Gracious Laughter

Increase Mather, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards were important figures in seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England, their lives and contributions overlapping in significant ways: Mather and Taylor were close contemporaries, with Edwards's birth occurring when other two men were in their sixties; all three were Puritan ministers; Edwards and Mather were college presidents and influential in their own time; and three together represent complementary facets of best of Puritan mind. The three books under review a biography of Mather, a philosophical study of Edwards's Freedom of Will, and a critical analysis of Taylor's selected poetry offer, through various genres, insight into early American life and thought. Michael G. Hall's The Last American Puritan is first biography of Increase Mather in over forty years. Hall views Mather as the leading exponent of Puritan culture at its peak in 1670s, decade when self-awareness was most fully articulated and before social, political and intellectual forces that would erode Puritanism had taken effect. The nine chapters of biography move in precise chronological order, with detailed descriptions of both commonly and lesser

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