Rutgers historian Phyllis Mack has effectively trained her attention—for the second time—on a group of early modern British women previously under-appreciated by secular scholars. In this much anticipated sequel to her prize-winning analysis of the early Quakers, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), Mack examines Methodist women (and men) in the latter part of the long eighteenth century. As in the earlier volume, she has made the subject her own. Heart Religion draws on a trove of little-used British sources, mainly letters and diaries, in the Methodist Archive and Research Centre at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. In assessing this evidence Mack supplements her own historical and women's studies expertise, her wide theoretical reading, and her wonderful historical imagination by immersing herself in the secondary literature on early Methodism (and particularly early Methodist women) generated in the last half-century.

As an “outsider” she brings fresh eyes to the material. She has patiently explored the spiritual lives of the early Methodists and elicited what their experiences might mean for their own self-construction and for gender roles, religion, and modernity in general. She takes their voices seriously, shaping them in the process of interpreting them, to be sure, but never caricaturing or dismissing them. The result is a rich and original look at the early movement as central to the development of the Enlightenment project.

The center of her thesis is the long-recognized creative tension in Wesley's theology, when he cobbled together the medieval tradition of “holy living” with the seemingly contradictory Reformation rediscovery of “salvation by grace through faith.” Mack finds something of the same pattern in the wider Methodist culture. Speaking not of Wesley, but of his “ordinary” followers, she argues that,

The result was a new “aggressive spiritual agency,” emotionally based yet disciplined, that “generated Methodism's world-wide missionary project” (15). In this same spirit Methodism “offered the religious seeker not a set of dogmas or a display of religious hegemony, but a series of conundrums”: the simultaneous condemnation and employment of “enthusiasm”; a renewal movement that was also part of the state church; an appreciation of both asceticism and modern medicine, celibacy as well as family; a belief in original sin along with social progress; and an ethos that comprehended an elite hierarchy and an anti-elitist community (26–27).

Her first chapter analyzes the Wesleys’ hymns, sermons, and letters in describing how Methodism educated emotions, achieving what she calls a “managed heart.” Chapter 2 follows with a description of conversion experiences, demonstrating how they might provide both “emotional release and the beginnings of emotional self-mastery” (27). Two subsequent chapters (3 and 4) deal respectively and extensively with “men of feeling” and “women in love,” teasing out the gendered differences in the early Methodist experience of life and piety—involving at one level the way men and women related differently to Methodism's “grand depositum,” Christian perfection. Of particular note are Mack's reflections in chapter 4 on the key roles played by women in the movement as well as the close friendships they developed with one another. While she detects no “overtly lesbian relationships,” she uncovers what she calls “an erotics of friendship, a valorization of romantic gestures and emotions that were consciously cultivated as an aid to spiritual progress” (154). Chapter 5 follows with a focus on gender and suffering, drawing heavily on the writing of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739–1815), famous in her own right and the wife and widow of Wesley's lieutenant, John Fletcher, vicar of Madeley in Shropshire. Mack discovers fascinating discourses on the benefits of both health and illness, on care for the body and asceticism in the Methodist experience, reflecting, again, her interpretive principles of agency and self-abnegation. Chapter 6 brings to the fore another under-analyzed phenomenon, the Methodist “culture of dreaming” under the rubric of “agency and the unconscious”—another highly gendered set of activities and reflections. Mack argues the “power of dreams to generate individual reflexivity and to assist the religious seeker in shaping her own autobiography” (257), but that does not begin to catch the nuanced reading of reported dreams, themselves odd, intriguing and poignant, that she offers.

The final chapter considers “Methodism and Modernity” and suggests that “the new Methodist culture developed as vigorously as it did” following Wesley's death, not so much due to evangelical confidence (John Walsh) or the counter-revolutionary “chiliasm of despair” (E. P. Thompson), but rather to something closer to David Hempton's category, an “expansionist dynamic.” However, in addition to such organizational and theological energy, Mack touts the solution Methodism offered to the “internal problems” of “agency and passivity, gender and emotion” (262). Like Hempton, she acknowledges change as well as continuity, comparing two generations of Methodist preachers, represented by the simple piety of the Yorkshire itinerant John Pawson (1737–1806) and the educated piety of the more settled Dr. Adam Clarke (1762–1832). Unfortunately, as Mack notes, the latter period also sponsored a Methodist version of evangelical domesticity, and offered much less respect for the women's preaching and leadership.

In such a wide-ranging and searching book, one that will drive conversations and research for years to come, “insiders” can excuse Mack for not being fully at home in the Methodist context and idiom. For instance she twice alludes to E. P. Thompson's famous rant on Methodist sexual repression with his quotation of the Moravian hymn, “O precious Side-hole's cavity/I want to spend my life in thee” (4, 52)—using it as an example of Methodist hymnody (Charles Wesley could be graphic, but not like this). Some details are off in the otherwise helpful appendix, which lists people dealt with in the text. The Wesley brothers' father is described as “the Nonconformist [sic] rector of Epworth church.” (312) Likewise, their mother Susanna's name is misspelled (312, 328), though it is correct in her one mention in the text (140). Though it is unfair to criticize an author for failing to address what she did not set out to do, it is clear that some of the same issues of emotion, Enlightenment agency, and Christian abnegation are already present in the writings of Susanna Wesley a generation before Mack's analysis begins.