"John Cotton (1584-1652) was one of the most important leaders of the English Puritan movement in the first half of the seventeenth century. His departure from England in 1633 for the newly established Massachusetts Bay Colony was regarded as a key moment in the realization of an alternative vision of a godly church and society in America. Once installed as teacher of the Boston congregation, Cotton was at the heart of New England religious developments for the remaining nineteen years of his life. Long before, in the midst of, and well after his embroilment in the Antinomian Controversy, people cared what Cotton thought.". "This volume collects all known surviving correspondence by and to Cotton. These 125 letters - more than 50 of which are here published for the first time - span the decades between 1621 and 1652, a period of great activity and change in the Puritan movement and in English history. The letters chart the trajectory of Cotton's career and revive a variety of voices from the troubled times surrounding Charles I's reign. Among those who appear are such prominent figures as Oliver Cromwell, Archbishop James Ussher, Bishop John Williams, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, John Winthrop, Richard Mather, Peter Bulkeley, Charles Chauncy, John Dod, and Nathaniel Ward, as well as many little-known persons who wrote to Cotton for advice and guidance.". "Among the treasures of early Anglo-American history, these letters bring to life the leading Puritan intellectual of the generation of the Great Migration and illustrate the network of mutual support that nourished an intellectual and spiritual movement through a transformative period in England and America."--BOOK JACKET.