ROBERT ST. GEORGE

    “Heated” Speech and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century New England

    Is the Tongue a Linguist? Many times it speaketh

    more Languages than is fit.536

    AS historians gradually recognize the complexity of everyday life in the past, their attention to the study of communication as a formative basis of social structure increases. Within the past decade the study of communication from an historical viewpoint has centered on literacy. Studies of the distribution and consequences of literacy skills, in particular, have demonstrated the implications of reading and writing for the diffusion of popular religious beliefs and political ideologies, debated whether or not reformed Protestantism was a “cause” of widespread education in the early modern West, correlated the presence of basic skills and the order in which they are learned to occupational success and emergent social class distinctions, and even shown that the ability to write may have affected the way a person remembered his or her own upbringing.537 In different ways, this new body of work focuses critical attention on the difficulties of equating literacy, per se, with an abstract process of “modernization” that plagued much of the writings completed during the 1950’s and 1960’s on the advancement of “peasant” cultures to “civilization.”538 But what remains surprising in much historical work is that, in exploring the meaning of transitions from “oral culture” to “written culture,” the meaning and function of speech either has been taken for granted as an historical constant or else has been overlooked.

    After all, we are taught in school that speech constitutes a “pre-modern” form beyond which we have progressed in our concern for written words that have the power to decontextualize and decentralize knowledge itself. Yet even in literate societies, speech continues to be a fundamental component in the routine shaping of social reality. And in some historical communities—like seventeenth-century New England—speech remained the principal means of discourse simply because large segments of the population, especially women, were illiterate. Indeed, the study of speech is so crucial to the study of reading and writing that these processes should be approached as an ethnographic totality; since the acquisition of speech typically occurs prior to either reading or writing, part of the context of the latter skills is speech itself. Although educators, anthropologists, and linguists have long recognized the interdependency of speaking, reading, and writing, historians have been reluctant to see it as central to the questions they have in mind.539

    Their hesitancy surely is related in part to a perceived lack in precise documentation. Unlike written or material artifacts, speech is by definition ephemeral. Once uttered, the word totally disappears. Or does it?

    On 25 June 1661, Beatrice Canterbury of Salem, Massachusetts, stood before the local magistrates to answer a charge “for wicked and reviling speeches toward her son-in-law,” one Benjamin Woodrow. By slandering and cursing him, she had hoped to convince her daughter Rebecca that her choice of a husband was unacceptable. Over the next few weeks, some of Canterbury’s neighbors submitted depositions, essentially their own stories of what had happened early that June. One of them, written by Elizabeth Buxton, herself an exceptional Salem goodwife for her ability to write a clear hand, explained how

    she heard her say to her daughter that [‘]her husband was both a rogue and a thiefe,[’] her daughter sayd [‘]she must prove it[’] she sayd [‘]he was a thiefe for that he had stolen the best flower in her garden, & a rogue because he had brought her body to shame[’] saying she [‘]did thinke the divel would picke his bones[’] this deponent sayd unto her [‘]she did not wel to speak so to her daughter agaynst her husband, but you should doe him the best good you can & give him good counsel for now he is your son[’]: she the sayd Cantlebery’s wife answered that [‘]the divel should picke his bones before she would owne him to be her son.[’]540

    Like all court documents, this one is written. Yet, as indicated by the inserted quotation marks, it contains six passages from a completed and spoken conversation. Although writing invariably imposed a filter of memory and form on the original spoken text and probably transformed its exact syntax and presentational style, what remains is at least the “said” of speech—the actual words that qualified in seventeenth-century New England as sufficiently offensive to warrant legal action. And because Elizabeth Buxton made it very clear that such words occurred in spoken conversation, itself the principal genre in which seventeenth-century individuals constructed and maintained social reality, we can assume that such words conveyed specific social meanings they understood immediately.

    Because court records provide the most detailed insight into seventeenth-century speech, this essay on the nature and meaning of speech in seventeenth-century New England naturally relies on the kinds of words that landed their speakers in court. Illegal speech acts were as base as sermons and prayers were eloquent, but, by defining the inverse of appropriate action, they reveal just as powerfully the underlying values of early New England culture. More specifically, the detailed analysis of the court records of Essex County, Massachusetts, between 1640 and 1680 suggests that offensive speech was crucial in defining the respective gender domains of men and women; recognition of the rules underlying these expressive domains in turn helps lead to a systematic and unified conception of literacy in past life by suggesting connections between the social meanings of spoken and written communication. Yet before addressing these issues, we must realize that attitudes toward speaking are not historically constant. Seventeenth-century people in both old and New England had a conception of speech very different from our own. To them, speech seemed inherently more mysterious, dangerous, and “real” than it does today.

    In his lengthy book, The Araignment of an unruly Tongue (1619), George Web offered his readers a description of the human tongue, the organ responsible for speech. Like other seventeenth-century ministers who addressed the subject, he admitted the contradictory properties of the tongue—and of speech by implication—when he warned:

    It is a Fountaine, whence waters flow both sweet and bitter, It is a Forge both of Blessing and Cursing, It is a Shop both of precious Balme and deadly Poyson, It is the Trouchman both of Truth and Error: Fire and Water are enclosed in it, Life and Death are in the power of it; It is a necessarie good, but an Unruly evill, very profitable, but exceeding hurtfull.541

    The repeated image of unresolved opposition is a dominant theme in seventeenth-century treatises on speech and its attendant evils: fire and water, forge and fountain, sweet and bitter, life and death, good and evil. On the one hand, speech was the single human faculty that contemporary authors seized upon as the touchstone of man’s superior intellect and ordained dominance over lesser creatures of the earth. In cataloging the properties of the tongue, seventeenth-century ministers praised it as the interpreter and controller of worldly affairs. The ability to speak, they argued, proclaimed man’s rationality and mastery of his environment. On the other hand, speech was the source of misrule and social conflict most difficult to control. Indeed, seventeenth-century individuals thought it a supreme irony that so small an organ as the tongue could prove to be so dangerous. “It is easier to tame a wild horse, than a wild Tongue,” wrote Web. “We put bits … in horses mouthes [so] that they may obey us; and wee turne about their whole body: but the Tongue can no man tame.” He went on to quote one authority who claimed that “Halfe the sinnes of our life … are committed by the tongue,” and another whose verdict was grimmer still: “there is no wrong or injurie done in the world, but first or last the tongue hath a share in the same.”542

    Of immediate concern to communities in seventeenth-century New England was the subversive threat that speech posed to social order. Fully cognizant of such danger, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay took prompt action to insure that the General Laws of 1641 included punishments specific to lying, blasphemy, cursing, slander, and swearing. After all, as one author had warned, “It is the tongue which breaketh the peace between neighbours,” and peaceful cooperation was vital to the establishment of permanent English settlement.543 Speech was particularly dangerous because it seemed to defy predictable categorization according to the social class of the speaker. It affected all men. “Lamentable and fearful is the abuse of the tongue among all sorts and degrees of men everywhere,” observed William Perkins in 1615.544 And how could one logically expect any man to keep a constant watch over his speech? “Hee is a perfect man that can rule Ins Tongue,”545 and all men were imperfect by nature.

    Because illicit speech fell outside their hierarchic view of social character, seventeenth-century people thought it anomalous and fundamentally indeterminate. The metaphors used by contemporary authors to describe the tongue dramatize the belief they and their audience shared in its likelihood to lead to spiritual downfall and social heresy. The tongue was considered a “witch,” a “practiser of poysonings,” a “box of poison,” a murderer that cuts “like a Rasor,” “the first corrupting Instrument,” the “unruliest member” that “defiles the whole body,” an arrow, a hammer, a sword, a traitor, a “common pickpurse,” and a “notorious Robber.” Speech itself was thought “harder to be tamed … than a strong City is to be conquered.”546 All of these images refer to destruction; weapons, poison, pollution, and, finally, socially liminal creatures who were believed to destroy society itself.

