This fascinating volume makes a substantial addition to Professor Ward's already invaluable contribution to historical scholarship on evangelicalism, building particularly on his important earlier book, The Protestant evangelical awakening (Cambridge, 1992), and on numerous articles and essays. His extensive command of primary and secondary literature in German gives his work a distinctive conceptual and geographical breadth, mediating to English-speaking scholars sources that would otherwise be unknown and inaccessible to them. In particular, Ward's publications are an essential corrective to two besetting sins of historical writing in this field: first, a limitation to an Anglo-American nexus, with minimal attention to continental Europe; second the writing of history backwards, viewing eighteenth-century Europe from the perspective of nineteenth-century Britain, or, worse still, twentieth-century America. At the same time, by setting early evangelicalism in its wider intellectual context, Ward also makes good a claim to show how ‘the history of piety casts light on the general movement of ideas’ (p. 2).

Indeed, the very title of this book offers significant implicit challenges to widely received assumptions. Ward argues that early evangelicalism was not merely, or even primarily, a populist movement, but also had an intellectual history well worthy of the name. Moreover, according to Ward, who implicitly rejects the conventional distinction between Pietists and later evangelicals, that history began not with Zinzendorf, Edwards, and Wesley in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, but two long generations earlier with the work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). Indeed Spener himself must be seen in the context of still earlier writers, notably Johann Arndt (1585–1621) and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), as well as more exotic influences such as Paracelsianism, hermeticism, and the Cabbala.

Ward characterizes the evangelicalism of the early eighteenth century as marked by ‘a violent, even venomous, anti-Aristotelianism, embodied in a tremendous hostility to systematic theology’ (p. 3). It also had an important mystical strand, mediated by August Francke, Gottfried Arnold, Pierre Poiret, and Gerhard Tersteegen, and drawing not only on Protestant sources, but also on Roman Catholics such as Antoinette Bourignon, Miguel de Molinos, and Madame Guyon. Other important features of the early evangelical outlook were an emphasis on Christian conversion as a specific datable experience, on small group devotion and Bible study as a vehicle for building up lay piety, and an eschatology that deferred the apocalypse into the remote future, and thus inspired a sense of human potentiality rather than resignation to an imminent Last Judgement.

Hence the perceived founding fathers of evangelicalism, Zinzendorf, Wesley, and Edwards, come much closer to the end of Ward's story than to its beginning. Each forms the subject of a substantial chapter, which relates them to the wider intellectual context of the book, presenting them in unfamiliar but plausible perspective. The final main chapter then traces ‘the disintegration of the old evangelicalism’, showing how the movement became intellectually fragmented at the very period that it began to gather institutional momentum. In due course the fragments came together in different ways, enabling ‘evangelicalisms of various kinds (and mostly new kinds) to establish themselves globally’ (p. 193), but, Ward believes, these ‘would hardly have been recognised by the original pioneers’ (p. 5). These early evangelicals, he implies, had a much more mainstream place in intellectual history than their later successors.

The argument is a bracing and important one, but is often presented in an allusive manner that can be taxing even for an attentive and well-informed reader, who is left feeling that Ward's fertile and formidably widely read mind is making connections that are insufficiently explained. While the book has potentially important implications for revising understanding of later evangelical history, as well as of eighteenth-century intellectual life, the full development of these lines of enquiry will require much further work and reflection. In particular, as Ward himself recognizes (p. 4), he does not explore the important Scottish and Irish Presbyterian strands in early evangelicalism. Arguably too, a balanced ‘global’ narrative would require closer attention to English Puritan as well as German Pietist antecedents. Nevertheless the book amply fulfils the promise of the claim on its dust-jacket to be a ‘pioneering study’. It maps out an important and neglected historiographical territory and requires careful attention from all serious scholars of the field.