Edwards, Jonathan
Patricia J. Tracy (Author)
Edwards, Jonathan (05 October 1703-22 March 1758), Congregational minister and philosopher, was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, the son of the Reverend Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard, daughter of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts. An only son with ten sisters, Jonathan Edwards was educated in the East Windsor parsonage amidst the boys his father prepared for college. As has happened with many other aspects of Edwards’s life and thought, recent scholarship has revised the assumptions repeated for two centuries about the “frontier genius” origins of his earliest intellectual work. Essays relating careful observations of the rainbow and flying spiders—to prove the goodness and wisdom of the Creator—have long been attributed to Edwards’s boyhood. New studies, however, have dated these essays to Edwards’s years at Yale College and have documented the European philosophic and literary models available to the boy even in his provincial home...
Encyclopedia Article, 1999
American National Biography Online, 1999
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999