    Beneath the circulation of ministerial tracts warning people to mind their words, a few unanswered questions compounded the mystery of speech in the minds of seventeenth-century New Englanders. What “caused” such verbal outbreaks? Was it Satan acting through man’s body? Or did words come from man’s own mind? Indeed, what part of the human body controlled what was said? Although it remains difficult to know the perceived causes in every case, one general fact does seem clear—all of the words to which people reacted in an adverse way were spoken in the context of anger and hostility, and such aggression seems to have been a constant and almost inescapable presence in early New England communities.547

    Seventeenth-century people viewed being angry or “in a passion,” as it was often called, as a temporary condition in which an individual’s rational understanding and will gave way to the momentary influence of his senses, believed to be the source of emotion. Under normal conditions, reason held the senses in check. But when the latter gained control because of an imbalance of bodily humors, people were prone to utter words which they had not sufficiently pre-meditated and controlled for situational propriety. Passion, like anger, seventeenth-century people believed,

    is no other thing, but a motion of the sensitive appetite, caused by the apprehension or imagination of good or evill, the which is followed with a change or alteration in the body, contrary to the Lawes of Nature. Whereby it appeares, that passions, to speak properly, reside onely in the sensitive appetite, and that they are not fashioned [except] in the irrationall part of the soule.548

    If “passion” was a state that witnessed the emergent dominance of irrationality, it also admitted momentary flashes of uncontrolled speech as part of the “change or alteration in the body” it produced. In Newbury, Massachusetts, in August 1679, Caleb Moody complained that William Fanning and his wife swore they would knock out his brains and cripple his wife. Two maidservants also heard Fanning curse. When brought to court, Fanning realized he had no defense and admitted “that in his passion he might have done these things,”549 the implication being that curses and threats accompanied a loss of memory when a person’s awareness of social restraints fell victim to his senses.

    If hostile words and deeds resulted from being in a passion, which in turn was associated with the “sensitive appetite” and by extension the “irrationall part of the soule,” where in the body was the source of the actual aggressive words? In diagnosing disorderly speech, some seventeenth-century physicians relied exclusively on the findings of Galen, whose explanations of speech control and impairment in the second century A.D. were among the first to derive from anatomical experimentation and exploration. Galenic tradition maintained that speech was the messenger of the soul, and since both the rational and irrational parts of the soul were believed located in the ventricles of the brain, speech of any kind was thought to originate in the head. From this point of view, aggressive speech uttered in an impassioned state came as well from the head, since it sprang from the irrational segment of the soul. Galen asserted this theory against his colleagues who believed in the cardiac location of the soul. In addition, a long-standing tradition of medical investigation prior to the seventeenth century demonstrated that both anger and offensive speech could be traced to a temporary physiological imbalance in which the choleric or sanguine humors were dominant. From this perspective, seventeenth-century individuals believed that angry speech was intrinsically hot and dry and that defective or impaired speech (e.g., stammering or aphonia), was by definition hot and moist.550 In both cases, the presence of heat was universally recognized and accepted. Aggressive speech was “heated” speech.

    To this explanation of “heated” speech seventeenth-century Puritans grafted beliefs derived from biblical exegesis that connected speech with emotion and located both the emotions and the “irrationall part of the soule” in the heart, in direct contradiction to Galenic theory. William Perkins, an English clergyman whose works circulated widely in seventeenth-century New England, urged members of his congregation to contrition by reminding them “the pure heart is most necessary becausest it is the fountain of speech”; his colleague William Ward agreed, stating that “a man (because of the aboundance of the heart the mouth speaketh) may know … the Children of the Divell by their Speech.”551 Seventeenth-century residents of Essex County shared the belief that the “Children of the Divell” used heated speech, a conviction which lay beneath the frequent analogy they made between the heat of speech, the fires of hell, and Satan himself. In 1660, Samuel Graves of Ipswich said he heard John Pindar “use the devil in his mouth often times … in such words as were not fit to be spoken”; the wife of William Ellet told another Lynn woman that she “was a fire brand of hell for her lying tongue”; and two Essex County women were described by a neighbor in 1657 as being “in combustion” when, in the course of arguing, one had called the other a “lousie slutt.”552 Speaking of cursers, another English divine said it seemed “as if their throats were Hell it selfe.”553

    Finally, seventeenth-century people thought any tongue that spoke heated words was filled with poison, and a distant cousin to the venomous mouth of that Edenic serpent whose wicked words had led men astray for eternity. “The tongue is a fire,” wrote St. James, “and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell … it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”554 Selectively fusing some parts of Galenic tradition with biblical mandate, seventeenth-century New Englanders conceived of emotion, the devil, fire, and the heart as interrelated, immanent in passion, and concretely enacted in heated speech. From Galen they took the idea of impassioned speech being caused by the elemental heat of humoral imbalance. And while they followed his suggestion that the rational soul was located in the head, they clung to biblical teachings claiming the heart as the source of emotion and hence of irrationality. While a lack of documentation makes it difficult to trace out these beliefs in detail, there is no doubt that people in seventeenth-century Essex County believed that the tongue spoke what the heart commanded; in Ipswich in 1668, Robert Cross and his wife Anna reported how one night they heard Thomas Wells call another man “a common liar” and say “that it cannot enter in to the heart of a man to conseve[,] neather in the Tongue of man to expresse the wickednesse yt is in him.”555

    The mystery of heated speech—its apparently universal usage and the rich overlay of classical and Christian explanations for its etiology—contributed to its being thought extremely unpredictable and dangerous in seventeenth-century New England. For the same reasons, the colonists thought of the human mouth as richly symbolic. When nineteen-year-old Mary Langley of Lynn described Richard Haven’s verbal attack on her father for having lamed his hogs in March 1663, she noted that after the assailant yelled “thou rogue I could find [it] in my heart to spill thy heart blood upon the ground thou rogue thou,” he “foomed at the mouth,”556 a sure sign of his being out of control and markedly “animal” or irrational in his behavior. The angry man, wrote the Puritan divine John Robinson, appears with “his lips fumbling, his face pale, his teeth gnashing, his mouth foaming, and other parts of his body trembling and shaking.”557 In addition, frequent references to biting, sucking, and eating in witchcraft narratives make explicit the crucial relationship that seventeenth-century Essex County residents saw between evil and the mouth, an association made more perplexing because, paradoxically, it was also through the mouth of man that God made His Word known in a region that remained only about sixty-percent literate until the second decade of the eighteenth century.558

    The tension in all speech—that it could, depending on circumstances largely unseen and wholly unknowable to man, burst forth as either blessed or sinful, reasoned or irrational, from the head or from the heart—led seventeenth-century people to pay extremely close attention to all utterances. Speech was a principal sign of the progress in the ongoing battle between God and Satan in which all men were soldiers. It both conveyed the Word of God and belched forth the flames of hell. When speech itself stopped, the silence that intervened was no less studied. God’s order resulted in peace among men, and “peace in effect,” wrote one English legal authority, “is the amitie, confidence, and quiet that is between men, And he that breaketh this amitie or quiet breaketh the peace.”559 At the same time, the loss of speech could also result from drunkenness, traumatic response to physical violence, or insanity. One Salem woman was discovered in 1680 “in a senceless stupifyed condition not able to speak one word.”560 Instances of dramatic and sudden aphonia were all the more worrisome because of popular beliefs that the loss of speech was a sign that God was punishing man for a specific speech offense. Consider the case of the widow Anne Averies, an unfortunate London woman,

    who foreswore [perjured] herselfe for a little money that she should have paid for six pounds of tow at a shop in Woodstreet: for which cause being suddenly surprised with the justice of God, she fel down speechlesse forthwith, and cast up at her mouth in great aboundance, and with horrible stinke, that matter which by natures course should have been voided downewards, and so died, to the terrour of all perjured and foresworne wretches.561

    Because speech defied prior categorization as either blessed or sinful, it framed and helped mark aggressive social encounters as essentially unpredictable. As soon as someone opened his mouth, no one could guarantee whether God or Satan stood behind what might issue forth. Because the act of speaking itself was endowed at every word with cosmic significance that fell outside man’s ability and logic to control, it momentarily suspended the determinacy of existing social reality, leaving an opportunity for personal relations among friends, neighbors, and enemies not only to be redefined, but also actively destroyed.

    Within this view of speech, the actual words exchanged in seventeenth-century Essex County warrant attention in three principal ways. First, we must examine how seventeenth-century people classified acts of heated speech. Here the records offer many clues; they specify twelve different kinds of “heated” language, sixty-nine distinct types of “heated” speech or ways of speaking, and twenty-seven additional kinds of words considered sufficiently vicious to warrant legal action by their listeners (see Appendix 1). Yet the actual structures of heated speech also fit into prevailing legal definitions, and we must describe in detail their intersection. Second, we need to chart the overall pattern of speech transgressions. Did, for example, one kind of offense increase steadily as another declined, and if so, what might this suggest about the changing social basis of litigation? Finally, we need to explore the meanings of the offensive words themselves, what kinds of punishment they received, and how they functioned to establish the respective speech domains of men and women.

