Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s brilliant monograph begins with a historical irony: “The first Spanish-language publication in what would become the United States” (2) was written by none other than Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the third-generation colonist and Boston minister frequently conscripted into mythic accounts of American (i.e., Anglo-Protestant and Anglophone US) exceptionalism that locate the nation’s origins in Puritan New England. Like any good historical irony, however, Mather’s authorship of a tract seeking to convert the Hispanophone populations south of Massachusetts proves less surprising than it seems, illuminating an underappreciated aspect of the past—and the reasons for its underappreciation. In Gruesz’s hands, the story of Mather’s La Fe del Christiano (1699) is not one about a literary “first” made possible by the teleological inscription of national borders onto a contingent colonial landscape (“what would become the United States”). Instead, it is a story about the dense geographic and temporal interconnections that informed...
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Book Review|
June 01 2024
Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas
Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas
. By Kirsten Silva Gruesz. Cambridge, MA
: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
, 2022
. 326
pp.
Alexander Mazzaferro
Alexander Mazzaferro is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a specialist in colonial American and early US literatures. His current book project recovers the early modern prohibition on “innovation” as a framework for rereading Anglo-American settler colonialism and the resistance it met. His articles and essays have appeared in Early American Literature, English Language Notes, and J19.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2024) 85 (2): 248–252.
Citation
Alexander Mazzaferro; Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas. Modern Language Quarterly 1 June 2024; 85 (2): 248–252. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060535
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