This volume is the first sustained scholarly investigation of Joseph Smith's translation projects considered together rather than discretely. It deploys several methods, such as historicizing translation in early American religion, theorizing Smith's unique relationship to translation and translation practices, bringing feminist perspectives to the question, and examining the relationship between the Bible and Smith's translation output, to name a few.
The editors, Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, group the collection into four parts: two on the Book of Mormon; one on the Bible; and one for the Book of Abraham, the “pure language” project, and the (forged) Kinderhook plates. This review focuses on the first two sections as most pertinent to Book of Mormon studies, although a few examples from Parts III and IV relating to essays in the first two groups illustrate the cohesiveness of the collection as a whole.
MacKay, Ashurst-McGee, and Hauglid draw...