    County courts in seventeenth-century New England considered presentments for heated speech either as criminal offenses or as civil offenses (Figure 24). A criminal case resulted when an individual spoke out in one of two ways. On the one hand, swearing or cursing constituted blasphemy because the speaker was presuming to control the will of God in attempting to execute against other men judgments reserved in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 28:15–20) for His wisdom alone.562 On the other hand, sedition included any speeches that protested or rebuked institutional authority and, by implication, the implicit authority of God’s patriarchal prerogative as embodied in the secular affairs of men. Civil cases involved speech offenses in which one individual took another to court seeking satisfaction for one of two kinds of “damage” or destruction that resulted from verbal assault. Immanent destruction, or damage that one person would invoke or promise to another, consisted of threats. Similar in some respects to curses in their wish that harm would indeed occur, threats were less serious because they suggested only that disaster would come at the hands of man. Opposed to immanent destruction was enacted destruction, which in turn involved specific words that detraded from an individual’s livelihood, and destructive styles of verbal assault that qualified as damaging in their own right.

    Figure 24. The Structure of “Heated” Speech in Seventeenth-century New England and its Location in Contemporary Law (use with Tables 1 and 2).

    TABLE 1

    Presentments for “Heated” Speech in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680.*

    Offense 1640–1650 1651–1660 1661–1670 1671–1680 Total

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    Criminal

    161 (62.2)

    69 (41.8)

    112 (56.9)

    151 (64.3)

    493 (57.6)

    Civil

    98 (37.8)

    96 (58.2)

    85 (43.1)

    84 (35.7)

    363 (42.4)

    Total

    259 (100.0)

    165 (100.0)

    197 (100.0)

    235 (100.0)

    856 (100.0)

    * For explanations of what the respective categories of criminal and civil offenses included, see Figure 24 and pp. 287–290, above.

    TABLE 2

    Presentments for “Heated” Speech in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680: Civil Offenses.†

    Offense 1640–1650 1651–1660 1661–1670 1671–1680 Total

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    Threats

    7 (7.1)

    8 (8.3)

    9 (10.6)

    14 (16.7)

    38 (10.5)

    “Detractive” Speech

    84 (85.8)

    76 (79.2)

    62 (72.9)

    49 (58.3)

    271 (74.6)

    Destructive style

    7 (7.1)

    12 (12.5)

    14 (16.5)

    21 (25.0)

    54 (14.9)

    Total

    98 (100.0)

    96 (100.0)

    85 (100.0)

    84 (100.0)

    363 (100.0)

    † George Francis Dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 8 vols. (Salem, 1911–1921).

    Under seventeenth-century English law, the words defined as “actionable” in cases of defamation, slander, or reproach had to fulfill stringent criteria. According to one treatise of the 1640’s, legal arguments could only cite as actionable

    scandalous words which touch or concern a man in his life, liberty or member, or any corporall punishment; or which scandal a man in his office or place of trust; or in his calling or function by which he gains his living; or which tend to the slandering of his title or any other particular damage; or lastly which charge a man to have any dangerous infectious disease by reason of which he ought to separate himselfe, or to be separated by the law, from the society of men.563

    “Damage,” in other words, resulted from any malicious speech that led the plaintiff to a position of social stigma because of an enforced moral distance, economic hardship, or physical exclusion. Since any one of these charges could result in real temporal damage to the defendant, they were heard and acted upon by the court of common law.

    Beginning early in the seventeenth century some English magistrates began hearing arguments maintaining that a damaged reputation warranted legal action in that it, too, could directly affect one’s social position. “Where the words spoken do tend to the infamy, discredit, or disgrace of the party, there the words shall be actionable,” wrote one judge in a decision of 1611, while another pronounced that “whenever words tended to take away a man’s reputation he would encourage actions for them, because so doing would contribute much to the preservation of the peace.”564 The resulting liberal extension of defamation under the common law was the norm in seventeenth-century New England, and most of the civil cases brought before the quarterly courts of Essex County sought damages from the “theft” of reputation, itself an intangible form of property, by a townsman with a heated tongue. The idea that defamation, slander, and reproach were united conceptually by the “theft” each implied was recognized during the period. “The Tongue is a common pick-purse,” wrote one author, who went on to explain that such robbery took three principal forms—taking a man’s name, his goods, and, in dire instances, his life. And, like defamation, slander, and reproach, lying was also a kind of theft because it robbed a situation of its truth.565

    A less complicated category, comprised of how such thefts were actually said, involved transgressions against appropriate verbal style: abuse, railing, reviling, and scolding. All of these seem to have combined a harshly negative tone with loud yelling and screaming. Such rude and sharp remarks offered corrective discipline and conveyed the intensity of outright anger itself.

    These three types of civil offenses did not always appear as singular phenomena. In many instances they erupted simultaneously. In 1647 Robert Blood of Lynn answered charges for “abusing Henry Rodes” in “threatening him”; twenty years later a servant “was convicted … of railing and threatening speeches against the country and his master, threatening to kill him [‘I will have the hart blood of thee or thine …’], and other gross abuses offered to his dame.”566

    If we compare the relative rates of presentment for criminal and civil offenses, the former remained statistically dominant in Essex County between 1640 and 1680, except for a slight reversal in the 1650’s (Table 1). Within the range of civil presentments alone (Table 2), offenses for detractive speech consistently comprised almost seventy-five percent of all cases, although its relative dominance slipped steadily from over eighty-five percent in the 1640’s to just over fifty-five percent in the 1670’s. And while it declined, presentments for threats and destructive style steadily increased. Taken together, the rates of presentment for heated speech suggest there may have existed subtle shifts of emphasis within specific genres of crime that offer clues to underlying social change. For example, when the shifting rates of presentment for speech offenses in seventeenth-century Essex County are correlated with the rapid rise in the area’s population beginning in the late 1650’s,567 the real drop in the rate of presentments as a whole appears dramatic. And within the overall drop in the frequency of civil presentments, the emphasis shifts from the extremely high rate of “detractive” speech in the 1640’s to the comparatively high rates of threats and destructive style in the 1670’s. Against the steady backdrop of criminal cases, civil complaints shift from the very direct assault on reputation explicit in defamations to an increasingly indirect or less engaged type of damage suggested by threats and verbal abuse.

    These patterns suggest that the particular way people chose to channel interpersonal aggression may have changed during the seventeenth century. Due to the mechanics of settlement, the adjustment of English regional models for daily life, and the pressures of establishing new reputations among total strangers, people in the 1640’s were more likely to use defamation as a means of claiming social turf. As society became more firmly established, the pattern quickly reversed. Increasingly competitive for status within the context of more densely overlapping kinship and economic networks, people in the 1670’s chose to tread more lightly on reputation per se, since words uttered in a moment of anger were ever more likely to land unintentionally on the ears of a distant cousin who would take immediate offense with family cohesion hanging precariously in the balance. Indeed, the presentments suggest that aggressive style and veiled threats were viewed as an increasingly effective form of reprimand in the more complex social web of the late 1670’s, because these forms could openly express their speaker’s displeasure without risking so great a potential change in his social identity.

    5. On rising population density in the late seventeenth-century, see the summary offered in David Grayson Allen, “‘Vacuum Domicilium’: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, I, 7; data for specific towns appear in Susan L. Norton, “Population Growth in Colonial America: A Study of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” Population Studies, XXV (1972), 433–452; and Lockridge, “The Population of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., XIX (1966), 319–344.

