Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England:
Reflections on Communion Silver

Mark A. Peterson

AS the seventeenth century came to a close, Cotton Mather, New England's self-styled "Lord's Remembrancer," pondered the various means by which he might commemorate God's blessings on the Puritan colonies. As one part of his ambitious project, Mather produced a capsule history of his home town entitled "A Bostonian Ebenezer," an account first delivered at a Boston Thursday Lecture in 1698. Mather borrowed an Old Testament verse (I Samuel 7:12) as a text for his lecture, a passage in which the children of Israel were miraculously rescued from imminent destruction at the hands of the Philistines. In remembrance of God's assistance in this moment of crisis, the prophet Samuel erected a monument that he called "Ebenezer," a Hebrew word meaning "a stone of help." Mather's reading of the passage plays with the possibilities of physical objects, written texts, and spoken words as sources of memory and devotion:	1
The Stone Erected by Samuel, with the Name of Ebenezer, . . . I know not whether any thing might be Writ upon it, but I am sure there is one thing to be now Read upon it, by our selves, in the Text where we find it: Namely, . . . That a People whom the God of Heaven hath remarkably helped in their Distresses, ought greatly and gratefully to acknowledge what help of Heaven they have received. 1	2
In effect, Mather was suggesting that objects can and should be taken as texts. Even if no words are written on them, objects can be read as signs or references to something else, in this case, to a benevolent deity's influence on Boston's history. Yet as an orthodox Puritan, Mather was well aware of biblical strictures against idolatry, of the possibility that sacralized objects might encourage veneration of the mundane signifier instead of the divine signified. To avoid that danger in this instance, Mather substituted spoken words for a physical monument—his lecture became a "Bostonian Ebenezer," a literary memorial stone. 2 But the implication of Mather's exercise in Puritan semiotics is that an object can play a legitimate part in expressing the relationship between God and his chosen people, so long as its maker, like the prophet Samuel, understands the divine meaning that the object commemorates and so long as future observers learn how properly to read it.	. . .