Skip to content
Home/ Governing the Tongue
Governing the Tongue

Governing the Tongue

by Kamensky, Jane
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780195090802

Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. In a work that is at once historical, socio-cultural, and linguistic, Jane Kamensky explores the little-known words of unsung individuals, and reconsiders such famous Puritan events as the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials, to expose the ever-present fear of what the Puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, as Kamensky illustrates here, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should lift one's voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of New England's early history, Kamensky develops new ideas about the complex relationship between speech and power in both Puritan New England and, by extension, our world today.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateJan 8, 1998
ISBN-100195090802
ISBN-139780195090802
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-08-18 13:54
$107.84
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Linguistics - Sociolinguistics
See all
Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language
Stavans, Ilan
$12.08
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Montell, Amanda
$21.09
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Montell, Amanda
$14.16
Like: A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word
Reynolds, Megan C
$19.70
Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (Revised)
<p><i>Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, </i> <i>Second Edition </i>(COPE) is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the discipline of pragmatics, an important branch of natural language study dealing with the study of language in it's entire user-related theoretical and practical complexity.</p> <p>As a derivative volume from <i>Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition</i>, it comprises contributions from the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As pragmatics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics, it will therefore be relevant not just for meaning specialists, but for most linguistic audiences.</p>
$235.92
Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society
Trudgill, Peter
$11.39