    If the “said” of speech led to social strife, what were the words recognized as sufficiently powerful to provoke a legal contest? The words hurled in anger over hedgerows and fences were extremely redundant and elaborate, with extended lists suitable for men and women, respectively. Of a total of ninety principal words used in Essex County during the middle of the seventeenth century, fifty-eight were appropriate to men, thirty-two to women, while an additional six landed on the innocent ears of children. (See Table 3 and Appendix 2). Those used most frequently could be modified with additional pejoratives. “Dog” had five modifiers, including base, black, foresworn, and French, as well as close equivalents in five variants of “curr.” Slut, pig, bawd, knave, and liar had three variants, witch had four, and devil had seven variants. Rogue occurred by itself and with any one or more of thirteen modifiers, including base, cheating, cowardly, long-shanked, thievish, old, and white-livered. The presence alone of such intensive descriptive attention to these key words suggests they may have been viewed as more dangerous in a cultural sense than other words. If we examine some of them in detail, we discover that they were so powerful and believed harmful in a very “real” sense because they made areas of cultural indeterminacy socially explicit.

    TABLE 3

    Damaging Words and Gender in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680

    Damage to:
    Type of word Man Woman Child Total

    Principal

    58

    32

    6

    96

    Modifier

    63

    25

    1

    89

    Total

    121

    57

    7

    185*

    * N=185 (96.9%) of 191 known presentments (use with Appendix 2).

    Take, for example, animal names. Two animals dominate the records: dogs (by variants of dog and cur) and pigs (by pig, sow, and hog). Animals in general and these two animals in particular derived their impact as pejoratives in part from the seventeenth-century belief that animals had no souls and therefore no chance for salvation. In a moment of spiritual despondence, John Bunyan admitted, “I blessed the condition of the Dogge and Toad … for I knew they had no Soul to perish under the everlasting weights of Hell for sin, as mine was like to do.”568 And seventeenth-century people who could read knew that the word “dog,” God spelled backwards, itself was the Devil’s handiwork. Animal terms also played on the deep ambivalence with which seventeenth-century Englishmen viewed domesticated creatures. Raising dogs for a purpose other than food or work, they allowed dogs into their homes and named them with affection. Dogs, at times, seemed almost human, but they lived off scraps thrown at random from their master’s table. And both dogs and toads were classed as inedible. Dogs were subject to someone else’s will for survival. They were both servile and dependent. “Curr” carried overt meanings of “low-class” or “ill-bred.” For a man in seventeenth-century Essex County to be called a dog—and men alone were so named—implied that he was not economically self-sufficient, that he contributed nothing to his family’s livelihood, that he had no hope for redemption, and that he might be working with Satan.

    Women in Essex County took equal offense at being called a pig, sow, or hog. Pigs were raised for no reason other than to be slaughtered, unlike chickens, cows, goats, or sheep, which while alive could at least provide eggs, milk, cheese, butter, and fleece before being killed for meat. This alone made raising pigs a moral issue and put them in a strange ethical category within seventeenth-century thought. In addition, pigs in some parts of England were allowed into the farmer’s house and fed from the table like dogs.569 They were also among the beasts declared by God to be an abomination to his chosen people (Leviticus 11:7). Along with other prohibited animals, the pig was believed an incarnation of the Devil. When William Morse’s house in Newbury was visited by spirits in late 1679, for example, he noted the recurrent appearance of hogs running in and out of his house during day and night, despite the presence of locked doors in their path.570 Pigs were unclean, dependent, exploited by men for their own benefit, and controlled by Satan. With these multiple meanings, the word “pig” was harmful to women not only as an immediate social pejorative, but also because it reminded them of their descent from Eve, the first woman to act out the will of the Devil to the detriment of all men.

    Other words, used with a specific gender in mind, suggest a fundamental difference in the appropriate social roles of men and women. Men in particular found damaging any words which, like dog, pointed to economic weakness or pushed too far an unethical dependence on the good will of their neighbors. The word thief, while aimed on occasion at women, was used most frequently to damage a man; it implied a lack of willingness to provide for oneself the necessities of life. The thief or robber had a sinful heart. “The principal cause” of theft, claimed one minister,

    is covetousnesse; which is so unruly an evill, and so deeply rooted in the heart of man, that ever yet it hath used to encroach upon the goods of others, & to keepe possession of that which was none of its owne; breaking all the bonds of humanitie, equitie, and right, without being contained in any measure or mean.571

    Like dogs, thieves were economic parasites on other men, a fault viewed during the period as an admission of failure as an householder.

    The moral implications of economic parasitism lay at the root of other words against men, of which rogue seems to have been the most often used in seventeenth-century Essex County. In order to understand the peculiar grip that a term like rogue had on early New Englanders, we need look no further than the writings of popular authors like Thomas Harman, John Awdely, or Robert Greene, whose books describing the habits and speech of vagabonds and other marginal characters in Elizabethan England portray their immoral and anti-social qualities in detail. Harman, for example, offers a definition of rogues as men who, merging mendicancy with transvestism,

    will go fayntly and looke piteously, when they see, either meete any person, having a kercher … tyed aboute their heade, with a short staffe in their hand, halting, although they neede not, requiri[n]g almes of such as they meete, or to what house they shall come. But you may easely perceive by their colour, that they cary both health and hipocrisie about them, whereby they gette gain, when others want that cannot fayne and dissemble.572

    For the majority of yeomen in Essex County, these creatures epitomized the social problems that over-crowding and emergent social class conflict had created in their home counties before emigration and which, they believed, the Devil was now using to stain the purity of their New Israel. Rogues, fellows, and knaves were suspicious men who did not own land, did not work, and survived off the labor (and Christian naivete) of their neighbors. In The Countrey Justice, a legal treatise used in New England by local magistrates, Michael Dalton devoted several pages to the rogue, defining him in great detail as any person “offending as hereunder is mentioned”:

    • All persons above the age of seven yeares, going about begging, upon any pretence or colour whatsoever.
    • All idle persons going about the countrie, either using any subtil craft, or unlawfull games, or being fortune tellers, or juglers, or using any other like crafty science.
    • All Pedlers, petie Chapmen, Tinkers, and Glasse men wandring about.
    • All wandring persons and common labourers, being able to [labor] in body, using loitering, and refusing to worke for reasonable wages, not having living otherwise than by labour to maintain themselves.
    • Poore persons.
    • Souldiors or mariners.
    • Poore diseased or impotent persons.
    • Persons infected, or dwelling in houses infected with the plague.
    • [And] all persons being able to labour, and thereby to relieve themselves and their families, that shall run away, or threaten to run away and leave their charge to the parish, &c.573

    In short, the word “rogue” carried with it connotations of membership in all the injured classes of seventeenth-century society that the bourgeois yeoman resented having to support in a world of values that he had helped to make rigid and highly stratified. The rogue was a burden on others. He did not participate in an economy structured by the scarcity of land. He actively sought to avoid work. He wandered. He was poor, diseased, and with little or no guilt would desert his family if something better came along. He was a social failure, a puppet of Satan challenging the courage of the Christian soldier.

    In contrast to the pejoratives aimed at economic self-sufficiency, occupational status, or physical strength as the basis of a man’s reputation,574 most slurs against women stressed bodily filth, sexual incontinency, and moral degeneracy. Typical words included “slut,” “Jezabel,” and “unchaste filthy creature.” In addition, women were more often called “adultress,” “bawd,” “whore,” and “hypocrite” than were men. All of these terms refer to moral infractions that contemporary authors—all of whom were men—cautioned women not to commit. “Adultery is forbidden,” warned one writer, “and grievous threatnings denounced against all those that defile their bodies with filthie and unpure actions, estrange themselves from God.”575 A direct violation of the Seventh Commandment, adultery was socially dangerous because it sought to subvert the sexual prohibitions that insured the structure of kinship.

