One of the world's leading researchers into the evolution of language argues that the acquisition of words changed the structure of early human's brains, which set into motion the limitless creativity that allowed people to make the world that exists today.

Dramatic and documentary narratives about aggressive and garrulous women often cast such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority. Contending narratives, however, sometimes within the same texts, point to the effective subversion and undoing of the normative restrictions of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested to in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. Examining the framing and performance of violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England. Blending gender theory with detailed historical analysis, Words Like Daggers asserts the power of women's language--the power to subvert binaries and destabilize social hierarchies, particularly those of gender--in the early modern era. In the process Stavreva reconstructs the speech acts of individual contentious women, such as the scold Janet Dalton, the witch Alice Samuel, and the Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge. Because the dramatic potential of women's powerful rhetorical performances was recognized not only by victims and witnesses of individual violent speech acts but also by theater professionals, Stavreva also focuses on how the stage, arguably the most influential cultural institution of the Renaissance, orchestrated and aestheticized women's fighting words and, in so doing, showcased and augmented their cultural significance.

Every Tribe and Tongue offers a way, first, to rediscover biblical stories and principles that relate to questions about immigration and societal multilingualism, and, second, to outline possible ways to guide thoughtful engagement in the discourse of the "public square" based on the biblical witness. We will try to show that, far from being an afterthought in the Bible, the call to love our neighbors and to gather people of every nation together in the worship of God is at the very core of the gospel message.Two powerful passions animate this book from beginning to end. First, this work is saturated in a deeply rooted love of the diversity of human languages that are one of God's gracious gifts to human beings. Second, this book is dedicated to calling the North American church to take seriously its charge not simply to love the "stranger and alien" but to live as "strangers and aliens" within the American nation to which it has been called to witness to Jesus Christ.