Conversing by signs

by St. George, Robert Blair

The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape - a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor.