Royal Skousen

I've been thinking quite a bit about religious history lately for one reason or another, and I particularly have felt, this year, as though I needed to know a bit more about Mormonism. I read Paul Gutjahr's The Book of Mormon: A Biography and he recommended Royal Skousen's The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, a scholarly edition of the book with some really fascinating textual history and background. So I took the time and read through the text and the apparatus. This review mainly concerns those scholarly apparatus around the text; I'm not going to dissect or try to analyze the text of the Book of Mormon itself.

Grant Hardy's excellent introduction to this volume (published by Yale University Press in 2009) offers a synopsis of the narrative text, a short history of the production and publication history, and ends with what he calls "three contexts for further studies": the text as a Mormon scripture, as an American scripture, and as a world scripture. He notes "In its own right, the Book of Mormon is an intriguing work that can be read as the word of God, a literary work, or as a remarkable example of the varieties of religious experience" (xxi).

Skousen's own preface lays out the process by which he arrived at the "original text" as presented here, drawing from the extant manuscripts and on the evidence of the earliest printed editions. He then analyzes various features of the original text, many of which were later emended by Joseph Smith for the second printed edition: non-standard English usages, Hebraisms, early modern English usages, and consistencies. Finally, Skousen outlines his own presentation of the text, and how he has chosen to display chapter and verse notations (not present in the original manuscripts), spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, &c. And he explains his decision to present the text not in paragraph form but in "sense-lines" instead, with "paragraph" breaks added. It's a fascinating look at the editing process itself, and well worth a close read.

Following the text, Skousen offers an appendix listing all the significant textual changes in the Book of Mormon throughout its history, using both the extant manuscripts and the twenty printed editions of the text. This, too, makes for a really intriguing look at the ways in which the text has evolved over time. Overall, a remarkable piece of scholarship and a testament to the interesting things that careful editing can tell us about a given work.… (mais)