JULIA PARK TRACEY’S BOOK & PURITAN HISTORY TALK AT OLD SHIP CHURCH
Let’s go back 300 years to the site where Silence Marsh was first condemned by church elders to a year of silence. Yes, this is the exact location where the trial would have happened. Julia Park Tracey, author and great granddaughter (x7), will talk about the development of Puritan and Unitarian Universalist theology as depicted in the novel. The book talk is the final event on the Hingham Arts Walk. The Old Ship Church is a Puritan meeting house built in 1681 in Hingham, Massachusetts. It is the only surviving 17th-century Puritan meetinghouse in the United States and is “the oldest continuously worshiped-in church in North America.” The Old Ship Church is currently a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Buttonwood Books (Cohasset, MA) will provide the pop-up onsite bookstore for this event.
EVENT INFORMATION:
OCTOBER 20TH, 2024 – 4:30 PM.
FREE TO PUBLIC
OLD SHIP CHURCH
90 MAIN STREET
HINGHAM, MA
This is event is part of the Retracing the Witch Trials Tour with Julia Park Tracey, Author of Silence: A Novel. The tour spans October 19 through 30, 2024 and takes place in New England. Readers are invited to enjoy the tour from afar through the TikTok Live events coordinated as part of this tour or if you live in New England, we invite you to attend the events. Learn more about the whole tour here.
About Silence:
After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that govern.
Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn’t until a new Boston doctor comes to her backward village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John’s Wort, long walks—and reading.
Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just 20 years before. Now, after they demanded her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself.
A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on this bestselling historical fiction author’s own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother.
About Julia Park Tracey:
Bestselling author Julia Park Tracey’s ancestors and their stories have given her a trail to follow from New York and New England to the Deep South and the Pacific Coast (Thanks Ancestry.com!). The Bereaved; A Novel, the story of her great, great grandmother’s loss of her children to the Orphan Train was named in the top 100 indie books published in 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. Silence is the story of another “an-sister,” Silence Greenleaf.
