Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. By Jane Kamensky. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii, 291 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-19-509080-2.)

The people of seventeenth-century Massachusetts regarded speech, or the spoken word, as the foundational means by which God revealed himself to humankind. Yet as Jane Kamensky so richly demonstrates, speech in everyday social relations had its "dark" underside—a subversive power to undo all that was good and holy. Hence the determination of the government to regulate what was said and to punish those who spoke with ungoverned, harmful license. After explicating the contradictory meanings of speech among the Massachusetts colonists in the opening chapter, Kamensky focuses on three episodes in which tongues seemed out of control: the initial decade of settlement and the antinomian insurgency, the restlessness of second-generation youth that coincided with the Quaker challenge to the orthodox establishment, and the Salem witch-hunt. Throughout, she insists that women's tongues were regarded as distinctively threatening. A concluding chapter sketches a transition in the early eighteenth century from high anxiety about speech to near indifference. . . .

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