Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (review)

In recent years, historians have explored many aspects of reading, literacy, and the culture of print in the Anglo-American colonies. Kamensky’s book breaks new ground by focusing on early American “speech history”—specifically, on the significance of the spoken word in seventeenth-century New England. Arguing that “the twin desires to promote godly speech and to prevent . . . ‘heated’ utterances lay at the very center of New England’s culture,” Kamensky structures her book both thematically and chronologically, covering the period from 1620 to the 1690s (5). She melds the methodologies of social and women’s history with those of linguistic theory and practice to produce an innovative and insightful volume.

Kamensky’s major sources are familiar (perhaps too familiar) to every historian of colonial America: Puritan sermons and Massachusetts Bay Colony court records, especially those of the Essex County Court, which survive in great abundance and which have also been published, albeit in truncated form. Yet, her concentration on the meta-language of speech—on how early New Englanders defined proper and improper speaking and on how they literally performed their speaking roles in daily life—gives her study a novel and provocative cast. “A language-centered approach to New England’s history,” she contends persuasively, “is not an exercise in grafting a contemporary theoretical framework onto past experience”; in her deft hands, it is, rather, as she claims, a device “to uncover something of how [early New Englanders] conceived of themselves” (10).

In successive chapters, she examines the concepts of speech that the settlers brought with them to North America; the way in which the problem of maintaining verbal order intersected with the more-often-studied maintenance of social and political order; the challenges to elite men presented by the difficulties of governing the speech of women and of both real sons and their metaphorical counterparts, male social inferiors; the rituals of public apology and their cultural importance; and, finally, the role of speech in witchcraft cases. Kamensky’s linguistic lens exposes new elements in familiar tales; her sensitivity to the significance of elite male speech in the courtroom, for example, leads her to a revealing exposition of the “topsy-turvy” world of the Salem Village witch trials, where the voices of the magistrates were displaced by the voices of women—and of young women, at that.

Only rarely does her analysis ring false. One such occasion comes in her discussion of Mistress Ann Hibbens, a high-status woman excommunicated from Boston’s First Church in 1641 for a variety of verbal offenses. Kamensky tells us that one reason for the censure was Hibbens’ failure to recognize that, despite her status, “by virtue of gender” she was properly subordinate to the ordinary workmen she had vehemently criticized (84). But no seventeenth-century New Englander would have seen Mistress Hibbens (her title was the key marker) as subject to the workers. Subject to her husband, yes; subject to the church, yes. For challenging those authorities she endured excommunication. But the world in which gender can be seen as more important than social status is ours, not theirs.

Kamensky argues that New England’s cultural emphasis on the significance of the spoken word was unique. Yet, she offers little comparative evidence to prove the point, openly admitting, “What if New England was no different? The question has dogged me since I undertook this project” (43). She calls for speech histories of colonies other than Massachusetts Bay; despite her broader title, this is a book almost exclusively about the Bay Colony. Possibly she is right about Puritan uniqueness, but the Puritans may have differed from other colonists only by degree, and by the fact that, for a variety of reasons, more of their records have survived to be mined by historians.

Kamensky concludes with some ruminations on the meta-language of speech in our own time. She notes, usefully, that contemplating settlers’ obsessions with what could and...