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

by Phyllis Mack

• ISBN13: 9780521889186
• ISBN10: 0521889189
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a major new 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, rules for housekeeping - many of which have never been used before. 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 new 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. x
Abbreviations	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
The managed heart: educating the emotions in Methodist discourse	p. 29
"Out of the paw of the lion": first conversion	p. 60
Men of feeling: natural and spiritual affection in the lives of the preachers	p. 83
Women in love: Eros and piety in the minds of Methodist women	p. 127
Mary Fletcher on the cross: gender and the suffering body	p. 171
Agency and the unconscious: the Methodist culture of dreaming	p. 219
Methodism and modernity	p. 261
Biographical list of Methodists discussed in the text	p. 302
Bibliography	p. 314
Index	p. 324
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