germ theory to "monstrous" births and marine volcanoes—capture the dynamic interplay between science, religion and colonial identity.

Accompanied by a substantial introduction, the collection situates Mather within the broader networks of the early modern Republic of Letters, challenging long-held assumptions about the intellectual landscape of colonial America. Essential reading for scholars of early modern science, intellectual history, and Atlantic studies, this work restores Mather's letters to their rightful place in the history of transatlantic knowledge production.

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIOS

Dr. Reiner Smolinski has spent most of his academic career in researching and publishing about early American literature, history, and Puritanism. As the General Editor of Cotton Mather’s 10-volume Biblia Americana (2010--) www.matherproject.de, he has guided a team of eight scholars in editing colonial America’s first commentary on all books of the Bible. Most recently, he has co-edited with Kenneth Minkema A Cotton Mather Reader (Yale, 2022) and with Kenneth Minkema and Andrew Juchno, Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society (Durham University, IMEMS Press, 2025). He is currently trying to finish his new biography with the working title “Cotton Mather: The First American Polymath.”

Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema is the Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, with an appointment as Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School. He is an advisory board member of the New England’s Hidden Histories project at Congregational Library & Archives.

Andrew Juchno is a doctoral student in history at Boston College. His work examines the intellectual life of early America.