“St. George finesses the epistemic shift from faith to science into a richly suggestive account of the continuities and paradoxes in New England colonial social relations.” — American Literary History
“Conversing by Signs is a model example of archaeological history. In its loving treatment of detail and its balanced and profound reflections, the book makes a wonderful read.” — Journal of American Folklore
“A major — yea, an outstanding — contribution to material culture, New England, and early American studies, and should take its place proudly . . . on the shelves of those concerned with this array of topics.” — Vernacular Architecture Newsletter
“Written in St. George’s inimitable voice, Conversing by Signs is a tour de force examination of the multiple meanings embedded in corporeal things, as well as the means, or conversation, by which they are expressed. . . . A landmark work that should, like the implicated ideas that St. George cites, continue to exert influence, overt and tacit, for generations to come.” — The Journal of American History
“Enriched by wide reading in theory as well as in architectural and cultural history, and informed by plain old digging for relevant texts, St. George imagines a lost world unlike any we have envisioned before. Is it quirky? In places, yes. Is it stimulating and engaging? Definitely.” — William and Mary Quarterly
“Enormously rewarding. . . . Perhaps the book’s greatest accomplishment is its willingness to question long-standing assumptions about historical and cultural processes that far transcend the limited scope of early New England. Recover[s] multilayered complexity in past experience.” — American Historical Review
“This is as daring a book as one is likely to find in the entire corpus of scholarly writing on colonial America.” — Reviews in American History
“An intricate and multilayered analysis.” — CHOICE
“A monumental book. Its painstaking and inventive scholarship and exhaustive original research would alone qualify it as a landmark in the understanding of material culture; but the scope and intelligence of its symbolic interpretations carry it far beyond the familiar boundaries of its grounding discipline. It is gracefully, confidently, and lucidly written, highly imaginative without falling into mere ingenuity and idiosyncracy, intellectually bold and fresh without bowing too deeply to current poststructuralist and new-historicist fashions.” — Robert S. Cantwell, author of Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture
“Conversing by Signs dramatically expands the exploration of early New England architecture, landscape, and material culture. In this provocative and engaging book, Robert Blair St. George offers a series of elegantly crafted interpretations that excite the historical imagination. From the investigation of body imagery in the seventeenth-century New England house to the representation of landscapes in eighteenth-century portraiture, Conversing by Signs stands as a model of interdisciplinary thought at its best.” — Bernard Herman, University of Delaware
