Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T04:57:42.384Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The long eighteenth century

from Part I - Wesley’s context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

Randy L. Maddox
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Jason E. Vickers
Affiliation:
United Theological Seminary, Trotwood, Ohio
Get access

Summary

John Wesley's long life (1703-91) almost spanned the eighteenth century. Any Companion to him needs to provide some sense of this period. Scholarly biographies of Wesley have provided some attention to this topic, of which the most impressive and successful to date is Henry Rack's Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. Extended treatments of his age by Wesley scholars have been rare and rather unsatisfactory. For example, in 1938, the amateur historian J. H. Whiteley published Wesley's England: A Survey of XVIIIth Century Social and Cultural Conditions, as part of the celebrations marking the bicentenary of Wesley's conversion. The book is drawn from secondary sources, aimed at a Methodist readership, and fails to give a coherent sense of the period. However, Whiteley astutely recognized that “the difficulties of the project are manifold, for this is a century of England's story whose details are surprisingly contradictory and elusive.” Eighty years later, this characterization holds. There is no consensus among professional historians about Wesley's context. Indeed, at present they are probably more divided than they have ever been about how to conceptualize the period in which he lived.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×