Visions in a Seer Stone

William L. Davis has published an astoundingly good book, one of the best works of religious and intellectual history I have read in years. Visions in a Seer Stone engages a range of academic fields, historical methods, and exegetical close readings in examining the development of the Book of Mormon, and above all helps his readers understand the dynamics of American religious culture during Joseph Smith's lifetime. In the end, he develops an argument impressive for both its conceptual rigor and its sweeping breadth: that the Book of Mormon is less a conventional text than an oral performance, and that all the elements that signal its spoken-word delivery reveal the extent to which it should be considered a part of a larger oratorical culture of the nineteenth century, “the artifact of a grander, multifaceted oratorical effort” (2). In building his case, Davis seeks to sidestep the more familiar historiographical conflicts between debunkers and defenders, who have battled over whether the faith's core text is a factual account or a product of Smith's imagination. Instead, he provides a way of understanding the text by focusing less on the subject matter than the manner in which it was constructed and delivered.The book is a model for developing a closely reasoned case. The author begins by tracing the contours of nineteenth-century evangelical sermon culture. As he builds up to a close reading of Joseph Smith's funeral discourse for King Follett, one of the rare sermons for which extensive records exist to reveal Smith's oral performance, Davis lays out the sermonizing landscape of early Vermont and the Burned-Over District of western New York, where Smith came of age. He weaves together a riveting account of the rhetorical strategies of those preachers as well as their techniques for memorizing and delivering addresses designed to have the greatest impact on listeners. With this conceptual foundation constructed during the book's early chapters, he proceeds to analyze the Book of Mormon to show how those practices for oral delivery get revealed in the text—both in the approximately 40 percent of the book that is expressly related to sermons, prophecies, and exhortations, as well as in the book's historical narratives. By the end, no matter whether the reader is inclined to believe that Smith truly translated the golden plates or invented the Book of Mormon, Davis makes a convincing case that in translating and dictating the book's text to a scribe over the course of only a few months, Smith delivered an extraordinary and extended verbal performance.The material that will gain the widest attention beyond Latter-day Saint scholarship will be the book's first four chapters on practices of memorization and delivery and the contexts of oral performance of the early nineteenth century. Using a wide range of sources, Davis sketches the most complete picture of a diverse landscape of homiletics I have seen for this era. He draws on formal teaching, such as that taught at Moor's Indian Charity School in upstate New Hampshire (eventually renamed Dartmouth College), a school attended by Joseph Smith's older brother. He also scrutinizes guidebooks for public speaking and sermonizing, tracing the techniques they advocated for students at all levels. But going beyond formal practices in education and published books, he also analyzes the evangelical milieu of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preachers of the so-called Burned-Over District of western New York state, where Smith and his family moved in the winter of 1816–17. Those lay preachers often learned their methods from one another in the hothouse evangelicalism of a region where sermonizing competition was fierce. There, Smith joined a Methodist class meeting and learned to exhort with them. Methodists may not have advocated for formal theological training, but Davis shows with detail how much lay training and practice they provided in this region.In discussing these preachers’ extensive training, Davis relegates two myths to the trash heap. The first is the notion that the terrifically talented preachers of the Second Great Awakening were uneducated and simply gifted, as if from heaven, with a talent for exhortation. The second is the tale describing Joseph Smith as an unlettered farm boy with only a marginal education from his schoolteacher father. Indeed, this book recasts the notion of a religious education, urging us to see the richness and variety of training possible for those who never intended to darken the door of a theological seminary. As powerful as it might be to describe these lay preachers as touched with a magical gift, Davis's methodical attention to the context of the sermon culture of the Burned-Over District reveals another side to how such speakers learned, honed, and practiced their gifts for reaching listening audiences.Davis's attention to practices of memorization and preparation for extemporaneous preaching sets the stage for much of Visions in a Seer Stone. As he demonstrates, although some ministers spoke from notes or written outlines, while others memorized entire sermons, many at the time held that those practices detracted from the speaker's effectiveness. Rather, Smith learned his own homiletics within a culture that often privileged the appearance of extemporaneous speaking, as many believed such speech signaled the presence of the Holy Spirit. Yet even if they did not memorize their words, exhorters like Smith learned that this form of exhortation nevertheless required extensive preparation. Sermonizers developed extensive outlines and memorized the key points and pivots (a “sermon skeleton” or outline with mnemonic cues to permit them to move from one point to the next). This strategy allowed exhorters to appear to deliver extemporaneously and to respond to the perceived needs of the listeners by ratcheting up the emotionalism or scrutiny of a biblical verse. Along the way, that speaker might be inspired to draw unexpectedly from other biblical stories or even poetry, as the moment seemed to call for it, while not losing the powerful effect of the overall arc of the sermon. Nor was this limited to the practice of preaching: schoolchildren also honed these techniques for their engagement with lessons that demanded extensive memorization on a daily basis. Contemporaries termed this process of preparation “laying down heads,” a concept that is crucial to the remainder of Davis's argument. This practice gave each sermon both a clear sense of order and direction without inhibiting the speaker from feeling the power of the moment infuse him with special eloquence. In exploring this aspect of sermon culture among evangelicals in the first half of the nineteenth century, Davis not only adds new insight into one form of lived religion but illuminates the habits of thought and rigor of preparation by lay preachers and their listeners, habits that harken back to the very different culture analyzed by Meredith Marie Neuman in Jeremiah's Scribes, about Puritan New England.1In his final three chapters, Davis turns to the Book of Mormon—and in the process walks a fine line between the debunkers and defenders of the text who have gone before. To be sure, in showing that the text bears all the distinctive marks of a broader nineteenth-century American phraseology, oratorical performance, and the “heads” that Smith used to guide his memory, Davis risks finding himself lumped in with the critics who say that Smith created the full text himself. “Smith's method of laying down heads for his historical narratives emerges as the most prominent and visible compositional feature of the Book of Mormon,” he writes (122). And he goes so far as to say that all of the textual evidence suggests that Smith was “the source and assembler” of the book and that he “spent a significant amount of time in the creation of the work” (163)—specifically preparing each of the sermons and stories in the book during the mid-1820s between his discovery of the plates and his dictation. Certainly, Davis acknowledges, Smith had a number of years during which he might have organized his ideas and laid down the “heads” of the Book of Mormon's historical narratives and sermons.But Davis has a more nuanced perspective on the origin of the text. In his final chapter, “A Theory of Translation,” he explains, “Whatever we may choose to believe, the historical record strongly suggests that Joseph Smith genuinely felt that his project emerged from divine inspiration and guidance” (191). Rather, we might see the Book of Mormon as the product of “some form of dialectical process” involving “the Holy Spirit in connection with Smith's inspired imagination or as a complex matrix of Smith's affective and spontaneous responses to conscious narrative creations and subconscious elaborations in his mind” (191). “As the script of an extended oral performance, derived from a kaleidoscope of contemporary cultural practices, the Book of Mormon reveals critical insights into the centrality of the spoken word and the prominence of oratorical culture in the early American republic,” he concludes (196).Visions in a Seer Stone is a profoundly intelligent piece of work, one that will inspire a wide range of scholars. It will be required reading for those concerned with reconstructing the culture of oratory and performance, religious history, and intellectual history during the long nineteenth century. And while its argument may not persuade the most ardent defenders of the text as the verbatim transcription of the words of prophets who recorded a history of ancient times, this book will have wide appeal and significance both within and without the Latter-day Saint movement

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