Isabel Rivers

Reason, grace, and sentiment : a study of the language of religion and ethics in England, 1660-1780

Introduction 1. The true religion of nature: the freethinkers and their opponents 2. Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 3. Defining the moral faculty: Hutcheson, Butler, and Price 4. The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis: Hume and his critics 5. The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century.

Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England : new essays

This collection of essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th century-writings were designed and received by different audiences. It focuses on research in publishing history since the 1980s.

THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters

David Humes attacks on religion posed particular problems of method and approach for those who undertook to reply to them. This article is concerned with the responses of two main groups from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth: a number of Anglicans and Episcopalians, and a smaller group of rational Dissenters. The responses of some of these are well known, but those of others have not hitherto been investigated. The essay charts a definite shift from wit and ridicule to reasoned and mannerly response as the appropriate way to deal with infidelity. Most respondents assumed that Hume could be adequately refuted by rehearsing old arguments; however, a small but significant number maintained that his infidelity was of positive value for the future of Christianity.

Review essayWriting the history of early evangelicalismMethodism: Empire of the Spirit, D. Hempton, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (2005) The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England, D. Bruce Hindmarsh, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005) Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, W.R. Ward, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006)

What was evangelicalism, when did it start, where and how did it spread, and where and what is it now? Was it a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century, or was it a continuation or a reinvention of something pre-existing? What materials do historians use to define and study it, and what is the best way for them to write about it? Thirty or forty years ago, to generalise not too wildly, and to repeat a point often made by David Hempton, those concerned with such matters were often either denominational historians who wrote about their own traditions from a Methodist or Anglican or Congregationalist or Baptist perspective, or social historians who to a large extent thought religion was to be explained in terms of class conflict and social control. Both groups took for granted their readers’ sympathy, in the first case with their religious views and in the second with their secular ones. Things have changed a good deal in the last 20 years in the ways in which religious history is written, but there are still obstacles to acceptance of the academic study of many facets of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Intellectual historians or practitioners of philosophical theology who write about religion and philosophy in the eighteenth century tend to focus on thinkers who were concerned with defining or questioning the relationship between revealed (scriptural) religion and rationally deduced natural religion. Political historians tend to see theology as an aspect of political thought, and to focus on the ecclesiastical aspects of religion in its relations with the state. Literary historians, particularly of the period 1780–1830, are on the whole far more sympathetic to unitarianism than to evangelicalism, and hence tend to overestimate the spread of unitarian views. It is still the case, in British universities at least, that there is more interest in seventeenth-century puritanism than in eighteenth-century evangelicalism; the eighteenth century is more of a stamping ground for historians of civil society, commerce, politeness, and material culture. Of the older generation of British religious historians who are still active in the field, no one has done more from the 1960s onwards than John Walsh and W. R. Ward to make us think about the meaning and importance of evangelicalism in the British Isles. Of the next generation, David Hempton and David Bebbington have been the most influential voices from the 1980s on, and they are now joined by the Canadian Bruce Hindmarsh, whose first book appeared in 1996. In this essay I shall consider aspects of the following four topics which are central to writing the history of early evangelicalism, and which are covered to a varying extent by Ward, Hempton, and Hindmarsh in the books under review: (1) the origins and expansion of evangelicalism; (2) evangelical thought; (3) the recording of evangelical experience; and (4) the literature of evangelicalism and its publishing history. This list does not exhaust the topics explored in these books, but in my view they are the ones that most deserve investigation. I should declare an interest at the outset: on and off over the last 7 years I have been working on a new work entitled Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical Literary Culture, 1720–1800, and some of my preoccupations with combining intellectual, religious, and literary history with history of the book will come to the fore. History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 105–111

Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, W.R. Ward. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006)

