"By Turff and Twigg": Seeing, Reading, and Hearing in the Performance of Legal Ritual in Seventeenth Century Maine.

This essay analyzes orality and literacy in seventeenth-century Maine. As most of Maine's English colonists were not fully literate, legal instruments such as land deeds existed simultaneously as oral, material, and textual representations of the authority of the law, integrally supported by the use of ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]