8.     Capitalization in “Biblia Americana” is rather problematic throughout; anybody who has ever seen a sample of Mather’s handwriting will be aware of the difficulty. His indiscriminate and indeterminate use of upper and lower cases of the letters c, e, g, l, m, o, p, s, u, v, w, x, y, and z is confusing to modern expectations, especially when the first letter of a name or the initial letter of a word following a period appears to be lowercased. Generally, a seemingly lowercased word at the beginning of a sentence is not problematic. But since there is no evidence to suggest that Mather intentionally uses minuscules after sentence-terminal marks, the initial letter of a word at the beginning of a new sentence, as well as of a proper name, is silently capitalized.

        A final capitalization usage deserves brief attention. Mather commonly capitalizes word-initial letters of nouns or a sequence of nouns, of adjectives modifying nouns, of a sequence of predicate adjectives, or even of sequential adverbs and verbs to emphasize particular concepts or themes, or to signal to the orator a change of intonation to effect a different meaning. Hence we find “their Thoughts and their Pens,” “Beloved City and Celestial Abode,” “Considerable Alterations and Divine Offerings,” “more Copiously or more Accurately.” Such conventions are typical of the contemporary homiletic tradition for oral delivery, and Mather’s practice requires no elucidating. It is more problematic, however, when his capitalization lacks any apparent rationale. His use of upper and lower cases in such passages as “GoD the Father, The son, and The Holy ghost” seemingly follows no recognizable logic—unless we remember Mather’s interchangeable use of such upper and lowercase letters as o, s, g. Since problems of this nature are a distinctive feature of Mather’s hand, I have elected to regularize his practice throughout and render this passage as “GOD the Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost.” However, when Mather’s intention could not be inferred from the context or prior evidence, I have silently capitalized nouns and gerunds if they began with the letters c, e, g, l, m, o, p, s, u, v, w, x, y, or z. Imposing consistency in these instances solved the problem of making literally thousands of individual and subjective judgments. Along the same lines, adjectival clusters preceding nouns and sequential adverbial modifiers have been silently rendered in upper or lower cases when the first letter of an adjective or adverb cluster in the sequence clearly indicate Mather’s intention. Hence such phrases as “the Illustrious and pious Master cartwright” or “he Barely touched yet sacrilegiously despoiled” are rendered “the Illustrious and Pious Master Cartwright” and “he Barely touched yet Sacrilegiously despoiled.” Unfortunately, this system is not completely foolproof; in same cases arbitrary decisions are necessary when no precedent patterns are available. At any rate, I have taken pains to rule out any unintentional shift in meaning.

9.       Punctuation marks in “Biblia Americana” are a frequent source of problems. Mather’s innumerable excisions and interpolations necessitated frequent repunctuation. Unfortunately, he does not always excise the existing punctuation mark when he inserts a new one, and as a result, two different marks often exist side by side. But deciphering Mather’s final choice proved relatively easy when I consulted the holograph manuscript at the MHS, for the different types of ink (generally indistinguishable on the microfilm copy) clearly signals Mather’s intention.

          I have retained Mather’s final choices in virtually all cases just as they occur in “Biblia.” Only when his punctuation mark renders the meaning of his sentences ambiguous did I intrude into the text. Such intrusions, however rare, are indicated by brackets [ ].

10.     To allow for later additions, Mather leaves many blank spaces and blank pages in the holograph manuscript. Frequently, an entire ms page consists of only two or three brief paragraphs of commentary on different biblical verses, with blank spaces of varying lengths between them. In such cases, I have regularized the blank spaces between such paragraphs by uniformly introducing a single blank line between them.

Most of the time, Mather signals the beginning of new paragraphs with indentations of varying lengths. Here I have used a standard indentation for each new paragraph unless Mather’s pattern suggests otherwise. Any extra spaces between words or sentences, possibly serving Mather as reminders for later insertions, have been silently omitted. When Mather skips one or more lines between paragraphs to signal a new subdivision or to break up long passages into visually recognizable units, I have regularized his practice by dropping a single. Similarly, when he uses one or more slashes to indicate that a passage is to be centered or to be blocked, I have carried out his intent but silently omitted his slash or slashes.

