Darren M. Staloff | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Darren M. Staloff | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660. By Phillip H. Round. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. xviii, 317 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-87451-928-4. Paper, $21.00, ISBN 0-87451-929-2.)

In By Nature and by Custom Cursed, Phillip H. Round challenges claims for the "hegemonic power of Puritan hermeneutics" in the first generation of New England settlement. Drawing on Bourdieuian social linguistics and contemporary cultural studies, Round argues that precise Protestantism competed with five other "civil discourses" or contexts/topics of discussion (epistolary truth-telling, town inhabitancy, gender difference, authorship, and Amerindian-English negotiation), each with its own conventions and idioms. Such civil discourses were in turn subsumed under a larger set of conventions associated with Renaissance courtly civility as exemplified by the "master trope" of paradiastole. Round's nuanced evocation of those discourses demonstrates that even the godly in first-generation New England were "forced to reach out and perform saintliness, Englishness, trustworthiness, and marketability to a metropolitan audience, using the recognized gestures of civil conversation." . . .

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