Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:41:05.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Jane Kamensky, Governing the tongue: The politics of speech in early New England. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. ix, 291. Hb $35.00.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2000

E. Jennifer Monaghan
E. Jennifer Monaghan
Affiliation:
English Dept., Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889 [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In what she terms “an exercise in historical eavesdropping”, Kamensky explores the relationship between speech and society in 17th-century New England. In doing so, she places speech at center stage in the New England experience. Her insightful study floodlights the connections between gender and speech, speech and power, community cohesiveness and community deviance. Early New Englanders, she argues, believed “speech was conduct and conduct was speech” that is, in a culture that remained largely oral, they imbued speech with powers almost as great as those of actual deeds.

Type
Book Review
Information
Language in Society , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 141 - 144
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)