11.     Mather frequently uses dashes of varying lengths. Such a dash often signifies the end of a quotation, an omission of words (especially in conflated quotations), or some other unspecified alteration to a quotation. This is not to say that dashes occur only within quotations, for they can frequently be found at the ends of lines, here generally indicating pauses. I have retained Mather’s practice in the text of the present edition but uniformly standardized their length.

12.     Single, and infrequently double, quotation marks serve Mather to highlight lengthy citations from his contemporaries’ sources. These markers appear at the opening (but not at the closing) of each citation and in front of each word (along the left-hand margin) beginning a new line. Little seems to be gained, however, by retaining this archaic practice: (1) Mather’s line breaks (except for those in his poetry) are different from the line breaks in the present edition. (2) If these lines were run to the same measure as the surrounding copy, Mather’s quotation marks would appear midline. (3) And to move the quotation marks back to the left-hand margin would be to impose an archaic convention on this modern setting. For these reasons, modern conventions have been adopted here, and double quotation marks are placed only at the opening and closing of Mather’s citations.

13.     I have retained Mather’s hyphenations of compound names, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs as they appear in the manuscript. Distinguishing compound hyphenation from end-of-the-line divisions proved easy enough, since the context clearly signals his intention. In those cases where an end-of-the-line division mark coincides with the hyphen of a hyphenated compound word, I have tried to rule out any misinterpretation. No separate record of Mather’s divisions of hyphenated compounds is therefore necessary.

14.     Mather’s Latin, Greek, and Hebrew citations are a constant source of problems because he virtually always quotes them at second, even third and fourth, hand depending on what authors and sources he is epitomizing. Modern readers must not forget that Mather and his contemporaries by and large did not have the benefit our modern classical editions, whose philological reliability, textual accuracy, and variant orthography are a result of the philological research begun during the Renaissance and achieving prominence in Mather’s own time. After all, we stand on the shoulders of giants who tried to liberate the classical corpus from the layers upon layers of later interpolations by copyists or editors. In virtually all cases Mather reliably copies his sources and their classical citations. In cases where Mather makes mistakes, the error generally occurs in Mather’s source.

His transcription of Greek and Hebrew accent marks, however, seems sloppy; Mather frequently adds accent marks in his Latin citations even though they do not appear in his source. Significantly, in nearly every instance, he omits the accent marks from his Greek citations—even if they are supplied in his source texts. A similar intent seems to govern Mather’s numerous, though brief, Hebrew citations, whether derived from secondary sources or from the Masoretic texts themselves. Some scholars faulted him for his imperfect knowledge of Hebrew (see Shalom Goldman’s edition Hebrew and the Bible in America [1993], ch. 3). However cogent this critique may be, Mather sided in his 1681 Harvard M.A. thesis with Johann Buxtorf the Younger, who in 1648 attacked Louis Cappellus’ Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) for rejecting the belief that the Hebrew vowel points were coterminous with the origin of the Hebrew language. Mather’s academic endeavor was perhaps more indicative of his faith and wishful thinking than the state-of-the art knowledge of the Tiberian Masoretes (6^th c. AD), whose contribution to the Hebrew texts was not fully understood until Louis Cappellus published his refutation. In “Biblia Americana,” Mather concedes his error and, perhaps for this reason, elects to omit the Hebrew breathing marks in virtually all instances.

Similar problems occur in Mather’s copying of Greek phrases and sentence, which (as usual) are at second, third, even fourth, hand. What complicates matters is that Mather and his peers frequently employ shorthand abbreviations such as @ for “ous,” the terminal “ς” (in opening or medial positions) for “στ,” or δς for “tai,” ∂ for θ, or J for θ. In all cases I have elected to expand his abbreviations silently. However, I retain all accent marks in his Greek and Hebrew citations as Mather supplies them in his manuscripts and supply the appropriate accentuations in a footnote.