Religionists and scholars have wondered what to do with Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon since its publication in 1830. While many produced scriptural commentaries in the nascent republic, more unusual was the production of new scripture. Yet Smith published nearly 600 pages that would come to be called scripture by millions. Opinions of Smith have ranged across the spectrum from that of a conniving charlatan to religious genius to an uneducated plowboy prophet. Some assessed the book without considering how Smith could create a text like the Book of Mormon; others assumed plagiarism—a farm boy could not produce such a thing on his own. With training in theatre and performance studies, William L. Davis treads new ground as he seeks to place Joseph Smith in the pervasive nineteenth-century sermonic culture that surrounded him. He argues that combining this context with “textual phenomena and internal evidence” elucidates Smith's process to create the book (3).

Using a “performance based approach to understanding the text,” Davis urges the reader to remember that Smith dictated the book (3). He argues that the process reveals substantive insight into the creation of the text. Historical sources document Smith dictated the 600-page book to various scribes in a three-month period—what Davis describes as a “torrential flow” of oral performance (1). That performance is at the heart of this analysis.

The author begins with a synthesis of the mystical cosmology that surrounded the Smith family and a young Joseph. This convergence of the religious and esoteric was embodied in an object Smith kept in his pocket—a seer stone, key to Smith's revelatory flow. Davis's title, Visions in a Seer Stone, refences Smith's supernatural claims, and the cover art imagines gold plates as a source for Smith's book, yet Davis is focused on process. His argument pulls Smith's narrative of transcendent origins to the earth with the temporal thud of extensive work and preparation to pull off the performance of religious genius. Rather than an esoteric revelatory object, the seer stone is a critical part of the performance.

Davis's strongest contribution lies in his dive into pervasive nineteenth-century sermon culture and the structural parallels within Smith's own record. Raised in upstate New York with its burned-over revivalism, Davis argues for Smith's submersion and practice in homiletic methods of structural organization from a young age. (Extant source material for Smith's teenage experience is extremely limited—though Smith had little formal education.) Clearly a teenage phenom, Smith excelled in his religious education with the patterns established by far more experienced preachers. This immersion, argues Davis, was so complete that by his early twenties Smith had mastered this practice of “laying down heads” to structure not only his own writing and speaking but also the sermons and the larger complex narrative of the Book of Mormon (14–32).

Using one short history (1832) and two sermons (1843 and 1844), Davis analyzes Smith's process. He compared those sources with three Book of Mormon sermons in his detailed analysis and then expands his argument more generally to a larger portion of the Book of Mormon text—first to sermons and later to historical narratives. With only very limited usage of the documentary work of the Joseph Smith Papers, I am left wondering how more expansive source material might limit or expand the author's arguments. There are a few Smith sermons for which extant notes remain; comparison here could be likewise illuminating. Moreover, does the practice of laying down heads also transfer to the third major category of Smith's words, well known for their orality—his revelations?

His underlying contention lies with the contemporary accounts that want to highlight Smith's spontaneity in this dictation—detailing the absence of notes or any sort of apparent preparation in the process. Davis sees examples in Smith's writings and sermons that emphasize the orality of the project and both its explicit and implicit structures. Arguing against an assumption of spontaneity, he makes a case for Smith's careful planning rather than “spontaneous, unpremeditated outbursts of creativity” (158).

For Davis, Smith carefully curated and meticulously performed his image of a plowboy prophet. He sees Smith following after the highly structured though extemporaneous preaching of John Wesley or George Whitefield rather than the humble recipient of an ex nihilo creative surge. In the end, Davis's Joseph Smith is in part conman, in part religious genius devoted to his work ethic, but decidedly not the plowboy prophet. Reconsidering the orality of Smith's Book of Mormon project treads new ground, and Davis's work will continue to play a role in the burgeoning field of Book of Mormon studies for years to come.