Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - The Methodist revolution?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The recent completion of the four-volume History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (1988), a project commissioned by the Methodist Conference some forty years ago, seems an appropriate point to attempt a re-evaluation of the impact of Methodism in English society between the death of John Wesley and the outbreak of World War One. Its massive bibliography, extending to some fifty pages for this period alone, and including many of the most influential historians of modern Britain, is both a tribute to the strange power Methodism has exercised over generations of research students and a revealing guide to the main turning-points of Methodist historiography.
Most obviously, there has been a marked decline in the number of words devoted to Methodist theology, spirituality and biography, and a corresponding increase in studies of the personal, social and political impact of Methodism on English localities. Such a trend was accelerated by the attention brought to the subject by the socialist historians Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, whose pioneering, if sometimes crude, work stimulated a remarkably rich literature culminating in the recent publication of the History Workshop volume Disciplines of Faith. The high quality of many of its contributions, and the fact that it was dedicated to John Walsh, who of all the eminent historians of Methodism was the most prepared to take religious motivation seriously, shows that reductionist interpretations of popular religion are almost dead and that the previously wide gulf between ecclesiastical historians and social historians of religion is now less impassable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religion and Political Culture in Britain and IrelandFrom the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire, pp. 25 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996