Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (review)

Emotion in the eighteenth-century novel became sensibility, a faculty to be admired, critiqued, and analyzed. Emotion in religion was called enthusiasm, a faculty to be mocked and dismissed. Scholars of eighteenth-century literature faced with the odd vestige of Methodism in a largely Anglican world often have looked to works like Albert Lyles’s Methodism Mocked: The Satiric Reaction to Methodism in the Eighteenth Century. Viewing early Methodists, most of whom were from the laboring classes, and their emotional religion through the condescending eyes of their betters is no longer the obvious choice. In the archives of early Methodism, historians—Henry Rack, Richard Heitzenrater, David Hempton, Ms. Mack, and others—have found texts composed by the early Methodists themselves, accounts of their lives, their spiritual formation, and, as it turns out, their feelings.

Ms. Mack here offers readers an opportunity to view emotion as it created and constrained agency in both men and women of early Methodism, addressing issues of “self-definition, sexuality, physical illness, and human love,” arguing for a dynamic complexity:

. . . their Enlightenment ideals and Protestant theology both contradicted and reinforced each other, and this combustion of ideas and values heightened the tension inherent in Christian thought between the desire for passivity and self-abnegation on the one hand, and the urge toward self-transformation and world-transformation, on the other.

Resisting the common secular definition of agency as individual autonomy, she argues that Methodists and others “defined agency not as the freedom to do what one wants but as the freedom to want and to do what is right. Since ‘what is right’ was determined both by absolute truth or God and by individual conscience, agency implied obedience and ethical responsibility as well as the freedom to make choices and act on them.” Implying self-control and negation as well as self-expression, this agency creates what Ms. Mack calls “the managed heart.” Methodism, thus, is not a passive religion: conversion for Wesley required individual effort, setting it on an activist path. By reading the lives of Methodist women and men, she demonstrates the important Methodist move from passivity to action.

This study of gender and emotion first explores Methodism’s “men of feeling”—not London dandies, but modestly educated itinerant preachers, always traveling the circuit, always away from home, whose days depended on a good horse, decent weather, and the welcoming spirit of a gathered community awaiting arrival and their next sermon. Rereading the Lives of the Preachers, a collection of spiritual accounts Wesley required of his preachers, Ms. Mack reveals both hardened souls like John Nelson, who did not cry when his daughter died and left his wife and children to fend for themselves as he rode the circuit, as well as mature, complex Christian leaders, such as John Pawson, capable of deep love for their wives and for their congregations.

While not ignoring men’s emotional lives, Ms. Mack focuses three chapters on the personal lives of Methodist women. Some women were married, but many lived long, productive periods of their lives single or widowed, traveling around England and preaching or leading classes with surprising freedom. They survived through the love and care of other women, some calling themselves the “female brethren.” A nuanced reading of relationships like those of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher with Sarah Ryan, Sarah Crosby, and Mary Tooth supports the author’s claim that women’s “patterns of friendship and marriage generated a different emotional and imaginative relationship to the divine.” The author’s analysis of John Wesley’s intensely emotional and yet often rocky relationship with women deftly moves beyond Henry Abelove’s earlier psychoanalytic reading of Wesley and his female followers.

Ms. Mack joins feminist scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Susan Juster in examining the contradictions between the meaning of suffering for women and their need for healing. The self-writing of Methodist women demonstrates their role as healers, even as it depicts medical traumas...