History Happy Hour: Settlement & Early Land Deeds

Seeing, Reading, and Hearing: Legal Ritual in 17th Century Maine
Maine’s early English colonists inhabited a world of wonders, acutely aware of the presence of powerful supernatural forces beyond their understanding. We see evidence of this mindset not only in religious material, but also in the seemingly prosaic legal records they carefully preserved. A close analysis of Maine’s seventeenth-century land deeds reveals a legal world dominated by numinous ritual and maintained in large part by means of the spoken word and carefully preserved communal memory. This intricate pre-modern legal system was at the heart of English settlers’ project of colonization in Maine, a project that aimed ultimately to transform an alien New World into a landscape imbued with the memory of English inhabitation–a New England.

Tickets are $10 for PHC members and $15 for non-members, and include refreshments. To learn more about membership benefits including program discounts, visit https://pejepscothistorical.org/giving/membership/