| Sumario: | This article analyzes the context of the book "Magnalia Christi Americana" by Cotton Mather and the quality of his writings. Ever since its first publication in 1702, critics have regularly censured the "Magnalia" for being a vainglorious attempt at displaying the author's rhetorical brilliance and universal erudition. Mather's belated piece of colonial or Puritan Baroque was often branded as an overly ornate conglomerate of learned references lacking in originality and coherence. Representatives of modern literary and cultural criticism have begun to reevaluate Mather's so thoroughly discredited technique of intertextual composition. In their interpretations these scholars have explained the peculiarly florid style of the "Magnalia" in terms of Mather's stubborn adherence to a baroque notion of rhetorical and literary perfection which was already beginning to give way to the new aesthetics of neoclassicism when the work was published. According to Mather's explanations in the General Introduction, the foremost representational object of the "Magnalia" is to exhibit and exalt God's limitless power by demonstrating how the glorious history of New England unfolds from his providential plan. This goal goes hand in hand with a literary portrayal of the first two generations of Puritan leaders, and particularly of their spiritual preceptors, who are depicted as exemplary executioners of God's grand design for the U.S.
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