Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

mirroring the order’s own stages of probation for its individual members—as a time of probation for the order as a whole. That probation was only finished when the two provinces of the Low Countries were reestablished, in 1832 in Belgium and 1850 in the Netherlands, explaining the end date of the volume. A helpful introductory article (Marc Lindeijer, Jo Luyten, and Kristien Suenens) on the “quick downfall and slow rise” of the Jesuits in the Low Countries, added after the conference to help frame the papers, sets out the basic developments in one convenient place (13). Two chapters by Michel Hermans then trace the highly varied fates of the members of the Gallo-Belgian province just before the suppression and then in the decades afterward; a third (Joep van Gennip) discusses the equally varied fate of the members of the Flemish-Belgian province after 1773; while a fourth (Marek Inglot) treats the crucial role of Russia, which for surviving Jesuits was arguably the most important of the three countries (including Prussia and the Dutch Republic) that never promulgated the suppression order and became the major gathering point for refugees. Though the fate of all Netherlandish members is not known, these chapters gather, knead, and massage all the available quantitative information a reader could possibly hope for—individuals, colleges, cities, ages, dates, percentages, and more. Three case studies of Jesuits are a pleasure to read as they give some flesh and blood to the general and surprisingly varied trends in the form of the “Vicissitudes” of the sometime Jesuits Joannes Vrindts (Jo Luyten), Antoine Malou-Riga (Vincent Verbrugge), and the especially well-told story of Jan Roothaan, the “second founder” of the order (Marc Lindeijer). Another case study (Frank Judo) treats a perhaps surprising tract by the civic official Balthazar de Villegas calling for the restoration of the order as early as 1790, while three others helpfully explore what changed, or not, after the 1814 restoration in three selected areas of Jesuit life: relationships with female religious congregations in Belgium (Jo Luyten and Kristien Suenens), anti-Jesuit propaganda in the Netherlands (Joep van Gennip), and new Jesuit churches in the Netherlands (Peter van Dael). A final and second framing paper added after the conference by Pierre-Antoine Fabre reflects on the papers presented to wonder: were the Jesuits ever really suppressed? And were they ever really restored? Because it was not as if in 1832 or 1850, when the provinces were healthy again, that everything returned to the way it was. More research into that paradox will also help answer another: how could the Jesuits be at the forefront of modernity and at the forefront of anti-modernity, too? A handy appendix of Jesuits in and from the Low Countries, 1773–1830, plus an excellent bibliography and index, complete this interesting volume.