Hofmann Syllabus (Or What to Read Now That You’ve Binged MURDER AMONG THE MORMONS

By March 7, 2021

If you, like millions of Americans, turned in to watch Murder Among the Mormons, and are interested in reading more on the Hofmann saga, Early Mormonism’s “magic world view,” or scholarship examining Mormonism as the “Other,” check out this list.

I want to add to this list–please send me a note or comment here for me to update it with additional resources!

Murder Among the Mormons (TV Mini-Series 2021) - IMDb

Histories of the Hofmann Saga

These are the two best histories of the Hofmann saga. Turley, a longtime employee of the LDS Church History Department, wrote the first account and focuses most on the LDS Church’s perspective. Sillitoe and Roberts address what it was like for those involved who weren’t part of the LDS Church’s leadership.

Scholarship on Mormonism and the “Magic World View”

If you’re going to read one thing, and want to read it fast, read Taylor (link is to a PDF). Quinn and Brooke both have drawbacks, including interpretation, but are nonetheless classics in Mormon history. Brown’s article is a literature review of books that cover Mormonism in the context of magic and religion. Taves’ article looks at the golden plates, as physical objects, which is perhaps the most religious studies-y reading provided here. Colleen McDannell’s introduction to Material Christianity provides readers with a sense of how and why objects are made sacred by religious traditions.

Steve Fleming’s book, forthcoming and based off of his dissertation, will make a significant contribution to the historiographical conversation!

Also of note: Ben Park organized a roundtable in the Journal of Mormon History on Brooke’s book and should be consulted by those looking for sustained intellectual engagement with the Bancroft winner.

The Mormon “Other”

J. Spencer Fluhman, “An ‘American Mahomet’: Joseph Smith, Muhammad, and the Problem of Prophets in Antebellum America,” Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 23-45.

Christine Talbot, A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

This list may not seem necessary at first, but as I watched MatM, I realized that the documentary is BOTH true crime drama and framed as a “cult documentary” like Wild, Wild Country. That isn’t to say the film is anti-Mormon, it’s to say that it fits a genre accessible and familiar to modern audiences. With Mormonism still regularly being called a cult this isn’t a surprise, but still requires that viewers see how Mormonism is made “other.” Whether Latter-day Saints produce something or not, it can fall into familiar tropes.

Fluhman’s article, also a part of his first book, examines how Joseph Smith’s comparison to Muhammad shaped whether Mormonism was truly a “religion” in antebellum America. Talbot’s, based later, examines polygamy and Mormonism’s public image. Reeve’s book examines the racialization of Mormons in nineteenth-century America.

Article filed under Miscellaneous


Comments

  1. Thanks for doing this, Joey!

    I’d add JB Haws’s The Mormon Image in the American Mind; his coverage of this episode is useful.

    Comment by Matt — March 7, 2021 @ 2:04 pm

  2. Thanks for the helpful discussion and sources.

    Comment by Devan Jensen — March 7, 2021 @ 3:32 pm

  3. “Show & Tell: A Unique Journey Through History From the Life of Brent Ashworth” by Traci M. Fieldsted (Eborn Books, 2017) tells my Hofmann story.

    Comment by Brent Ashworth — March 8, 2021 @ 7:59 am

  4. Mark Ashurst-McGee’s “Moroni: Angel or Treasure Guardian?” is another interesting piece in the historiographical converstaion of Latter-day Saint History and folk magic practices.

    I’d also recommend Jared Hickman’s essay “‘Bringing Forth’ the Book of Mormon: Translation as the Reconfiguration of Bodies in Space-Time” in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity.

    Comment by Steve — March 8, 2021 @ 1:07 pm

  5. It covers Mormon folklore more generally, but Eric Eliason’s “Mormon Folk Culture” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism does dive into folk magic and discusses the Hofmann case.

    Comment by Hillary — March 8, 2021 @ 9:32 pm

  6. Yes, Naifeh’s and Smith’s “The Mormon Murders” is lurid and verges on ax-grinding, at times, but it’s the best of the books in capturing the thinking, process, and breakthroughs of the investigators and prosecutors. Lindsey’s “A Gathering of Saints” is the most entertainingly readable of the lot.

    Comment by MoPo — March 9, 2021 @ 8:24 am

  7. The annotation on Quinn’s book states: “The updated version still contains the disproved Salamander letter”.

    Technically true in that it mentions the “Salamander Letter.” To clarify, it does not use it as an authentic historical source. And yet, Quinn then goes on to argue that Smith REALLY DID see a salamander.

    Hofmann obviously based the Salamander Letter on the 1834 statement of Willard Chase, who said that Moroni initially appeared to Smith as a creature that looked “something like a toad,” which then “assumed the appearance of a man, and struck him [Smith] on the side of his head”–very similar to the Salamander Letter. Quinn argues that Chase was right about the creature but didn’t get the species right, that the creature was more likely a salamander, and that Hofmann had done his forgery homework and got it right.

    Hofmann and Quinn are right that the salamander had magical power in European and European-American folk belief. It was one of the four classical “elemental spirits”—the gnomes in the earth, the sylphs in the air, the undines in the water, and the salamanders in fire. It was the subterranean gnomes who hoarded and guarded treasure, not salamanders. Everyone who has heard the Germanic tale of Snow White remembers the seven salamanders who mined gold and copper from a treasure mountain. Wait, I mean the seven dwarves (often substituted for the more accurate gnomes).

    Comment by Mark Ashurst-McGee — March 9, 2021 @ 11:22 am

  8. I was thinking that Curt Bench wrote a book not long after the event, but I can’t find it listed at Amazon. I actually attended the Sunstone Symposium following the release of the salamander letter (1984?). It was a wild, whacky, and intriguing event, with presentations covering the spectrum of speculation concerning this new “found” curiosity and it’s implications. Several were given by BYU professors, who used to attend the symposium in those long-ago days. For some reason I recall Curt – at a symposium several years later, passing out free copies of a book about Hofmann which i was thinking he had written. But I may be wrong.

    Comment by larryco_ — March 9, 2021 @ 5:14 pm


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