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.

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.