    Closely related to adultery was prostitution, and anyone who acted as a procurer for that purpose was a bawd, and just as guilty in the eyes of God as the whores or “queanes” themselves. By calling a woman a “brazen-faced bawd” or a whore, one was by implication calling her house—her domain of work, child-rearing, and moral guidance—a place of prostitution. By further implication, her children born in that house were bastards; one seventeenth-century woman said that her neighbor “was a whore and that she had severall children by other men, and that Cuckoldlay old Rogue her husband owned them.”576 Bawds, whores, and adulterers engaged in duplicitous social relations. They were distrusted and scorned as sinners. The same was true of hypocrites, who, being inauthentic in their worship, failed to live up to God’s covenant with man.577

    One of the most frequent modifiers that insulted men and women alike was “old.” While being elderly in seventeenth-century New England commanded respect from some as a sign of being closer to death, salvation, and God, it was also a badge of weakness, vulnerability, a lack of sexual identity, and a dependency on grown children who often resented the strain an aged parent put on their own family life. Some children were able to articulate their resentment; John Paine, a carpenter in the Plymouth Colony, confided to his diary his disdain for “some older infirm person whose life is Even a burden to them Selves and they them Selves a burden & a trouble to all about them.”578 Perhaps Paine and others faced with caring for the elderly had encountered the anguish of watching a loved one lapse into senility. “A man in his old age, doe become a very childe again in his understanding,” wrote Henry Swinburne late in the sixteenth century.579 The dependency of old age and its accompanying physical decline reduced men to children and lay behind the occasional use of “boy” as a pejorative. For women, old age brought with it de-sexualization, physical decay, and a greater chance of being called a witch.580

    A final group of pejoratives emerged with the appearance of ethnic minorities other than the English in Essex County. From the beginning of settlement individuals from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland served as the butt of insults, and phrases like “Welsh curr” and “Scotch rogue” pepper the records of civil cases throughout the century. Starting in the 1670’s, the presence of immigrants from the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey introduced a new linguistic minority which, while initially confined to the servants and fishermen that Philip English and Zachary White imported, soon grew in number and contributed to the complexity of speech communities in seaport towns like Salem and Marblehead. In short order, slurs like “Jerse cheater” and “French dog” appeared in the insult repertoire of men like constable John Waldron of Marblehead.581

    In their quantity and diversity, curses, swear-words, and threats were far less elaborate than “detractive” words. Curses could be made against people or animals and took similar forms in either case. They usually requested that God visit pestilence on the victim, or that he be taken by the Devil, and sometimes both. Francis Usselton of Salem cursed one of his neighbor’s swine in 1657 by saying “A pox of god upon her & the divill take her”; in 1652 William Snelling, a Newbury resident, inadvertently used a local proverb from his home town of Plympton St. Mary, Devon, in front of his East Anglian Ipswich neighbors—“as for our foes, a plage on theire heeles and a pox on theare toes”—and they took him to court.582 Most cases of swearing involved some mention of “the blood and wounds of Christ.” The common threat in Essex County consisted of “I will knock out your brains,” “I will have your heart’s blood on the ground,” or some variation of the two.

    All of these heated exchanges, whether they involved a curse, a threat, or a slander, could lead quickly to genuine hostility that intensified as rapidly as it had erupted. Consider the fierce escalation of a “combustion” between Thomas Wells and William Nelson of Rowley in 1669. Nelson told the court how he and John Bare, a neighbor, began splashing water on one another as they were walking along the road with Wells on a summer day. Some of the water fell on Wells, who was carrying an axe on his shoulder. Feeling himself being splashed, he swore by “God’s wounds that he would split them downe.” Nelson then asked, “Whie will you bie in such a pashon for so smale a matter?” Wells replied that he “would not suffer such an affrount from no man no not from King Charles if he was here … [I] would tramped hem under my Foot.”583 The intensity of reaction and the instant transformation of reason into rage were part of the same passion that gave rise to heated speech itself.

    The swift intensification of anger in this and other encounters demonstrates that seventeenth-century people were extremely sensitive to heated speech because they attributed to it a reality that we no longer acknowledge. Despite all the historical literature extolling the communal solidarity and the heirarchic permanence of seventeenth-century New England’s “peasant” society, heated speech reminds us how fragile it could be at certain levels. A defamation or reproach was “real” because it pointed to a recognized shortcoming in the social personality of the victim—someone who, for example, was viewed as being wealthy but unable to make appropriate decisions, or someone who was powerful but self-serving—and the implicit warning that if the person tried to “complete” his or her personality at the expense of others, he would fail.584 To be exposed in public as socially “incomplete” could have very real consequences, since a loss in the presentation of household authority could result in ridicule, weakness in town affairs, and possible economic loss. In addition, defamation was believed “real” since God promised punishment to both those who spread slanderous rumors as well as those who listened. Individuals who witnessed or heard a slander were warned to turn upon it a deaf ear, a frowning look, and a sharp reproof, for all such encounters were held as the work of the Devil. Their ministers claimed Satan was in the heart and the mouth of the curser, and that hell was in his throat. And although modern language theory maintains words to be arbitrary signs and merely referential, seventeenth-century speakers believed that the uttering of the word itself could result in actual physical destruction. With the Devil’s power unleashing itself before their ears, Essex County yeomen believed in the power of a curse to ruin crops, burn a house, or kill a new lamb.585 Certainly part of the reality of heated speech was due to its being punishable by law. The degree of damage inflicted by heated words and their relative publicity bore directly on the kind of punishment the offender received. An offense and its punishment were symmetrical opposites; the inverse of stealing a neighbor’s good name was having one’s own taken away; the opposite of reputation was shame. Of course, on a cosmic level all offenses were subject in theory to divine judgment, and popular literature reiterated the warnings against evil speech given in the Bible. A typical story, similar in many respects to the sad tale of Anne Averies, recounted the tragic fate of a woman who, having renounced her profession of faith, “was so seised upon and possessed by an evill Spirit, that … she fell to lamenting, and tormenting her own flesh, and Chopt in pieces with her daintie teeth her rebellious tongue, wherewith she had spoken wicked words.”586 On a more local level, punishment focused on various forms of public censure designed to subject the convicted speaker to the public ridicule of his neighbors as a means both of breaking his will and of temporarily excommunicating him from the respectable members of his community.587

    The least public type of censure was the payment of a fine, a literal payment of a debt to society demanded most often in cases of lying, defamation, swearing, and cursing. Fines in Essex County ranged from five shillings to six pounds, depending on the exact nature of the infraction and whether or not it was a first offense. Fines had the obvious advantage of relative privacy; an offender could satisfy the court and not parade his wounded pride so actively before his fellow townsmen. But only wealthy individuals could always pay a fine. Others had no choice but to endure public embarrassment, three distinct types of which prevailed in Essex County during the seventeenth century.

    The first technique was the public confession, a ritual event in which the convicted would recite pleas for forgiveness in front of their local meetinghouse on a lecture day, thus ensuring that most of the community would be present to judge their fitness to participate anew in the moral economy of their town. These confessions followed a specific form in which the offender began by recounting the charge against him, asked for the forgiveness of his friends, and concluded by seeking a guarantee of their and God’s assistance in the future. A confession by Thomas Wheeler of Lynn written in 1653, after he was convicted “for sinful speeches” against the town’s minister, Thomas Cobbett, is typical of the genre:

    Whereas I Thomas Wheeler of Lin have bene convicted at the last Court at Salem for speakinge sinfull and reprochfull speechis ag[ai]nst Mr[.] Cobbett caluminatinge the doctrine by him delivered and for other evill speechis uttered ag[ai]nst som oth[e]r of the Inhabitants of Lin which though I doe not p[er]fectly rememb[e]r yet seeinge it is testified ag [ai]nst me I have noe reason but to beleeve it to be true and therefore doe acknowledge my greate sin and offence in soe speakinge humblie intreatinge those whom it doth concern to passe it by and receive sattisfaction by this mine humble acknowledgm[e]nt p[ro]misinge for the time to come god helping me to be more watchfull over my words and speeches.588

    The crucial breaking of Wheeler’s will and his submission to community judgment occur when he admits that despite his not recalling the words per se, so many people have accused him that “I have noe reason but to beleeve it to be true.” Wheeler chose to submit and opt back into the structure of local values. The relative truth of the allegations, he realized, was secondary to his reacceptance by town and congregation.

    The second type of punishment meted out in Essex County were papers upon which the offense was written. The papers were attached to the convicted person’s body. The offender then had to display his crime by standing in a public place where all could read the paper. When Joseph Severans of Hampton was convicted in 1673, he was ordered to stand at the meetinghouse door for one-half hour before the lecture began with the following incriminating words in capital letters pinned to his breast, “this person is convicted for speaking words in a boasting manner of his lascivious & unclean practices.”589 He was also fined. In some instances, the use of papers was combined with other punishments that mocked the evil tongue even more. Bridget Oliver of Salem was gagged as well as put on public display with a paper for calling her husband “old devil” and “old rogue,” and George Dill of Salem was ordered in late 1639 to “stand att the meeting hous doar next Lecture day with a Clefte sticke upon his Tong, & a pap[er] upon his hatt subscribed [‘]for gross pr[e]meditated Lying.[’]”590 Finally, the use of papers could be combined with more severe physical punishment. Elizabeth Hewlett of Salem, convicted of “slanderous speeches against Mr. Zerobabell Endicott in fathering her child with him,” was to be whipped twenty stripes as well as having to wear upon her forehead the words “a slanderer of mr. zerobabell endicott.”591 In all instances, papers were attached to either the breast or the head, indicating again the fundamental confusion over where in the body heated words originated.

