Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-06, Section: A, page: 2298.

Director: John Demos.

This project examines the cultural construction of speech in early New England through a variety of sources including laws and legal treatises, advice literature, personal documents, and, most centrally, court records. These sources demonstrate that people at all levels of society were intensely preoccupied with regulating verbal exchange. The thesis addresses what that preoccupation meant in the world of New England Puritans from roughly 1630 to 1692. I argue that although elites and ordinary people had different agendas regarding speech, they revealed a shared concern with constructing and maintaining social hierarchy by enforcing unwritten "speech codes"--a set of widely acknowledged rules governing who could speak to whom, when, and in what manner.

The available documents disclose these rules for speaking chiefly when people broke them, transgressing verbal norms dramatically enough to wind up in court. The chapters of the dissertation are organized around particular types of verbal challenges documented in the records, including speech against authority (citizens challenging the state), witchcraft (a female challenge to a male establishment), and heresy (lay people's challenges to ministers). Connections between gender, speech, and hierarchy are central to the thesis, which focuses on the ways in which women's prescribed silence served as a model for proper demeanor before authority.

The first two chapters explore the broadest parameters of "governed" speech, looking at verbal order in early Massachusetts as people believed it should be, and documenting conversation as it was, primarily in Essex County.

The next three chapters focus on stories that disclose the "rules of right speaking" in the breach. Chapter Three considers the "mis-governed" words of Anne Hutchinson and Ann Hibbens and the impact of disorderly female speech early in New England's history. Chapter Four looks at threatening female voices as incarnated in the speech of witches and their possessed victims. Through the story of John Porter, Jr., the fifth chapter explores verbal boundaries between parents and children, and the gendered constraints governing male speech. The final chapter reflects on apology as a remedy for the damage caused by heated words. The epilogue looks ahead to the changing economy of speech in America.