Kristin A. Olbertson, The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts

Abstract

It is often said that words paint pictures, but The Dreadful Word is a book of sound, in which Kristin Olbertson mines the court records of eighteenth-century Massachusetts for speech crimes and, in the process, allows the reader to listen in on the conversations and frustrations—the noise—of rich and poor alike during the Bay colony’s transition from Puritan commonwealth to revolutionary hotbed. Carefully sifting and classifying the cases she uncovers, Olbertson argues that during this time, Massachusetts courts shifted their concerns about deviant speech from punishing sin to policing violations of the ‘code of politeness’, linked to ‘new ideals of elite white masculinity’ (p 2). In the eighteenth century, ‘a distinct cadre of politely pious men’ came to ‘define itself in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly’ (p 38). The idea of ‘the peace’ changed to reflect these new values, and as Massachusetts courts heard these cases, pronounced their verdicts, and punished offenders, their litigants and justices also performed and created the new order, one in which ‘genteel masculinity—gentlemanliness—joined godliness as a central personal quality on which claims to social and cultural authority rested’ (p 8).