The tricentenary of George Whitefield's birth offered scope for an extensive re-evaluation of his character and career that might sharpen contexts and rescue him from the pieties of generations of Evangelicals almost from the time of his death in 1770 until the present. The papers in this impressive volume suggest that the opportunity was successfully taken up. Whitefield was a supremely forceful character, whose emotional life was poured out in several decades of famously theatrical preaching to large gatherings in the British Isles and North America. As Boyd Stanley Schlenther shows, he was not a modest man. He boasted about his work for the Lord and, when a young man, in denouncing those unsympathetic to his mission or his theology, Whitefield often expressed himself with ‘the verbal equivalent of a catapult’ (p. 21). He was settled in his theological convictions before he was thirty years old. Influenced by the writings of Henry Scougal and William Law while an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, Whitefield had his conversion experience at the age of twenty-one and after that all the emphasis, as Mark K. Olson writes, was on new birth, not faith. By 1739 he had accepted the reformed doctrines of grace and election and there was never any question of regression from those tenets. He was ordained deacon and priest in the Church of England and, provokingly (for some), liked to align himself with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but his sacerdotal minimalism kept him on its official margins and, though he mused about being a bishop himself when mixing in the circle of Frederick, prince of Wales, in the 1740s, he was comfortable in his aloofness. William Gibson examines some of the problems that Whitefield had with a range of bishops and clergy: they generally concerned the hierarchy's discomfort over his alleged antinominianism. He stood ready, as Brett C. McInelly argues, to use the press to increase his outreach and was quite ready to be abused in the public prints on the basis that it all served as publicity and helped his cause. Whitefield had no time for the easy-going attitudes to the benefits of revealed religion that he claimed to find in contemporary latitudinarianism. Frank Lambert, in a chapter on ‘Whitefield and the Enlightenment’, mentions his inclusion of John Tillotson's works among the ‘bad books’ encountered at Harvard. Whitefield shared the High Church disavowal of the archbishop's alleged sufficiency of natural reason, his rationalism and his optimism, persuasions that, as they saw it, left no place for the saving grace of Christ.

Whitefield's travels rivalled those of Wesley. Stephen R. Berry calculates that he spent more than three years of his life shipbound on the Atlantic and explores the different ways in which Whitefield envisaged the ships and their crews as, severally, a parish, a wilderness, a cloister and a haven. His thirteen journeys to North America arguably entitle him to recognition as what Carla Gardina Pestana calls the ‘first celebrity’ of empire (p. 82) who, she argues, helped to break divisions between the colonies. His early travels took him naturally enough to Northampton, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Edwards (the subject of Kenneth P. Minkema's paper), but the frictions between the ‘Grand Itinerant’ and America's Augustine were not resolved until the later 1740s when both men were moving beyond the revivals. Peter Choi reminds us that Whitefield wanted a university college in the new colony of Georgia as early as 1740. The plan was still on the table when Secker was archbishop in the 1760s but he was deterred from endorsing it by Whitefield's wish that it should be ecumenically Protestant. The latter was never prepared to confine his work within the ususual denominational boundaries. Mark A. Noll uses his 1753 Collection of hymns both to give a snapshot of the Evangelical movement at a point in time when red hot enthusiasm had waned and to show how the book's eclectic range illustrates Whitefield's desire to appeal to a broad Protestant market.

Central to Whitefield's impact was his voice. In an oustanding contribution, Braxton Boren demonstrates how archaeoacoustic research allows for more detailed descriptions of how acoustic spaces would have sounded in the past. On this basis, he concludes that under ideal outdoor conditions, Whitefield could have been heard distinctly by as many as 50,000 people, and concludes – dramatically but plausibly – that the evangelist ‘probably spoke directly to more individuals than any unamplified orator in history’ (p. 188). The other exceptional essay comes from Isabel Rivers who, from the vantage point of her remarkable familiarity with the literature, unerringly charts the complicated business of Whitefield's reception in England from his death until the centenary celebrations of 1839.

This carefully edited collection represents a balanced attempt to fashion a multi-dimensional approach to George Whitefield's character and ministry from its energetic beginnings in the 1730s through to his premature decline over three decades later. The sixteen essays cover an exhaustive range of angles and yet the overall assessment suggests a general consensus among the contributors. For all his remarkable gifts as an evangelist, Whitefield was as divisive as he was unifying, a man who found cooperation or playing second fiddle difficult, a one-man revivalist who, though a Protestant ecumenist, jumped quickly to judgement on those who disagreed with him. His preaching turned him into a celebrity, and his temperamental wanderlust accorded well with what he saw as the mission divinely alloted to him. In his lifetime he was accorded minimal recognition by the Church of England which harboured understandable anxieties about his influence for generations after his death, as Andrew Atherstone's chapter on commemoration confirms. Whitefield was never institutionally comfortable. Had he been so, as he knew, he would never have made the impact that he did.