Wit and Wisdom, a book talk with Joan Radner

Maine Historical Society - Programs Podcast

Recorded June 20, 2023 - Wit and Wisdom begins with the story of an odd discovery in a Maine attic—a discovery that led Joan Radner to uncover a long-lost rural tradition of joyful wintertime gatherings. We might imagine that the long, dark winter evenings and deep snows of northern New England would have isolated nineteenth-century families in their scattered farmsteads. But this was far from the truth: rural villagers saw winter as a "season of improvement," a time not only for home industries and woods work, but also for mental exercise in good company. Neighbors bent on self-improvement created local "lyceums"—they conducted formal debates on current topics and performed aloud handwritten "papers" compiling their homegrown literary compositions. Ordinary people—men and women of all ages, farmers and mechanics, and the few village intelligentsia—wrote poetry, serious essays, witty parodies, and sundry pieces teasing one another. In this podcast Joan Radner discusses what she found in found dozens of these ephemeral lyceum papers, which provide new access to the voices, talents, and concerns of rural New Englanders: their lifelong devotion to mutual "improvement" through face-to-face exchange of ideas, their broad national awareness combined with resistance to the pressures of modernization, their passionate belief in their own model of democratic community, and their abundant, playful humor.