Robert Calef
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Robert Calef (c. 1648-1719 Roxbury, Massachusetts) was a Boston, Massachusetts Baptist cloth merchant who came to America before 1688. He is best known as the author of More Wonders of the Invisible World, a treatise that he wrote in 1700 against the state clergy, particularly Rev. Cotton Mather, for its role in the Salem witch trials. Because no Boston publisher would accept the book, it was printed in England.[1] Rev. Increase Mather, father of Cotton, had the book burned in Harvard Yard.
Calef thought it absurd to believe that witches rode "upon Poles through the Air", and objected to proceedings that lead to "a Biggotted Zeal, stirring up a Blind and most Bloody rage, not against Enemies, or Irreligious Proffligate Persons, But (in Judgment of Charity, and to view) against as Vertuous and Religious as any they have left behind them in this Country, which have suffered as Evil doers with the utmost extent of rigour."
Mather responded in his Some Few Remarks upon a Scandalous Book in 1701.
From 1702 to 1704 Calef was an overseer of the poor. In 1707 he was chosen an assessor, and in 1710 a tithingman. He retired to Roxbury, where in 1707 he had bought a place and where he was a selectman of the town, in which he died in 1719.
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- ^ Cotton Mather wrote in his diary, "It was highly rejoicing to us when we heard that our Booksellers were so well acquainted with the Integrity of our Pastors, as that not one of them could admit of any of those Libels to be vended in their shops."
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