Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment
Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism

A fascinating account of the daily life and spirituality of early Methodists by a prize-winning gender historian.

Phyllis Mack (Author)

9780521290364, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 16 June 2011

342 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

'… a path-breaking work of meticulous scholarship and shrewd analysis.' Bruce Hindmarsh, Books and Culture

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.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Church history [HRCC2], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]