Historians of early-seventeenth-century English religion are deeply divided over whether the church of the 1630s was characterized by more general theological and liturgical agreement and tolerant ecumenism, or by escalating conflict over theology and ceremonies, driven in part by virulent anti-popery and culminating in the violence of the 1640s. Those who see conflict acknowledge that such categories as Puritan and Anglican are unwarranted for what was really a spectrum of opinion, with the moderate range heavily occupied. Still, they find antecedents of the Civil War in longstanding quarrels over theology and ceremony. For those who find the Caroline church a consensual body, on the other hand, the causes of that war “remain elusive.” Having discarded as simplistic the plot line of the received version, which proceeds inexorably from Elizabethan dissent to “Puritan Revolution,” they now substitute short-term contingency and the sudden flourishing of a lunatic fringe. In the process of trying to sort out the complexity of contemporary theological opinion, they have lost the thread of the story they were trying to tell.

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791), was a central figure in the eighteenth-century religious revival that swept across England and Wales. A faithful daughter of the Church of England, Lady Huntingdon became a “Methodist” when that term described a style of piety rather than denominational affiliation. She was a pivotal figure in early Methodism, around whom the Calvinistic and Arminian wings of the movement revolved. Selina frequently described herself as being engaged in “this present Reformation” of England. A close examination of her piety—which stressed justification by faith—and her many ministerial works suggests that Lady Huntingdon was indeed a significant religious reformer; this examination offers a divergent path to the complicated roots of early Methodism.

The struggle between village priest and schoolteacher in France over education, the struggle for the minds of the young, has a long history. Although it reached its peak in the Third Republic, it developed throughout the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, evidence is heavily anecdotal, so we do not actually know how extensive or intensive it was, and thus how significant for the history of France.

In 1883, the African American Baptist preacher George Washington Williams published his History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880. The book, a fundamentally optimistic account of the black presence in the New World, represented an attempt by the well-educated, northern divine to balance his commitments to an American evangelical tradition with an awareness of the ongoing oppression of his fellow African Americans at the hands of whites. “I commit this work to the public, white and black,” he noted in the preface, “to the friends and foes of the Negro in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights.” The work revealed much about Williams: his upbringing in antebellum Pennsylvania as the child of an interracial union, his training at Howard University and Newton Theological Seminary, and his work experiences at Baptist churches in New England and Ohio. But this particular passage highlights the motivating force behind the book: it reveals, in anticipation of a historical narrative of over two hundred years of African enslavement, Williams's desire to recast much of the American past. Williams's historical account was, at heart, an attempt to impart moral meaning to the present by reconstructing the historical consciousness of both blacks and whites. In this desire, Williams fit precisely Friedrich Nietzsche's characterization of “historical men,” those who “believe that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back to consider that process only to understand the present better and learn to desire the future more vehemently.”

Once in a while, an occasion turns out to be historic, historical, and historiographical. Such an occasion was the conference on the Canadian Evangelical Experience held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, early in May 1995. This four-day conference devoted to the history of evangelicalism in Canada (thus “historical”) was the first of its kind in this country, and marked the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in this field (thus “historic”). It has become a considerable enough mass, in fact, that this review will confine itself to published books and particularly those published in the last ten years. It is a “critical” mass, furthermore, in that the conference raised explicitly and implicitly serious questions about the writing of Canadian evangelical history, some of which this essay will discuss (thus “historiographical”).