Book Review

In the seventeenth-century world of John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, and Ann Putnam, "speech was conduct and conduct was speech" (5). Kamensky's fascinating exploration of the power of language to shape Puritan society explains just how words acquired the weight of action in early New England. Though the regulation of speech "was central to the work of governing families, neighborhoods, towns, even empires" elsewhere as well (9), Puritans' particular obsession with the Word as well as with words heightened their sensitivity to the ability of language to transport speakers and listeners closer to heaven or hell. Godly speech promoted a social order at once devout and deferential, while a deviant tongue threatened to undo (or unspeak) divinely ordained relations of respect. Given the power of speech to mold the beloved community and its corporate fate, Puritans attended to words with special vigilance. In the process, however, Puritan leaders faced a dilemma of their own making: how to encourage ordinary women and men to speak directly to God in plain, candid, prayerful language, while preventing expressions at odds with clerical definitions of appropriate speech (especially when such talk was directed against the ministers themselves). Governing the Tongue brilliantly explores the tensions inherent in the Puritan project of promoting the speech of the faithful and yet tightly controlling it at the same time. The book also demonstrates what Puritans already understood and twentieth-century scholars have rediscovered, namely that the meaning and power of words was contingent and contextual. Not everyone in early New England could author speech to equal effect, and the force behind any given utterance, from slander to sermons, invective to apology, blasphemy to contrition, hinged on the speaker's social rank. In six carefully crafted chapters Kamensky demonstrates precisely how "status, age, race and, especially, gender shaped New Englanders' concepts of right speaking" (8).	1
Gender does indeed account for a great deal in this book. Kamensky argues, for example, that it was not so much Anne Hutchinson's claims of direct revelation that got her into trouble with the Puritan establishment as the fact that she was speaking in ways reserved only for men (and clergymen, at that). In Kamensky's telling, Hutchinson's downfall becomes a gendered contest over authorship: "Silencing Hutchinson offered New England's leaders a chance to define their own voices as the speech of authority by classifying the words of disorderly women as the archetype of social danger" (73). To the relief of her outwitted judges, Hutchinson eventually made self-damning claims of immediate revelation, but Kamensky nicely demonstrates that Hutchinson was excommunicated for her behavior rather than for her opinions. Hutchinson's worst offense was her breach of gendered norms of speech; she was a woman who spoke like a man in a society that "hinged on maintaining both gender order and linguistic order" (90). It is the tight links between these orders that Governing the Tongue so persuasively articulates.	2
If outspoken women represented a central threat to the New England order of the 1630s and 1640s, the focus of concern shifted after mid-century to the speech of children who would inherit their parents' place. Especially sons had to learn "the precarious balancing of deference and mastery" by honoring their fathers while preparing for their role as household patriarchs in their own right (101). When they could not or would not strike the right balance, as in the case of one especially cantankerous John Porter Jr. of Salem, the community stepped in, both to punish the culprit as well as chastise his father, whose inability to control his offspring threatened to have a ripple effect in the community. Legislatures enacted laws making speech against one's parents a capital offense, though no child was put to death under these laws. Instead, male speech offenders more often found themselves compelled to author a public apology in which they restated the offensive words and then recanted them, thus "unsaying" the initial insult. These public "unsayings" were gendered as well, as convicted women could not undo verbal damage with yet more speech but rather had men read aloud their written professions of sorrow and apology.	3
The public silencing of women reinforced the idea that women were properly meant to be seen and not heard, and indeed, women who chronically misspoke might find themselves accused of witchcraft. Kamensky argues that words were at issue in the Salem witch-hunt crisis, and she adds "linguistic 'declension'" to the list of troubles that beset Puritan society in the late seventeenth century (170). In the rising hysteria of the day, magistrates encouraged rather than silenced ranting women presumably possessed by demons. These women were "invited to assume a public voice of unprecedented reach," and theirs was a voice that turned the linguistic order of the divine and the demonic on its head: confessions of witchcraft became a license to speak more, while professions of innocence led to their ultimate silencing at the gallows (170). Later, when magistrates apologized for the role they had played in the cataclysm, they focused again on the powers of speech: they had "listened to the wrong witnesses, and then had unleashed the power of their own voices against" the innocent (177). In so doing, they undermined their own capacity for authoritative speech, inadvertently giving their children greater license to speak out against them. As the currency of speech was debased, it increasingly became a matter of private concern rather than state and church control: "The mission of governing the tongue passed from the sphere of law to the sphere of etiquette, where it largely remains today" (190).	4
This is a brilliant book, beautifully written, about the palpable power of language in a "hearful" society. In contrast to scholarship on the written word that evokes images of silent readers and introverted thinkers, Kamensky makes Puritan New England seem as noisy and verbally contentious as it probably was. Sometimes Kamensky seems to see (or hear) only speech everywhere: the decades-long battle between Puritans and Quakers was "at bottom a struggle over the cultural meanings of speech" (118). At other times, gender is called upon to explain too much: "By focusing on Hutchinson's role in the controversy, the authorities were able to insist that a dramatic breach of gender roles—especially their verbal component—lay at the root of the Antinomian heresies" (77). But this is an argument-driven book of the best sort. Unerringly, Kamensky returns from vivid tales of verbal brawls, boasting, and besting to the important point she makes so well: speech in early New England was powerful, it was political, and it was thoroughly gendered.	5
Kirsten Fischer University of South Florida

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