Where Heaven Meets Earth; Or, the Importance of the Joseph Smith Papers

[This past Wednesday, March 23, I was privileged to take part in a bloggernacle event with the Joseph Smith Papers folk via internet in honor of the release of the third volume overall and second volume in the Revelations and Translations Series. General information on the volume can be found here. Since many participants of the event have already outlined both the happenings of the meeting and the contents of the book, this post gives a general reflection of the project that I came away with after listening, once again, to the volume editors explain the purpose and mission of the project.]

Sixty-five thousand. That?s how many copies of Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 1 is currently in circulation. Most scholarly papers editions?typically limited to presidents, founding fathers, or other iconic figures?are fortunate to reach four digits, and a vast majority of those are purchased by libraries and research institutions. When the most recent edition of the Thomas Jefferson Papers: Retirement Series rolled off the press several months ago, there was no press conference, no advertisement campaign, not even a ?based on your previous purchases, you may be interested in?? email from Amazon. Papers project volumes aren?t generally on even a bibliophile?s wish list. But copies of the Joseph Smith Papers are purchased en masse. They are showcased in the front shelves of Deseret Book, offered for impressive discounts on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (even if the discounts rarely hold), and are displayed prominently in numerous Mormon households. And thus, when a new volume was released last week, the great folks at the LDS Church History Library hold a blogger event. Naturally.

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New Dissertation Proposal

So after researching Proclus’s influence on Christianity these last few months and some conversations with my adviser, Ann wanted me to write up a new proposal. Ann really stresses that dissertations/books ought to have one clear thesis and thus we thought it best to go with the Neoplatonic one over the medieval Catholic one. I do still plan on arguing that Mormonism was a rejection of Protestantism, that crypto-Catholic ideas and practices persisted in folk practices that JS drew on, and thus Mormonism looks more Catholic than Protestant. But I’m arguing that Christian Platonism informs the direction of JS’s religiosity. Anyway, here’s my latest write up.

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Women’s History Month at JI: Kristine Wright, “Finding Christiana Pyper: Some Thoughts on Changing Paradigms”

I live a little over 4000 km from Jonathan Stapley which brings some unique challenges to researching and writing together. Once we had compiled hundreds of healing accounts, they were arranged in a document chronologically. We read through them separately, made notes and then had a couple of marathon phone calls to discuss our findings. During one phone conversation, we discovered multiple appearances of two healers who seemed to work together. Several references to a Sister Piper/Pyper and a Brother Patison/Patterson piqued our interest and led to deeper research into their stories. No familial connection was obvious; Christiana was married to Alexander Pyper and the mother of George D. Pyper who among other things managed the Salt Lake Theatre, was the leading tenor in the Salt Lake Opera Company and the editor of The Juvenile Instructor. Alvus Patterson had four wives, however he did have a daughter named Christiana. They received their patriarchal blessings from the same patriarch on the same day in February 1888.

We were excited to discover that Christiana had a diary that was listed in the register of the George D. Pyper manuscript collection at the University of Utah, but then disappointed that the diary couldn’t be found and the general consensus was that the old inventory was incorrect. A diary was reviewed and it was determined to be George D. Pyper’s. On a research trip to Salt Lake City, I spent some time in the Special Collections section of the Marriott Library and decided to read through George Pyper’s diary to see if I could glean any insights into his mother. It seemed that George was also a healer and that he sometimes administered with Brother Patterson as well. He recorded the completion of temple work for female relatives which in retrospect should have seemed odd, but as I knew this was a man’s diary, I chalked it up to having submitted names to be completed by female ordinance workers. The item that jolted me out of framing these events through the eyes of George Pyper was an entry deep in the diary about receiving a dress as a birthday gift. I checked the date and went to Family Search and entered the name Christiana Dollinger Pyper. Sure enough. the dates matched. The diarist was Christiana Pyper! Re-reading the entries a second time “knowing the true author and looking at the document through a different “lens” changed my perspective. It also corroborated other diarists’ accounts, happily revealed a full listing of her administrations to the sick in 1888 and 1891 and provided many insights into the culture of collaborative healing. (1)

Finding Christiana Pyper’s diary underscored the idea of the paradigm shift. As I have written elsewhere, when I began the study of women’s history, the idea of “separate spheres” or a separate women’s culture was the dominant paradigm of historical interpretation. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s groundbreaking article, “The Female World of Love and Ritual” as well as Barbara Welter’s work on the “Cult of True Womanhood” and the feminization of religion set the tone for a generation of historians who focused upon the unique bonds between women and the distinctive world they created and inhabited. Studying the participation of men and women together in healing rituals seemed to subvert the idea of separate spheres (see here) and I wondered about a new framework for interpreting women’s history. Rachel Cope’s excellent dissertation underscores this point. She states:

Although women and men both had spiritual experiences and became engaged in the conversion process, important aspects of the revival story are distinctly female, not because nineteenth century-religion was feminized, but because religious experiences thrust women into a world where they could escape the expectations of “true womanhood,” “separate spheres,” “feminization” and “sentimentality.” (2)

While part of the work of Mormon women’s history is simply unearthing untold stories, it is clear that a new interpretive framework needs to be developed. Scholars of American women’s religious history have already begun this work, but the study of Mormon women– who Cope points out were religious “outsiders” – will also require its own unique reading while being grounded in American history. A distinctive system of marriage, ritual participation and theology shaped Mormon women in the past. By placing their voices in the centre, instead of on the margins of history, new interpretations of the past will be developed and shed new light on the whole, just as the diary of Christiana Pyper did.

