Brett C. McInelly, an associate professor in the English department at Brigham Young University, is the founding editor of this annual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles on a wide range of subjects that can be linked to the Enlightenment. With an editorial board that includes a wide range of scholars from multiple disciplines, this second volume of the journal gathers together thirteen articles and ten book reviews that range over a wide variety of topics including Samuel Johnson's prayer life, Jonathan Edwards’ sermons to Indians, and Alexander Pope's desire to be an unbigoted Roman Catholic.
An article by Joanna Cruickshank is a particular standout: “‘If God . . . see fit to call you out’: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ in the Writings of Methodist Women, 1760–1840.” Female strivings “to be little and unknown” needed, at times, to be negotiated when women were called out to “publick action” (55–56). Using a large collection of manuscripts by Mary Fletcher held in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre at Manchester and Fletcher's popular autobiography, Cruickshank shows how “the Methodist emphasis on solitary prayer, reading, and reflection point to a valuing of individual intellectual and spiritual development among evangelical women that must be factored into longer chronologies of feminism” (76).
An article by Barbara Prosser on John Wesley's political writings in the Arminian Magazine is also particularly interesting. Wesley designed not to tell people what to think about deep political issues; rather, he stated that, “I would only help you to think” (79). But in helping readers to think, he opened them up to his own thinking on highly charged issues such as the abolition of slavery. Prosser shows how Wesley used the magazine to “raise the intellectual, ideological, and emotional horizons of the early Methodist” (101).
Overall, there is no intellectual thread that holds the articles together, no defined “enlightenment” and no specific notion of “religion;” however, many insights on both find themselves juxtaposed. David Manning analyzes the rhetoric of ridicule as a way to “question the historiographical application of the term enlightenment” and propose “a wholesale reassessment” (215, 241). In the following article Christopher Smyth sees a “clear evolution” of “Enlightened” attitudes in the literature responding to the London earthquakes of 1692 and 1750.
Book reviews, edited by Kathryn Stasio at Saint Leo University, follow this collection of articles. A submission policy for articles and book reviews can be found at http://www.amspressinc.com/rae.html.
Over the past several decades the conversations about the roles of religion within types of enlightenment—and roles of enlightenment within types of religion—have only been getting more complex and subtle. There use to be a day when labels such as “deist,” “puritan,” and “enthusiast” were easily distributed, when “enlightenment” was always in the singular, and when “religion” meant a confessional stance. A new journal is always welcome in today's continuing conversations about religion and enlightenment.
