Content area
Full Text
SARAH PRATT OF WEYMOUTH, Massachusetts, lived a fairly typical New England life in an era defined by Puritanism. Born July 4, 1640, as Sarah Hunt, she grew up in a large blended family, with a stepfather and various step- and half- siblings, until the death of her mother when she was twelve, after which she came under the care of guardians whom her mother had appointed. Sarah married at age twenty-one. Both she and her husband enjoyed long lives, and their marriage produced nine children. Along with her husband, she was accepted into church fellowship, which entided her to participate in the Lord's Supper, following the obligatory questioning by the elders of the church. She could give a good account of the doctrines of New England Puritanism taught by the ministers of the Weymouth church and, like many women whose "spiritual relations" were recorded in the first and second generation of Puritan settlers, proved her genuine interest in religion by the concern she had for her own soul. As Increase Mather reported in 1684, Sarah was "to the best observation, a grave and gracious Woman."1 She died in Weymouth on August 3, 1729, at the age of eighty- nine.
Typical as she was, the circumstance that earns Sarah a place in Increase Mather's 1684 An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences is that she was deaf from the age of about three. Her husband, Matthew Pratt,2 was also deafened through sickness at the age of twelve. Although he, too, was a full member of his church, it is Sarah's conversion and its communication through sign language that Mather records as an "illustrious providence." While Mather realized that Sarah's ability to understand and participate in church fellowship was remarkable, what is noteworthy for sign language history today is that a signed language capable of this level of abstraction and used within an extended family existed in America only a generation after the founding of Plymouth colony.
Mather's commemoration of Sarah's life and of her comprehension of "the great Mysteries of Salvation" occurs in chapter IX of his Essay. The chapter, about twenty pages in length, begins by transcribing in full a four-page letter from an informant in Weymouth who describes Sarah and Matthew, revealing the...