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BYU Studies Quarterly

BYU Studies Quarterly

Authors

Mark A. Noll

Keywords

Mormon studies, Jesuit, modern Protestantism

Abstract

As historians of Mormonism have long since established, Europeans took note of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints almost from the beginning. Mormon missionaries, converts, and expatriates, as well as European visitors to the United States, put the church on the European map early on. The result was a great deal of animated European commentary on, interest in, and interaction with Mormonism itself. Such engagement was illustrated in 1854 when, after a decade in the United States, the ecclesiastical polymath Philip Schaff returned to his native German-speaking regions and included—though reluctantly (“I would fain pass over this sect in silence”)—an account of the Mormons in his landmark lectures entitled America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character. Schaff did so because so many Germans had asked him about the movement. That interest was also evident when Anthony Trollope, on his fourth visit to the United States in 1872, paid an unannounced call on Brigham Young, “the great polygamist,” but came away “properly punished” when Young refused an interview, since Trollope, in his own words, had been “vain enough to conceive that he would have heard my name.” Only a few years later, a different kind of European attention was paid in the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s book-length mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes where the Mormons and their Utah habitat factored large in the story.

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