Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture Book

Robert Blair St. George's Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication was academically dense but full of well-researched and theorized and very thought-provoking ideas about the mental world of Colonial Americans. One of the hardest things to understand about the past is the ways in which the world of symbols and associations resonated with people; rarely are these things commented on directly, so knowing the 'mind' of the past by their documentary history and material culture alone will always be incomplete. St. George tries to fill in some of that incompleteness by uncovering resonances between the idea of social order and its metaphors in human bodies and house architecture, and ideas about mortality and time in the marketplace and trade. Connecting everything from witchcraft and monstrosities to gravestones, front doors and center halls, trade unionism and family portraits, he convincingly re-creates some of the patterns Colonial people perceived in their world - many of which continued (and continue?) to underlie popular conceptions of society and the universe well past the Enlightenment.