Book Reviews 147 JOSEPH F. DAROWSKI is a retired historian, formerly with the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, ed. Matthew C. Grow et al. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2021. xxxviii + 755 pp. Illustrations, index. Hardbound: $89.99. Reviewed by Colby Townsend Over the last two decades the Joseph Smith Papers Project has made a name for itself as being the most important source for studying early Mormon history. Almost completed, the entire collection will include twenty-eight volumes when all volumes are through the press. This new volume in the Revelations and Translations series deserves high praise from those working on early American religion and Mormon studies, both for the importance of having direct access to the remaining leaves (roughly 28 percent of the total) of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, as well as what the scholarship in the volume suggests for future work. This volume represents not only a watershed moment because it allows unprecedented access to the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, but also because it indicates directions for future work on the Book of Mormon. The volume includes useful reference material that readers of the Joseph Smith Papers will be familiar with, including timelines of Joseph Smith’s life and maps. There is also a thorough introduction to the story of the produc- Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article-pdf/49/2/147/1839939/147townsend.pdf by UNIV OF ILLINOIS LIB-E user on 27 April 2023 his health. It can be said that his intensity in service to the church and the gospel ultimately cost him his life. He suffered from severe bouts of stress and fatigue, including hospitalizations. One comes away from Bringhurst’s biography with an appreciation of Lee and his significance in part because Bringhurst’s treatment is so condensed, so concentrated. Other lengthier biographies offer a more comprehensive, inclusive portrait, yet there is something to be said for viewing the essence of a subject’s life in the fashion that Bringhurst has adopted. For anyone unfamiliar with Harold B. Lee or interested in a professional, well-conceived, and thoughtful biography of Lee as a dynamic and dominant figure in LDS church history, Bringhurst’s account does justice to both the man and his impact. At the close of the volume, Bringhurst pays tribute to Lee’s legacy in a fitting epilogue. He quotes Richard D. Poll, who suggested that Harold B. Lee “will surely be remembered as one of the ten most influential General Authorities in the History of the Church” (156). To understand the modern institutional church, one must come to understand Harold B. Lee, his life, and his thought. 148 The Journal of Mormon History Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article-pdf/49/2/147/1839939/147townsend.pdf by UNIV OF ILLINOIS LIB-E user on 27 April 2023 tion of the Book of Mormon, as well as notes on the editorial method. The latter is useful because it indicates where it differs from Royal Skousen’s editorial method and markings indicating the kinds of revisions and additions to the manuscript. The Joseph Smith Papers’ transcription style is far more user friendly than what one finds in Skousen’s earlier volumes. This volume also includes photographs of each manuscript page, and the editorial team has selected the best representative photo of every page to be included in the main body of the text. An appendix near the back of the volume (Appendix 2) provides all the alternative photos that they could have chosen, so the student of the original manuscript can turn to those as well. The images of every leaf, both recto and verso, are on the lefthand side of the page and their transcriptions are on the righthand side throughout the body. Most of the pages are legible due to the advances in technology and the use of ultraviolet and multispectral imaging. There are some pages, however, that are either very difficult or impossible to read, but the editors assure the reader that although it is difficult to capture in photography, the text is readable in person on those pages. Second only to having access to the original manuscript on your bookshelf, the next best thing about this volume is that it showcases a lively debate between the two editors about whether two leaves acquired by the LDS Church from the University of Chicago are also authentic and should be included in the text-critical study of the Book of Mormon. Robin Jensen argues in the affirmative while Royal Skousen argues the negative. The two approaches highlight major differences in method and what is counted or not in the search for evidence of authenticity. Jensen’s argument is meticulously grounded in both material and textual detail, though with an emphasis on the former—something one would expect as they try to establish the origin of a document. Jensen gathers a list of evidence that he suggests “strongly indicates that [the University of Chicago leaves] are an authentic part of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon” (516). This includes the following: firsthand accounts from a University of Chicago archives employee about his knowledge of leaves in the early and middle of the twentieth century; card catalogs from the University of Chicago created by library staff between 1923–1929, including the period specific Library of Congress call number; invisible ink with “ICU” (the University of Chicago’s security mark) added to the manuscript soon after 1965 to protect it from theft; three handwriting experts’ identification of Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting on the leaves; the leaves are the right height and the damage matches the pattern of wear as we find in the original manuscript, but also indicate their own unique damage after separation; a 1989 Scanning Auger Microscopy (SAM) test that established the date of the leaves as within five years, plus or minus, of 1830; and many of the mistakes on the leaves indicate the scribe was taking the text as dictation. Book Reviews 149 COLBY TOWNSEND is a dual PhD student in the English and Religious Studies Departments at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the editor of Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Revelations in their Early American Contexts (Signature Books, 2022). Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article-pdf/49/2/147/1839939/147townsend.pdf by UNIV OF ILLINOIS LIB-E user on 27 April 2023 Skousen’s argument seems to me to be more scattered and less convincing. He argues that the shape of the “leaves is extraordinarily inappropriate” (521), that the damage fits the wrong gathering because the least damaged part of the manuscript is 1 Nephi and as the text moves toward Moroni it disintegrates and seems to suggest that the Chicago leaves are the wrong paper type. He further argues that since the leaf in between the two extant Chicago leaves is missing—a problem, he argues, that is found nowhere else in the original manuscript—this should raise concerns. He notes that the leaves have crowded text with too many lines, but if this is the case, there is little evidence for it in the original manuscript near the beginning of Alma and the numbers are only just over what he identifies as the norm. He claims that no other leaves are trimmed in the original manuscript but the Chicago leaves, a point that Jensen notes was normal in twentieth-century preservation methods. In an odd turn in his conclusion, he seems to suggest that Jensen is ignoring textual evidence when he explains that many of the supposed errors in the Chicago leaves are due to Alma likely being the first section of the text that Cowdery transcribed, but then claims that “It is better to ignore” the Chicago leaves “until all these oddities can be truly explained instead of simply dismissed” (528). One has to wonder how they can be explained if the leaves are to be ignored. If we were to blend the evidence that both Jensen and Skousen provide and give Skousen the benefit of the doubt that the leaves are in fact forgeries, then the forger would have to be better than Mark Hoffman and have been working at least sixty, if not more, years prior to Hoffman and had complete access to the earliest manuscripts of the Book of Mormon in order to base his forgeries on the proper type of paper, Cowdery’s handwriting, etc. But that would only include the material evidence from the University of Chicago’s archives and ignore the evidence from the 1989 SAM test that established the creation of the leaves within five years plus or minus of 1830. Although Jensen humbly concludes that “no single category of evidence can be conclusive in establishing the authenticity of the Chicago leaves” (521), it does seem like there are specific lines of evidence that weigh heavily against Skousen’s argument. In any case, whatever each individual scholar finds most probable between these two essays, this topic should invite more work on the complex textual history of the Book of Mormon by an even broader array of scholars studying early American texts and religion. And this volume will be crucial for generations of scholars to come.