Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism
Cambridge University Press, 8/14/2008
EAN 9780521889186, ISBN10: 0521889189
Hardcover, 342 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
This is a major study of the daily life and spirituality of early Methodist men and women. Phyllis Mack challenges traditional, negative depictions of early Methodism through an analysis of a vast array of primary sources - prayers, pamphlets, hymns, diaries, recipes, private letters, accounts of dreams, and rules for housekeeping. She examines how ordinary men and women understood the seismic shift from the religious culture of the seventeenth century to the so-called 'disenchantment of the world' that developed out of the Enlightenment. She places particular emphasis on the experience of women, arguing that both their spirituality and their contributions to the movement were different from men's. This revisionist account sheds light on how ordinary people understood their experience of religious conversion, marriage, worship, sexuality, friendship, and the supernatural, and what motivated them to travel the world as missionaries.
Introduction
1. The managed heart
educating the emotions in Methodist discourse
2. 'Out of the paw of the lion'
first conversion
3. Men of feeling
natural and spiritual affection in the lives of the preachers
4. Women in love
Eros and piety in the minds of Methodist women
5. Mary Fletcher on the cross
gender and the suffering body
6. Agency and the unconscious
the Methodist culture of dreaming
7. Methodism and modernity.
'This is an important revisionist study that will necessitate a re-evaluation of the eighteenth century development of Methodism and an expression of its dynamism.' The Historical Association
‘… for the general reader this is a well-presented and brilliant book. I commend it heartily.’ The Methodist Recorder