U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Book Award Winner

The S-USIH Best Book prize for books published in 2016 goes to Jan Stievermann’s Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity. Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana.

Stievermann, who teaches at the University of Heidelberg, where he is professor of the history of Christianity in the Heidelberg Center for U. S. Studies, is among the tiny number of scholars on either side of the Atlantic who have explored the riches of the “Biblia Americana,” a commentary on the Bible that occupied Cotton Mather for much of his life. Mather was never able to persuade an English bookseller to undertake the “Biblia.” Only now, in the early twenty-first century, is the manuscript being published thanks to the efforts of Reiner Smolinksi (George State University) and others, including Stievermann.

Please see the full press release HERE.