    Corporal punishment was the third and most desperate means of humbling an offender into submission. In seventeenth-century Essex County, two techniques were common—the stocks and whipping. In most instances the stocks were an alternative to paying a fine; one-half hour or one full hour was normally the time specified for confinement. The stocks were always located in a public place. If New England stocks followed the design of their English precedents, they forced the prisoner to sit down with his or her feet held securely between two horizontal oak rails which were then locked in place. In some cases only one foot was secured. In others, both feet could be enclosed, resulting in greater discomfort for the prisoner and less agility in dodging anything that might be thrown at them in mockery or contempt.592

    The most serious offenders felt the sting of the constable’s whip. Most seventeenth-century towns had a whipping post in a central location. Generally a frame of two uprights supporting a crossbar to which the prisoner’s wrists were tied, the “post” was high enough to prevent the prisoner from hunching over to protect his bared back and shoulders. Whips were made either of branches or rushes bound roughly together or leather thongs knotted and tied to a wooden handle. Individuals were whipped for lying, slandering, and cursing if their crimes were of a “high” nature or if the offender was a servant. In 1648, John Bond was presented for making “unclean speeches,” having said that Alice Spooner, a married neighbor, had given birth to his child. The court ordered him “severely whipped.”593 John Cooke, a Salem servant, was sentenced in 1640 “to be severly whipped and have a shackle put upon his leg for resisting his master’s authority.”594 Iron shackles and manacles symbolized the servitude that Cooke tried to protest. Finally, whipping was used in combination with fines and the stocks to discipline repeat offenders. Lying was punished, for example, with different levels of social and corporal censure if it was a first, a second, or a third offense. In cases of total disobedience, like that of John Porter, Jr., a Salem mariner who repeatedly swore at and cursed his parents in the early 1660’s, speech offenders could be sent to prison.595

    Punishment, like the immediately understood meanings of heated words, intensified the reality of aggression in seventeenth-century society. Yet given the power of such words and their legal punishment, what can we say about the relative involvement of men and women in heated speech acts? Who accused whom? Did men accuse other men more than women, or vice versa? Were there types of accusation that rarely, or perhaps never, occurred?

    Despite the overt bias toward male involvement that all seventeenth-century court records share, some patterns appear. First, men so overwhelmingly outnumber women in the Essex County records that one cannot avoid concluding their more frequent involvement in the public display of aggression. Yet the relative dominance of male over female participation was not uniform across all classes of heated speech. If we look at the gender of known defendants (Table 4), we see that a higher proportion of women to men (approximately 1:2) were involved in cases of destructive style than in any other category. By contrast, men outnumbered women almost five to one in cases of detractive speech, and in both threats and criminal cases the ratio of men to women was six to one. Of a total of 363 presentments for civil offenses, about seventy-two percent of the defendants were men, about seventeen percent were women, and an additional ten percent were a man and his wife acting jointly.596

    Turning to the gender of plaintiffs (Table 5), the selective dominance of men is again unmistakable. Of the 363 civil presentments, men brought eighty percent to court, while women brought about sixteen percent; the remainder were brought by a husband and a wife acting together.597 And within each type of offense patterns appear that are related, but not identical, to those for the defendants. For example, as either plaintiffs or defendants, men and women respectively had close to the same amount of participation in presentments for destructive style. As plaintiffs, women were almost as sensitive to this as they were to detractions, the two categories together making up thirty-four percent and forty-six percent, respectively, of all the crimes they complained against. Threats comprised only about nineteen percent of women’s complaints, suggesting on the one hand that threats were not often made against women, or on the other, that they may not have reacted to them with great intensity. By contrast, men took other people to court most often for damage to their reputation—a total of 231 cases comprising eighty percent of all actions they filed. Presentments for threats and destructive style comprised ten and just over nine percent of their remaining complaints, respectively. Women appear to have been more prone to use destructive style and threats than did men, and less likely by far to use detractive speech. In fact, they were outnumbered by men as plaintiffs in cases of detractive speech by almost ten to one. The latter point suggests that women, when they wanted to inflict verbal damage, did so differently from men. Men would use defamation to damage another’s reputation, while women would use a heated style more often as a means of moral rebuke. Women were not only involved much less often in defamation cases than were men; defamation seems not to have mattered to women in quite the same way.

    TABLE 4

    Defendants and Gender in the “Heated” Speech of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680

    Civil Cases

    Gender of Defendant Threats “Detractive” Speech Destructive Style Criminal Cases Total

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    Man(-en)

    32 (84.2)

    197 (72.7)

    35 (64.8)

    151 (84.4)

    415 (76.6)

    Woman(-en)

    5 (13.2)

    39 (144)

    18 (33.3)

    26 (14.5)

    88 (16.2)

    Both man & woman

    1 (2.6)

    35 (12.9)

    1 (1.9)

    2 (1.1)

    39 (7.2)

    Total

    38 (100.0)

    271 (100.0)

    54 (100.0)

    179 (100.0)

    542 (100.0)*

    * N=542 (63.3%) of total of 856 presentments recorded in which gender of defendant can be determined. This number is low because only 179 (36.3%) of the 493 total criminal presentments recorded definitively give the gender of the accused (i.e., the remaining cases usually just mention a family surname).

    TABLE 5

    Plaintiffs and Gender in the “Heated” Speech of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680: Civil Offenses

    Gender Relation* Threats “Detractive” Speech Destructive Style Total

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    No. ( %)

    M v. M

    23 (60.5)

    159 (58.9)

    18 (33.3)

    200 (36.9)

    M v. M+M

    1 (2.6)

    11 (4.2)

    1 (1.9)

    13 (2.4)

    M+M v. M

    – –

    4 (1.6)

    2 (3.7)

    6 (1.1)

    M v. W

    1 (2.6)

    29 (10.6)

    8 (14.6)

    38 (7.8)

    M+M v. W

    – –

    – –

    – –

    – –

    M v. W+W

    – –

    – –

    1 (1.9)

    – –**

    M v. M+W

    1 (2.6)

    28 (10.2)

    – –

    29 (5.3)

    W v. W

    4 (10.5)

    8 (3.1)

    9 (16.7)

    21 (3.9)

    W v. W+W

    – –

    1 –**

    – –

    1 –**

    W+W v. W

    – –

    – –

    – –

    – –

    W v. M

    7 (18.6)

    14 (5.3)

    10 (18.5)

    31 (5.7)

    W+W v. M

    – –

    – –

    1 (1.9)

    1 –**

    W v. M+M

    – –

    1 –**

    – –

    – –

    W v. W+M

    – –

    3 (1.2)

    – –

    3 (1.0)

    M+W v. M

    1 (2.6)

    8 (3.1)

    3 (5.6)

    12 (2.2)

    M+W v. W

    – –

    1 –**

    – –

    1 –**

    M+W v. M+W

    – –

    4 (1.6)

    1 (1.9)

    12 (2.2)

    Total

    38 (100.0)

    271 (100.0)

    54 (100.0)

    363 (100.0)

    * M=man; W=woman

    ** Indicates percentage lower than 500.

    Indeed, women seem to have taken the issue of reputation far less seriously than did men. Their vocabulary for defamation, slander, and reproach was far less elaborated, suggesting that for them it may not have been as developed and perfected a skill. In some instances, Essex County women directly questioned the male need to emphasize reputation at the expense of both people and property. In 1661, John Hathorne of Salem filed an action of slander against William Langley and Joan Langley of Salem. Hathorne exceeded the defendants’ expectations when, instead of attaching a cow or sheep—the usual move in a slander case—he arrogantly attached all of their property, including house, land, and livestock. The day after the writ of attachment was executed, Joan Langley complained to her friend Mary Browne that the writ was far too severe and put their livelihood in peril. Browne ventured an explanation: “I suppose he esteemes his name more than all your estate,” at which Langley in amazement replied, “Is his name so good?”598 William Langley understood Hathorne’s challenge and said nothing, fully aware that the relationship of one man to another was qualitatively different from that between women.

