Joseph Smith's Golden Plates: A Cultural History

i love the world of nineteenth-century American religion, specifically what historian Jon Butler termed “the antebellum spiritual hothouse.”1 Since my introduction to American religious history in graduate school, the creativity, flexibility, occultism, revivalism, utopianism, boundary crossing, and (at times) downright oddity of the era has fascinated me. During that time, people were figuring out their ideas of who and what counted as Americans and religion, in terms of gender, race, authority, legitimacy, and more. While I am not a scholar of Mormonism, this period is where I feel most at home. I am additionally a scholar of material religion who argues that the “stuff” of religion—bodies, objects, books, art, ephemera, tools, and more—is the key to understanding what religion is. And so, it is no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Lyman Bushman's Joseph Smith's Golden Plates: A Cultural History.Bushman is one of Mormon studies’ most renowned scholars, and it shows in this book. He deftly moves between eras in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his wealth of knowledge on major players, places, controversies, texts, objects, revealed knowledge, themes, treasure hunting, cultural challenges, miraculous events, and more are on full display. The book is a delight to read because you witness a foremost scholar creatively and critically explore a part of Mormon history that is both at the heart of the tradition and befuddling. In his exploration of the golden plates, his focus is not on the content of the text of the Book of Mormon, but rather its physical and material form. When he references the golden plates, he means the plates.As he is writing a cultural history, Bushman is concerned about culture. As such, the book spans all of the tradition's history, compares the plates with material texts in other traditions, and considers the role of visual and written art and the intimate experiences early Mormons had with the plates both physically and in terms of translation. Culture changes over time and so answers to the question “What were people to make of the plates?” have shifted over the tradition's history (2). That question, posed early in the book, is both the monograph's driving question and a question asked by Bushman's subjects. It is clear that the plates’ materiality mattered at the religion's origin and throughout its history. It matters that the plates were physical, and it matters that the plates are no longer physically accessible. As Bushman put it, had the plates remained in the church's possession, “the tension between earthly and heavenly would have ended” (5).In a later chapter, he imagines how the plates would be displayed in a museum and thus some of their mystery, which is a key aspect in every religion, would have been lost. In other chapters, Bushman analyzes the translation process, the significance of the witnesses and their testimonies, the reverence and irreverence shown to the plates in literary and visual art, how missionaries do and do not invoke the plates in their work, and more. The result is a clear articulation of the plates’ place in Mormon history, American history, and global history. The final chapter takes a page from Jonathan Z. Smith's emphasis on the power of comparison and contrasts the plates with other found manuscripts, relics, stone tablets, and other texts. In the end, Bushman concludes that “there is no single way to understand” the plates (169). This is undoubtedly and obviously true, and that is the point. The plates can and have been understood in a multitude of ways because of their mystery and the utter fascination that comes with it.If I were to offer one critique, it would be that the book at times assumes the readership has a deeper knowledge of Mormon history than I do. Occasionally, I had to look up persons or texts. However, this feels like a cheap critique. I'm a bit outside my field and Bushman is one of the scholars of this field. I only hope that one day I can write a book so masterfully on a topic in American religious history.