Increase Mather was a prominent Puritan minister and the president of Harvard College in the late seventeenth century. His son, Cotton Mather, was also a prominent minister who contributed to the prosecution in the Salem Witch Trials. When public opinion turned against the prosecuting ministers, Increase penned two texts, Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft and A Further Account of the Tryals, to defend his son. Both Cotton and Increase continued to insist upon the real existence and danger of witchcraft—an issue Increase had written about years earlier in his 1684 Remarkable Providences—but portrayed the ministers implicated in the prosecution as circumspect and cautious rather than hasty and hotheaded. A Further Account of the Tryals outlined the timeline of events and the available evidence of witchcraft in Salem. It was first printed in 1693, bound together with a reprint of Cases of Conscience.