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  • Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self by Misty G. Anderson
  • Brett C. McInelly
Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2012. Pp. xii + 279. $65.

“I show that Methodism served imaginatively as a space of intimacy, desire, and even ecstasy for the modern British self even as, and indeed because, it served as a boundary for that self,” Ms. Anderson states. “This study is thus not so much about the lives of Methodists as it is about the imagined life of the Methodist as modernity’s homegrown, mystic-evangelical other.”

Her study, then, has less in common with histories of Methodism than with studies that relate Methodism to broader cultural categories and questions, such as the Culture of Sensibility (Barker-Benfield) or the formation of an English working class (Thompson). Moreover, Ms. Anderson documents the popularity of Methodism in the British imagination and the ways its forms of spirituality became a part of a larger discourse about identity and modernity. The period, she claims, is not defined by the secular supplanting the religious so much as it is by the tension between the two.

Ms. Anderson’s historical overview shows how Methodism both embodied and reacted to the modern moment. Relying on Lockean empiricism to characterize Methodism as “experimental religion,” she describes the religion’s championing instantaneous conversion and mystical experience. While Methodists insisted that their faith, and identities, were founded on reasoned reflection, critics claimed they lacked the critical distance needed to read their experiences accurately, “a debate that shaped the articulation of the categories of modern literature and modern critical reading practices.” Methodist religiosity hinged on the interpretation of religious impulses, printed devotional materials, and public performances like sermons; in critiquing these practices, anti-Methodists inevitably found themselves confronting broader questions: how might novel reading or play going most effectively transform readers/ audiences into more controlled and conscious selves?

Methodism tended to encourage, whether in fact or mere perception, sexual impropriety. Encouraging his followers to live celibate lives, Wesley divided his societies across gender lines, which contributed to the belief that Methodism promoted relationships that ran counter to normative heterosexuality. In criticizing such practices, anti-Methodists naturally [End Page 76] picked up on time-tested themes in anti-Catholic and anti-Puritan literature, in which devotees hypocritically mask sexual desire with feigned piety. But Ms. Anderson argues that these writers moved in a relatively new direction by positing that the Methodists were not hypocrites, “but unstable selves open to radical reformation,” consequently raising questions about agency, sexuality, and identity at a time when these categories were being reconstituted. She discusses Fielding’s Mary/ George Hamilton in The Female Husband (1746) and Cleland’s Mr. Barville in Fanny Hill (1748) as illustrations of individuals transformed by their religious and sexual enthusiasm. Suggesting that Methodism challenged modern notions of masculinity and femininity, Ms. Anderson gives Fielding a lens for representing Hamilton’s unstable sexuality: “Silenced and punished in a way that Methodism could not be, Hamilton bears the weight of Fielding’s anxieties about selves who are malleable enough to be transformed by belief, and about religious practices powerful enough to relandscape the self.”

She examines the performative nature of Methodist meetings: “Methodism unsettled the boundary between actor and role, as well as the space between actor and audience in sermons that left congregants deeply moved, even changed, by this theater of the real.” Critics, such as Foote and Hogarth, naturally mocked these “performances,” and in so doing “revealed their own fascination with the promise of some mystical presence that defied rational explanation.” Their critiques raised questions about the proper relationship between actors and audiences, critical viewing and reading practices, and the modern self.

Perhaps no form of Methodist discourse influenced Methodist belief and self-understanding more than the hymnal. Ms. Anderson carefully analyzes the lyrical qualities of the hymns and how they importantly reshaped Methodist identity and challenged “the demand for autonomy and agency that liberalism articulates as a requirement of modern consciousness.” Given her focus on representations of Methodism, she gives surprisingly little attention to...

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