 | |  |
A "Mather" of Dates
by
William R. Manierre
In 1896 Kuno Francke published the "record" of what he calls "probably . . . the earliest expression of sustained interest, on the part of Americans, in German affairs"—a "chronological" listing of letters from Cotton Mather to August Hermann Francke and of entries from Mather's diary which mention Francke or his activities.[1]
In this "record" is printed the following extract from Mather's diary: "1711. Nov. 10: I am again writing to ye University of Hall in ye Lower Saxony; sending a present of Gold for ye Orphan-house there." After this entry there appears a portion of a letter, dated December 19, 1714, from A. H. Francke to Mather, which makes patent reference to both the proposed letter and gift mentioned by Mather in the passage just quoted. "Reverend Sir, It was the first of April, 1713, when I receiv'd your Letter, dated the 10th of January 1712, in the West-Indies; together with the Packet of Books, and the Piece of Gold accompanying them: But as for those you sent me the 28th of May, 1711, (the Copy whereof I find also enclosed in the Packet just mentioned) they are not come to my Hands." To this entry Kuno Francke appends a footnote: "Since the year 1712 of Mather's diary is lost, our only information about this letter from Mather's side is the entry of Nov. 10, 1711."
Inasmuch as this "lost" Mather diary has since been recovered,[2] there seems some use in pointing out that it says nothing whatever of the letter in question. Only one entry, that of December 17, concerns Mather's correspondence with the Pietist leader.
Unfortunately, we cannot let the matter rest here. Mr. Francke's footnote, in suggesting that Mather's diary entry of January 10, 1712, might well have contained a comment on his letter of the same date, indirectly laments the loss of that comment. On closer inspection, however, one finds that what Francke's article dates as Mather's diary entry of November 10, 1711, is, in fact, the entry for January 10, 1711/12,[3] precisely the date mentioned by Mather's correspondent; so that what we have is the curious circumstance of a scholar's calling attention to the non-existence of a passage which, unrecognized by himself, he has just quoted.
Curious this may be but it occurs not once but twice in the article under discussion. Again in a footnote, Mr. Francke remarks that, "it is strange that the [diary] entry of May 28, 1711, does not contain a mention of a letter of Mather's to Francke which is referred to in Francke's letter of Dec. 19, 1714, as bearing that date. This seems to have been the first communication sent by Mather to Francke." But already quoted in the article, under date of March 25, is this passage: "When I send unto Dr. Franckius in the lower Saxony, I would enclose a present of Gold, for his Orphan-house, which may be to the value of four or five pounds in that Country." But once again Kuno Francke has misdated a quotation by two months; and the passage, correctly dated "May 25," is, in spite of the negligible difference of three days, pretty obviously the very "mention" the "strange" absence of which his article points out.[4]
The cause of all this confusion is, of course, Francke's unawareness that Mather, in accordance with "legal-year" practise, considered March, not January, to be the first month of the year. Accordingly, whenever Mather numbered the month instead of writing it out, Francke is two months off in his ascription. "2.d 8.m," for instance, by which Mather meant the second day of the eighth month (October), becomes, in Francke's article, the second day of August and "10.d 1.m" becomes the tenth of January instead of March.[5] The result is that this pioneering study of the relations between the prominent Boston divine and the father of German Pietism is, so far as chronology is concerned, completely unreliable.
Half of a total of twenty-four citations are misdated; all twelve by two months and three by varying numbers of days. On the left, below, are the twelve incorrect entries as recorded by Francke.
- "Dec. 9" . . . . . should be February 3, 1709/10.
1709. Mather's Diary
- "Mar. 12-13" . . . . . should be May 16.
1711. Mather's Diary
- "Mar. 25" . . . . . should be May 25.
- "Apr. 7" . . . . . should be June 27.
- "Nov. 10" . . . . . should be January 10, 1711/12.
From this point on, Francke's dating of diary entries is correct, presumably because Mather altered his system by: 1) identifying month by name instead of number and 2) numbering his "G. D.'s" consecutively throughout each month instead of by week. Unfortunately, however, Mather continued to identify the dates of his letters by number rather than name of month. The result in Francke's article is that correctly dated diary entries alternate with incorrectly dated letters.
Following are the incorrect ascripitons:
- "Oct. 2. Letter from Mather to Boehme"[6] . . . . . should be December 2.
1715.
- "June 6. Letter from Mather to Boehme" . . . . . should be August 6.
1716
Here only does incorrect dating lead to error in the article's "chronological" order. The following entry (from Mather's diary) is correctly dated "Aug. 2."
- "Jan. 10 . . . letter to Boehme . . ." should be March 10.
- "May 15 . . . letter to Boehme . . ." should be July 15.
1718.
- "May 4 . . . letter to John Winthrop . . ." should be July 4.
- "May 8 . . . letter to Boehme . . ." should be July 8.
- "Oct. 26 . . . letter to John Winthrop . . ." should be Dec. 26.
1720.
Notes
Kuno Francke, "Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, V (1896), 57-67.
A fact of which Kuno Francke apparently remained unaware. In his "The Beginning of Cotton Mather's Correspondence with August Hermann Francke" (PQ, V, [1926], 193), he refers to the earlier study without mentioning the recovery of the "lost" manuscript. Nor have I been successful in tracing the history of this now recovered document. Between 1816 and 1820 considerable portions of it were published in The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine (Vols. XII-XVI), but, by 1891 in his Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, Barrett Wendell could state explicitly that "the Diary of 1712 is not extant." On May 22, 1919, however, more than a quarter of a century after Wendell's assertion, and more than a century after its unnoticed publication in The Panoplist, the diary reappeared in New York as lot 213A at Scott-O'Shaugnessy sale number 64 where it was purchased by William Gwynn Mather of Cleveland. It has subsequently become part of the Mather collection of the Tracy W. McGregor Library at the University of Virginia.
Mather began each year's diary on his birthday, the twelfth of February. Consequently, the entry for January 10, 1711/12 was available to Francke in the manuscript diary of 1711, and is, of course, not to be found in the diary of 1712.
Volume II of Ford's edition of The Diary of Cotton Mather, with entries correctly dated, appeared in 1912, fourteen years prior to Francke's article in The Philological Quarterly.
When examining the manuscript diary for the entry of May 28, 1711, Francke must have looked up Mather's entry for July 28 ("28.d5.m"). Since the manuscript of 1712 was missing, he could not very well examine it for a January 10 entry; but if he had had the document, presumably he would have checked under "10.d 1.m" (March 10) instead of "10.d 11.m" (January 10) and, consequently, would again have come up empty-handed.
| | |