What was evangelicalism, when did it start, where and how did it spread, and where and what is it now? Was it a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century, or was it a continuation or a reinvention of something pre-existing? What materials do historians use to define and study it, and what is the best way for them to write about it? Thirty or forty years ago, to generalise not too wildly, and to repeat a point often made by David Hempton, those concerned with such matters were often either denominational historians who wrote about their own traditions from a Methodist or Anglican or Congregationalist or Baptist perspective, or social historians who to a large extent thought religion was to be explained in terms of class conflict and social control. Both groups took for granted their readers’ sympathy, in the first case with their religious views and in the second with their secular ones. Things have changed a good deal in the last 20 years in the ways in which religious history is written, but there are still obstacles to acceptance of the academic study of many facets of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Intellectual historians or practitioners of philosophical theology who write about religion and philosophy in the eighteenth century tend to focus on thinkers who were concerned with defining or questioning the relationship between revealed (scriptural) religion and rationally deduced natural religion. Political historians tend to see theology as an aspect of political thought, and to focus on the ecclesiastical aspects of religion in its relations with the state. Literary historians, particularly of the period 1780–1830, are on the whole far more sympathetic to unitarianism than to evangelicalism, and hence tend to overestimate the spread of unitarian views. It is still the case, in British universities at least, that there is more interest in seventeenth-century puritanism than in eighteenth-century evangelicalism; the eighteenth century is more of a stamping ground for historians of civil society, commerce, politeness, and material culture. Of the older generation of British religious historians who are still active in the field, no one has done more from the 1960s onwards than John Walsh and W. R. Ward to make us think about the meaning and importance of evangelicalism in the British Isles. Of the next generation, David Hempton and David Bebbington have been the most influential voices from the 1980s on, and they are now joined by the Canadian Bruce Hindmarsh, whose first book appeared in 1996. In this essay I shall consider aspects of the following four topics which are central to writing the history of early evangelicalism, and which are covered to a varying extent by Ward, Hempton, and Hindmarsh in the books under review: (1) the origins and expansion of evangelicalism; (2) evangelical thought; (3) the recording of evangelical experience; and (4) the literature of evangelicalism and its publishing history. This list does not exhaust the topics explored in these books, but in my view they are the ones that most deserve investigation. I should declare an interest at the outset: on and off over the last 7 years I have been working on a new work entitled Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical Literary Culture, 1720–1800, and some of my preoccupations with combining intellectual, religious, and literary history with history of the book will come to the fore. History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 105–111

Writing the history of early evangelicalism

What was evangelicalism, when did it start, where and how did it spread, and where and what is it now? Was it a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century, or was it a continuation or a reinvention of something pre-existing? What materials do historians use to define and study it, and what is the best way for them to write about it? Thirty or forty years ago, to generalise not too wildly, and to repeat a point often made by David Hempton, those concerned with such matters were often either denominational historians who wrote about their own traditions from a Methodist or Anglican or Congregationalist or Baptist perspective, or social historians who to a large extent thought religion was to be explained in terms of class conflict and social control. Both groups took for granted their readers’ sympathy, in the first case with their religious views and in the second with their secular ones. Things have changed a good deal in the last 20 years in the ways in which religious history is written, but there are still obstacles to acceptance of the academic study of many facets of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Intellectual historians or practitioners of philosophical theology who write about religion and philosophy in the eighteenth century tend to focus on thinkers who were concerned with defining or questioning the relationship between revealed (scriptural) religion and rationally deduced natural religion. Political historians tend to see theology as an aspect of political thought, and to focus on the ecclesiastical aspects of religion in its relations with the state. Literary historians, particularly of the period 1780–1830, are on the whole far more sympathetic to unitarianism than to evangelicalism, and hence tend to overestimate the spread of unitarian views. It is still the case, in British universities at least, that there is more interest in seventeenth-century puritanism than in eighteenth-century evangelicalism; the eighteenth century is more of a stamping ground for historians of civil society, commerce, politeness, and material culture. Of the older generation of British religious historians who are still active in the field, no one has done more from the 1960s onwards than John Walsh and W. R. Ward to make us think about the meaning and importance of evangelicalism in the British Isles. Of the next generation, David Hempton and David Bebbington have been the most influential voices from the 1980s on, and they are now joined by the Canadian Bruce Hindmarsh, whose first book appeared in 1996. In this essay I shall consider aspects of the following four topics which are central to writing the history of early evangelicalism, and which are covered to a varying extent by Ward, Hempton, and Hindmarsh in the books under review: (1) the origins and expansion of evangelicalism; (2) evangelical thought; (3) the recording of evangelical experience; and (4) the literature of evangelicalism and its publishing history. This list does not exhaust the topics explored in these books, but in my view they are the ones that most deserve investigation. I should declare an interest at the outset: on and off over the last 7 years I have been working on a new work entitled Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical Literary Culture, 1720–1800, and some of my preoccupations with combining intellectual, religious, and literary history with history of the book will come to the fore. History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 105–111