The historical secret hidden in plain sight in the title of Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s new book Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons is that for at least part of the period of Cotton Mather’s life during which he was learning Spanish, someone may have been teaching him. To the degree that the Mather of those lessons was a student, the possessive genitive in this title might point to someone else entirely. There are reasons, of course, that Mather is the eponymous protagonist. Books about Mather will probably sell better than books about almost anyone else in his world, especially when they’re published by the press at his alma mater, Harvard University. Relatedly, but more saliently, we don’t actually know for sure what to call the person whom Gruesz narrates as his teacher, a man who appears elusively in the written archive produced by Mather and his contemporaries, and who is most vividly...
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