Phyllis Mack's book, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism, is an ambitious interdisciplinary project. In the introduction alone, she sets out the book's agenda amid thorough interactions with a wide range of scholars, such as historians, anthropologists, and Western and non-Western thinkers, both secular and religious. Insights from these scholarly sources, along with a painstaking consultation of Methodist first source materials—hymns, sermons, letters, and autobiographies—are brought to bear on the three central themes of the book: “gender, emotion, and the relationship between religious values and the values of the Enlightenment” (27). More specifically, Mack argues that, “as individuals confronted issues of self-definition, sexuality, physical illness, and human love, their Enlightenment ideals and Protestant theology both contradicted and reinforced each other.” The combustion that resulted was “an aggressive spiritual agency,” a paradox of strength and weakness for both men and women, that catapulted “Methodism's world-wide missionary project” (13–15).

Of the book's seven chapters, chapters 3–6 are particularly interesting, cohesive, and illuminating. They focus on the themes of marriage, friendship, health and illness, and dreaming. Chapter 3, titled “Men of Feeling: Natural and Spiritual Affection in the Lives of the Preachers,” delves successfully into the tensions inherent in the male preacher's identity, tensions between his commitment to the church community and his nuclear family and between celibacy and sexual impulses. These tensions were writ even larger within the movement between John Wesley's “painfully ambivalent attitude toward sex” (90) and Charles Wesley's wholehearted embrace of marriage. To concretize these tensions, Mack provides a very interesting close read of three autobiographies written by men whose spiritual struggles centered on marriage, family, and love. She concludes this chapter by focusing on the conundrum of the centrality of domesticity in men's religious identity, the very element that is difficult to fuse with Methodist itinerancy. In the next chapter, titled “Women in Love,” Mack considers many of these same issues among Methodist women. She notes that, in contrast to male preachers, many Methodist female leaders not only remained single but also experienced a “romantic friendship” with another woman, such as the “most unconventional and creative friendship” that crossed class and social boundaries, that of Sarah Ryan and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (153, 157).

Chapter 5 considers early Methodist men's and women's approach to physical suffering and spiritual progress, particularly as they were heirs of John Wesley's intense interest in the relationship between body, mind, and soul. As in previous chapters, Mack notes differences between the genders on this topic. While men were known to discipline as much as encourage those who were ill, women took most seriously their “pastoral work as healers and visitors to the sick” (189) to the extent of filling letters with remedies and personal visits with empathy and lengthy vigils. Mack traces this proclivity to women's experience of embodiedness in suffering the pangs of labor and childbirth.

In chapter 6, the early Methodist female leader Mary Bosanquet Fletcher receives particular attention as Mack discusses several topics related to dreaming, such as dreams and the devil, dreams and emotion, and a female culture of dreaming. Fletcher, like other early Methodist women, analyzed her dreams with the utmost seriousness and derived spiritual direction and authority from them. As Mack recounts about women's dreams, “Indeed, the most significant aspect of Methodist dreaming was … the power of dreams to generate individual reflexivity and to assist the religious seeker in shaping her own autobiography” (257).

The conclusion shifts to a different topic altogether and leaves behind themes discussed previously, which in turn prompts an uncertainty about what exactly is the book's purpose. In the conclusion, Mack chooses to focus on a second-generation Methodist leader, Adam Clarke, because he epitomized the difference between the emotional intensity of the first generation of Methodist apostles (271) and the confident, disciplined endeavors of the second generation. From this suggested bifurcation arise three critical questions. First, Mack notes the missionary activity of Methodism only in the book's introduction and conclusion. Nowhere else in the intervening chapters is there any mention about Methodism's missionary activity. From this absence, should one conclude that there was no connection at all between Methodism's emotional intensity and its missionary activity across Great Britain in the first generation? Second, how does the focus on Adam Clarke relate to the book's main theme of the difficulty of balancing agency and self-transcendence? Is this main theme only relevant to the first generation of Methodists? Third, can the difference between two generations be summarized so neatly in one person—Adam Clarke—as Mack argues? Despite these lingering questions about the book's conclusion, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism provides wonderful insights culled from Methodist writings into the ways in which men and women express and exercise power, agency, emotions, and self-transcendence.