    If we look at which gender relations did not lock horns, three distinct combinations appear that shed some light, however faintly, on men’s and women’s attitudes toward one another. First, two people of any gender(s) never complained against one woman acting on her own (M+M v. W, W+W v. W, M+W v. W). Second, with only one exception, one man and two women never engaged one another, no matter who was plaintiff and who was defendant (M v. W+W, W+W v. M). And third, again with only a single exception, one woman never complained against two defendants of the same sex (W v. M+M, W v. W+W). The fact that people in these gender relations never or only very rarely took one another to court suggests that such relations were seen as asymmetrical oppositions that were culturally unfair or inappropriate, and thus could not support a legal action for heated speech in seventeenth-century Essex County. It suggests also that beneath the differing sensitivity of men and women to actionable words ran a substratum of social conventions which could not be violated without bringing shame to the parties involved.

    Consider the rules that men acknowledged when complaining against women. Two men did not seek justice under any circumstances from one woman; it must have been an embarrassment to each of their senses of authority to appear publicly as if they could not achieve legal satisfaction against a woman on their own. Conversely, one man did not complain against two women, for that implied he was being too sensitive in letting two women raise his ire or “get his goat” at the same time for the same reason. And for a married couple to prosecute one of their female neighbors was simply an unfair social match, pitting a complete household against a fragment of another. One woman never complained against two men, perhaps because that would constitute, even in the relatively progressive legal system of seventeenth-century New England, a challenge to male dominance that could not be tolerated. Finally, two of these unworkable oppositions point to a gender relationship that failed to occur no matter who was plaintiff or defendant: two women and one woman (W. v. W+W, W+W v. W). The absence of this relationship suggests that women, unlike men, would not enter into an asymmetrical argument with members of their own sex that would of necessity make one side weaker than the other. Women would take on other women on a one-to-one basis, or join forces against one man, but they would not risk public disequilibrium with other women.

    Given the public nature of speech offenses and the fact that many of them took place in areas outside the house that were marked in seventeenth-century New England as specifically male spatial domains,599 it is not surprising that most of the recorded cases of detractive speech involved men alone. Women were denied access to these male domains on an everyday basis. Confined more often to private or “back” spaces—the house, the farmyard, or the garden—or else to the meetinghouse, which for doctrinal reasons extended them greater status, women cared little for the abstract world of verbal honor in which their men sparred for economic parity as they attacked and defended their chronically frail reputations. In this spatial sense, at least, Cotton Mather may have been accurate when he claimed that seventeenth-century women were “People who make no Noise at all in the World; People hardly Known to be in the World; persons of the Female Sex . . . buried with Oblivion in the World.”600

    What does seem unusual in the Essex County evidence is the remarkably low total percentages of female involvement in speech transgressions as either plaintiffs or defendants, averaging about sixteen percent throughout the period. In other words, no matter how we look at the records, for every one woman who appeared in court there were at least five or six men. Such low female participation hardly squares with the contemporary belief that women were more prone to offensive speech of all sorts than were men. “The Faculty of Speech is of such noble & of such a signal Figure in the Constitution of Mankind,” wrote Mather, “that it is a thousand Pities, it should be abus'd.” He continued, deliberately reporting what his parishioners believed and not what he actually thought: “Womankind is usually charged with a peculiar Share in the World’s Abuses of it.”601 Instead of all women being at fault, Mather maintained, only a few were blameworthy and those few had given their sex such a negative reputation that “it is indeed a Piece of great Injustice, that every Woman should be so far an Eve, as that her [Eve’s] Depravation should be imputed unto all her Sex.”602 Another author added his belief that not only was the heart the frequent source of heated speech, but the heart itself could be found in an angry woman’s mouth.603

    With less self-consciousness Mather suggested that women in seventeenth-century New England may have been regarded as more talkative than men, which might explain why the words of women were frequently distrusted. “Be careful that you don’t speak too much,” he warned his young female readers, “because that when the Chest is always open, everyone count[s] there are no Treasures in it; and the Scripture tells us, ‘tis the Whore that is clamorous, and the Fool, that is full of Words.”604 If women were viewed as naturally more talkative than men, their words may also have been tolerated longer and had less weight attributed to them. Part of the low percentage of female presentments may have been due to a husband’s greater willingness to be constantly scolded than to admit to his neighbors how little control he had over his spouse. When women did appear in court, however, their sentences were usually severe. Perhaps talkativeness and the doubt cast by men on anyone who was “full of Words” contributed to women being portrayed as liars. When in 1658 William Deane of Ipswich shouted at Susanna Wade, “Fy upon thee woman, base lyar, o fy, upon thee woman, thou art a base lyar I will not regard a word you say est … more than a straw,” he was only stating what most people—including some women—freely acknowledged. Indeed, some seventeenth-century women were aware of being thus stereotyped and had to make a special appeal to be taken at their word.605 Coupled with their perceived tendency to talk too much and to lie was a belief that when women cursed, they—like the poor and the diseased—did so with greater power. “No venemous Snake stings like a Woman’s tongue,”606 ran one English street ballad of the 1640’s, reinforcing Mather’s connection between women, words, Eve, the serpent, and their combined harm to mankind.

    Without doubt much of the absence of women from the court records can also be attributed to their understood role in the home and their position subordinate to the rule of their husbands. At least one part of the Puritan conception of love in marriage, the idea of the wife’s submission to her husband, relied on verbal deference in both directions. The husband was to remain mild at all costs. “Whether an husbands speech be to his wife before her face, or of her behinde her backe, it must be sweetned with mildness,” wrote William Gouge in the early 1620’s.607 Like other early seventeenth-century social theorists, Gouge was able to prescribe such mildness knowing that its success in family government depended on the husband’s ability to command respect, and this was in part why reputation was so important to men. He warned husbands who tended to abuse their wives with verbal cruelty that by their speech they would “make themselves contemptible, and so lose their authority.”608 In return for the mildness of their spouse, wives were expected to be deferential, protect their husband’s name in public and in private, and not pry into their husband’s personal affairs. Despite the latter dictum, seventeenth-century women must have devised linguistic strategies to ferret out all but the most secret of their beloved’s plans, and the techniques they used probably contributed still more to their husbands’ belief and distrust of women’s verbal cunning.609

    Closely related to a woman’s dominance within the household was the existence of female speech genres that probably rivaled the theatre of male reputation-making for power: rumor and gossip. Yet unlike the transgressions that leap from the written record to document the importance of reputation for men, few instances appear that shed light on this darker, almost secret, side of female speech domains. In 1672, for example, Elizabeth Goodell of Salem charged John Smith with making several abusive carriages toward her. When the case came to trial, several of her neighbors came forward and betrayed her, saying that she did some of the “lascivious things” of her own free will. Goodell replied that such stories were greatly exaggerated. She had told her husband and her sister in private what had happened, she insisted, but the news had “come to the mouths of such talkers as have perverted the truth and made the matter appere far worse than ever it was”; undoubtedly, two women that Goodell recognized in Court as merely “pretended friends” had spread the story with additions of their own design.610 Although little evidence survives, much of these interchanges probably took place at the “gossip meetings” mentioned by Web, which were probably one of the few all-female social forms of the period.