Kris Wright has a M.A. in History from The University of Western Ontario. She has co-authored three articles with Jonathan Stapley on Mormon healing rituals. The most recent, an article on female ritual healing, is available online.

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1. Christiana D. Pyper, Accounts of Administration to the Sick, 1888 and 1891, manuscript, George D. Pyper Papers, MS 1, Bx 2, Fd 19, Special Collections, Marriott Library; Christiana D. Pyper, Diary, 1886-1889, November 9 and 10, 1888, George D. Pyper Papers, MS 1 Bx 6, Fd 1, Special Collections, Marriott Library
2. Cope, Rachel, “In Some Places a Few Drops and Other Places a Plentiful Shower’: The Religious Impact of Revivalism on Early-Nineteenth-Century New York Women,” (Doctoral Dissertation, Syracuse University, 2009), p. 12-13.

Patrick Mason answers your questions

Thanks to Matt and everyone at JI for this opportunity.

For those of us who are interested in Mormon history, particularly in graduate school or the early years of our academic careers, the question of how to position oneself is always a vexed one. I was one who very consciously did NOT want to write a ?Mormon dissertation.? That?s why I chose a comparative topic: violence against religious minority groups in the postbellum South. Mormons were one of these groups, but at the time of my dissertation proposal I thought they would represent only a minor aspect of the study. I was as surprised as anyone when they turned out to be the best part of the story, and got twice the coverage in the dissertation and eventually became the centerpiece of my book.

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Call For Papers: Exploring the Text of the Doctrine and Covenants

The 2012 Sidney B. Sperry Symposium

You Shall Have My Word (D&C 5:10): Exploring the Text of the Doctrine and Covenants

Call For Proposals

Women’s History Month at JI: Vickie Speek on Elvira Field/Charley Douglass, Strang’s Plural Wife

Elvira Field is pretty much my favorite person in Mormon history–probably my favorite historical person ever! Elvira was awesome! She was a nineteenth century woman way ahead of her time: a feminist, a working mother, and a leader in the Strangite church.

Physically small and fragile, Elvira was not especially beautiful, but she had a brilliant mind and was unusually articulate. She loved plants and flowers, especially orchids, and knew their Latin names. She was also a dead-eye with a gun who could out-shoot most men. She frequently did, even when she was sixty-seven years old!

In 1831, when she was just a year old, Elvira’s parents were baptized into the fledgling Mormon church and moved to Kirtland, Ohio. Elvira and her family remained affiliated with the Mormon church, but moved to Michigan in 1837-38, instead of relocating to Missouri. After Joseph Smith Jr. was murdered in June 1844, the Field family supported the succession claims of James J. Strang rather than Brigham Young.

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Women’s History Month at JI: Janiece Johnson, “Rebecca Williams, Steadfast and Immovable: Part Deux”

As part of our continuing series celebrating Women’s History month here at JI, Janiece Johnson, graduate student at the University of Utah, has contributed the following insightful look at one early Mormon woman’s religiosity.

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Women’s History Month at the JI: Rachel Cope on Shaker and Mormon Women

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Juvenile Instructor is planning a number of excellent posts on various aspects of Mormon women’s history. Earlier this month, Ardis S. spotlighted a recent article by Max on Jane Manning James and Jerri Harwell–two magnificent Mormon women of African descent, separated by time but not by faith. Today’s offering comes from Rachel Cope, who describes her recent visit with the last surviving Shaker women, and the impact of that experience on Prof. Cope’s approach to writing history and the importance of women and gender in our past. — David G.

Being Biblical Part II

My last post was a product of where I was at in my research. As I’ve argued in previous posts, I see heavy Neoplatonic (particularly that of Proclus) influences on Mormonism, which become more pronounced in JS’s last years. The Book of Abraham and the King Follett are thoroughly Neoplatonic in their notions of pre-existence, references to intelligences, the nature of the creation, the rejection of creation ex nihilo, deification, hierarchy of gods, and that God was once human.

I found two things most striking about the King Follett Discourse.

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Scholarly Inquiry: Patrick Mason

Our next Scholarly Inquiry will be with Patrick Mason, who will in the fall assume the Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. We invite you to submit questions for Patrick – on his research, present and past, on his work at Notre Dame, and of course, on the Hunter Chair, below; answers will soon be forthcoming.

Patrick Mason is currently Research Associate Professor at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Associate Director for Research of a multi-year research initiative called ?Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.? In the fall he will assume his new duties as Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.

His new book is The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has also published articles on topics including the history of Utah state legislation against interracial marriage, anti-Jewish violence in the South, the role of religion in the African American protest tradition, the possibilities of Mormon peacebuilding, and most recently on theodemocracy in 19th-century Mormonism.