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.