Touring New England's Past

More than thirty years ago, Hayden White complained that “history has become increasingly the refuge of those ‘sane’ men who excel at finding the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange.” White enjoined historians to be bolder—to drop the attempt to portray the past “right side up and in true perspective” and experiment, not just with new topics, new problems, and new sources, but with new methods and alternative forms of historical representation. ¹ Historians have not responded to this call with much enthusiasm. We may wish to consider ourselves bold and ambitious, but in reality we usually follow well-tested formulae. The arguments may be new, but the way in which history is researched and presented varies little.

There are exceptions, however, and Robert St. George’s book, Conversing by Signs, is one of them. This is as daring a book as one is likely to find in the entire corpus of scholarly writing on colonial America. Whereas most historians start with a problem then go in search of evidence, St. George begins “in the territory of fragments . . . [with] patches and spots of evidence” (p. 9) then seeks to elucidate them. And whereas most works of history hope to present a unified argument, Conversing by Signs leads one from point to point around the cultural landscape of early New England in what is essentially an enlightened ramble. The book is extremely intelligent but lacking a thesis, highly stimulating yet difficult to read, and deeply learned while wildly flexible in its standards of evidence. More than anything, however, it raises questions—some about particular points in the past and others about the very nature of history itself. It is, in sum, a book that will both irritate and stimulate—and both in sufficient doses that it should not be ignored.

What holds the book together is not an argument specific to the history of colonial New England but rather an approach to the writing of history in general—what St. George terms the “poetics of implication” (p. 3). Whenever people of early modern times (and probably any time) spoke, wrote, painted portraits, constructed physical objects, designed buildings, raised barns or demonstrated in the streets, they were saying some things directly through intention but other things indirectly by implication. If one takes some piece of history—say a physical object like a doorstone—and examines it, not simply for its ostensible function, but for the way in which it referred (symbolically for the most part) to other objects, words, and actions, one obtains a deeper understanding of what that piece of history meant to the people involved. By identifying the critical referents to any piece of historical data, one can penetrate below surface intentions to discover the “nervous, unsteady assumptions” (p. 3) that underlay the conventional appearance of things.

An example might make the point clearer. In July 1677, a group of women slew and dismembered two Native American prisoners in the streets of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Superficially, they were revenging the attacks that Native New Englanders had been launching against Marblehead fishing ketches and crews all summer, but, as the author is by no means the first to notice, the ferocity of the assault seemed quite out of proportion to whatever provocation the Indians may have offered. ² St. George proceeds to make sense of this fragment in terms of its cultural referents. By his interpretation, the massacre spoke in part to the elements of “cannibalistic savagery within Puritan civility” (p. 149) fuelled by a fear that within the sacrament of communion, “while sharing in a blessed act of consumption, the colonists risked practising a kind of symbolic cannibalism” (p. 148). Puritan anxiety about consuming the body and blood of Christ, moreover, referred back to and intersected symbolically with a parallel set of anxieties about consuming material goods within the market economy of the North Atlantic. New Englanders displayed...