    Overall, the few references to gossip and rumor work in concert with other forms to suggest that the heated speech of women centered on issues relating to personal morality, the subjective side of human relationships, and kinship ties—that is, to the seventeenth-century household as a female domain in its broadest sense. Men, on the other hand, were more often concerned with issues of social status, crops, livestock, and their ability as self-sufficient participants in the local economic community. In short, both the gender roles of speech and the functions of heated speech in damaging men and women with specific kinds of pejoratives, reinforced the separate but interdependent interests of men and women. Women seem to have regulated the community of morality, men the community of commodity exchange. In turn, this division of expressive acts was linked to the prevailing division of routine labor in everyday life. Men were farmers, artisans, and producers. Women were regulators of process and the individuals assigned to insure the morality of social relations. These separate roles were engaged as well on the level of popular protest, where women railed against ministers, figureheads of moral inspiration, and men derided magistrates, whose tasks included overseeing the litigation of property disputes.611

    An awareness of the relationship between speech and gender domains is crucial in two ways to relating the cultural significance of heated speech to that of written language. First, on a general level, speech relates directly to both reading and writing simply because seventeenth-century people often spoke aloud the words they were reading or writing in graphic form. This basic fact has two correllates. Because reading and writing were often spoken and aural as well as graphic and visual activities, they must have been committed to memory according to rules for hearing sounds, which for a newly literate person may have been more developed than those for the recording of a printed image.612 In addition, it suggests that in many instances the particular syntactic and rhythmic presentation of written words must have been fundamentally similar, even continuous, to that characteristic of speech. Elizabeth Buxton’s deposition is a case in point; the repeated use of the pronoun “her” in the written text is confusing until the text is spoken, and then proper emphases appear to make sense of the action. Other texts show constant restatement, insertions, a lack of systematic punctuation, and a high degree of orthographic variety in a single paragraph—all signs that rules for speech still retain their priority within the text over emergent written conventions.613

    Second, the existence of gender domains within seventeenth-century speech may help us understand why literacy failed to rise above sixty percent in Essex County until the second quarter of the eighteenth century. We can begin by asking a simple question: Do people even need basic literacy skills if speech alone still succeeds in regulating social exchange and clarifying social relations? The answer is a firm “maybe not” that forces us to address an apparent contradiction in Puritanism that bears directly on the importance of literacy skills—especially writing—to seventeenth-century social theory. On the one hand, like all reformed Protestant sects, the Puritans stressed the importance of basic literacy skills as a means of confronting directly the Word of God. Yet on the other hand, Puritanism also stressed the enforced separation of gender labor as the basis of family government, and part of what kept the roles of men and women separated was speech. Indeed, the role of speech—heated or otherwise—in articulating different categories of cultural experience was a fundamental means of insuring social order itself. Speech organized life in a straightforward way that corresponded to the teachings of Christ; it was a foundation stone upon which “little Commonwealths” comfortably rested.

    By comparison, writing represented a threat to such stability in that it could seem like genderless communication. Writing could exist apart from a specific social context. It could blur the distinctions that underlay social organization. Indeed, writing seems to have done to words in the early eighteenth century what wages would do to work one hundred years later.614 With this in mind, Puritanism, per se, seems to have contributed to the diffusion of reading and writing skills up to a point and no further. Universal male literacy was fully consistent with Puritan social theory, since it reinforced the authoritarian structures already in place. But full literacy for both men and women threatened to blurr the rigid division of labor that kept women actively in control of morals and men in control of commodities. For this reason, Essex County was the last county to move toward full literacy, and only did so as the Puritan orthodoxy lost its firm hold on local congregations.

    If the Puritanism that dominated New England society in the seventeenth century was a religion of the Word, it was a religion that admitted the potential within all kinds of words. Certainly it valued the read Word of the Gospel, as illiterate people marvelled at stories read aloud by educated neighbors, and the written words of published ministerial tracts and zealously kept diaries. Perhaps more fundamentally it recognized the power of spoken words to shape not only the most eloquent of sermons but also the thorniest reprimands and scolds of household talk; these extremes mark the edges of the totality of an oral literature that has vanished except for small traces—a passage from a conversation here, a momentary flash of oral style there. Ultimately, the complex interweaving of all these kinds of verbal communication moved, at irregular rates and with differing associations of social class and gender domain, toward a single goal in the minds of seventeenth-century people. By clarifying both ideas and social boundaries, different kinds of words provided the preeminent genre of cultural reflexivity. And in such reflexivity lies the goal of studying literacy and speech together, as an ethnographic totality: to discover how people in the past and present structured, contemplated, and shared their own knowledge.

    Appendix 1. Categories of Aggressive Verbal Behavior in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680

    I. “Kinds” of Language (12)

    abusive

    ill

    bad

    lascivious

    baudy

    retorting

    evil

    saucy

    foul

    scurrilous

    gross

    untoward

    II. “Kinds” of Speech or Speaking (69)

    absurd

    lascivious

    abusive

    light

    affronting

    lying

    arrogant

    obstinate

    bawdy

    malignant

    boasting

    misinforming

    calumnating

    nasty

    common

    naughty

    contemptuous

    nicknaming

    cursing

    not positive [-ly]

    profane

    not sufferable

    wicked

    offensive

    dangerous

    of a high nature

    derisive

    peremptory

    desperate

    perverse

    discouraging

    presumptuous

    disturbing

    quarrelling

    evil

    railing

    false

    rebellious

    faltering

    reproachful

    filthy

    reviling

    indecent (song)

    ribald [-ry]

    injurious

    rude [-ly]

    irreligious

    scoffingly

    insinuation

    scornful

    insulting

    scurrilous

    sinful

    unclean

    slanderous

    unlawful

    slighting

    unmannerly

    swearing

    untrue

    falsely

    unworthy

    rashly

    uttering

    taunting

    vain

    threatening

    vile

    troublesome

    violent

    unadvised [-ly]

    wanton

    unbecoming

    wicked

    III. “Kinds” of Words (27)

    abusive

    miscarriage in

    bad

    mutinous

    base

    opprobrious

    blasphemous

    provoking

    clipped

    railing

    common

    reviling

    disloyal

    scolding

    disparaging

    seditious

    foolish

    treasonable

    frequent

    unchaste

    harsh

    uncivil

    high

    unseemly

    idle

    wild

    maliciously raised

    IV. “Kinds” of Gestures (1)

    unseemly

    Appendix 2. Aggressive Words and Gender Distinction in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1640–1680

    I. Words that “Damaged” Men

    ape

    foresworn

    simple

    French

    backbiter

    fellow

    bastard

    base

    bawd

    cursing

    beast

    deceitful

    bloodymen

    false

    blood-thirsty men

    jealous

    boys

    lousy

    jackanapes

    lying

    mallapart

    malicious

    proud

    picking

    rascally

    pimping

    saucy

    pitiful

    cheat [-er]

    quarrelling

    Jersey

    swearing

    Clan-backs

    vile

    curr

    flatterers

    cockolly

    fools

    foresworn

    lying

    Indian

    prating

    shamble-hand

    hell-hound

    Welsh

    Honey

    cuss

    hypocrite

    cowardly

    imp

    debased

    Ishmaelite

    devil

    Jack

    black

    lying

    foresworn

    saucy

    Gurley-gutted

    Jack-a-napes

    old

    knave

    devil’s packhorse

    base

    dog

    cheating

    base

    lying

    base Welch

    leeringest hang dog that was in the world

    black

    liar

    Welch

    common

    white-hat limping

    like Laban

    white-livered

    limb of the devil

    wopper-jawed

    loggerhead

    rude

    murderer

    scoffer

    not fit to live upon Godes earth

    shittabed

    persecutor of God’s people

    slave

    pimp

    drunken

    rascal

    such as make a house desolate

    base

    theif

    saucy

    highway

    robber

    toad

    Robin Hood

    damned

    rogue

    verryest rascal in New England

    adultrous

    whelp

    base

    witch

    cheating

    wizard

    cowardly

    old

    foresworn

    wretch

    long-shanked thievish

    damned

    old

    foresworn

    Scotch

    wicked

    thievish

    II. Words that “Damaged” Women

    adulteress

    dear

    bawd

    devil

    base

    base

    brasen-faced

    little

    impudent

    lying

    old

    fire brand of hell for her lying tongue

    blot and reproach to the Church

    bold, badly spoken thing

    gamar pisse house

    captain

    gamar Shite house

    creature

    hag

    filthy

    old

    unchaste

    hogge

    curr

    old

    pitiful

    hus[se]y

    hypocrite

    sow

    jade

    base

    base

    bobtail

    lying

    filthy

    Jesable

    lying

    liar

    thief

    base

    toad

    common

    base

    verriest

    lying

    lieutenant

    witch

    mill-mare

    black-mouthed

    pennycoinquick

    old

    rotten member and a scandal to the Gospel

    spiteful

    ugly

    roundhead

    woman

    scandalous

    base

    slut

    devilish

    base

    false

    crooked-back

    foresworn

    lousy

    lying

    III. Words that “Damaged” Children

    bastard

    stue

    dog

    tallafast que[e]ne

    base

    Tinckers trull

    puncke

    IV. Words that “Damaged” Public Authorities

    Ministers: Catch-pole

    deceivers of the People

    ladyes Chambermayd

    Magistrates: robbers and destroyers to the widows and fatherless

    logreded poopes

    Robert Blair St. George is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Boston University.