The tercentenary of George Whitefield's 1714 birth inspired renewed interest in his life and work, which in turn has spawned new scholarship. Books by Peter Charles Hoffer, Jerome Mahaffey, Thomas Kidd, and Jessica Parr have reexamined Whitefield's role in creating a colonial identity, introducing theological innovations, and popularizing new forms of spiritual experience, all while shaping his own public image. Then, an international conference drew prominent scholars to Pembroke College at Oxford University in 2014 to explore facets of the Grand Itinerant's career and historical context. Participants included historians, theologians, literary scholars, and even one scholar of musical technology and acoustics. This volume—a collection of brief but insightful chapters that examine Whitefield from both familiar and previously unexamined perspectives—is the result of that meeting. Together, these fine essays shed new light on Whitefield's personal and spiritual evolution and his place in a dynamic religious world.

The volume's sixteen essays follow a loosely chronological arc within a thematic framework, tracing Whitefield's life from his upbringing to his itinerancy to his survival in public memory. Essays by Boyd Schenther and Mark Olson focus on Whitefield's early life, exploring the relationships that shaped his character, theology, and religious sensibility. Much of what they reveal is surprisingly new. Despite Whitefield's fame, scholars have examined little of his personal life and early doctrinal meanderings, largely because his published journals and early biographies hid his doubts and conflicts under a veneer of confidence and certainty. In a similar vein, William Gibson, Frank Lambert, and Brett C. McInelly highlight the formative theological and intellectual underpinnings of Whitefield's evangelicalism. Gibson, who analyzes Whitefield's conflicts with the Anglican Church, and Lambert, who examines his selective spiritual reading of the Enlightenment, both argue that Whitefield's confrontations with religious and intellectual authority enhanced his own influence. And as McInelly points out, Whitefield used the firestorm of criticism he provoked to sharpen his beliefs, heighten his renown, and advance his movement.

As he did so, he situated himself as the first true transatlantic celebrity. Carla Gardana Pestana, Stephen R. Berry, and Peter Choi all explore Whitefield's impact on the Atlantic world. Pestana argues that by traveling through the British Empire, especially its periphery, he participated in empire-building (if unwittingly, having declined to represent the Anglican church's interests). Through preaching, itinerancy, and publishing, Whitefield introduced audiences to different parts of the empire, so that they linked the Whitefieldian evangelicalism to a shared British identity. Berry considers a much-neglected part of Whitefield's Atlantic crossings: his time on the ships themselves, which served as spiritual havens, parishes, and wilderness settings where seagoing hardships stood as metaphors for his own spiritual struggles. And Peter Choi, who considers Whitefield's efforts to secure a charter for Bethesda College in Georgia, links that project to Whitefield's evolving sense of his own mission and its place in the empire. In other words, as the British Empire expanded (and as Georgia shifted from the periphery to a place of greater importance), Whitefield argued that institutions like Bethesda could promote religious and imperial interests alike.

As Whitefield helped extend the boundaries of empire, he engaged with (and came to define) a wider religious world. He did so in part by creating a culture of evangelical revival, as Braxton Boren, Geordan Hammond, Kenneth Minkema, and Keith Edward Beebe and David Ceri Jones all attest. Using the science of musicology and acoustic simulation, Boren considers how far Whitefield's voice could have carried without amplification, thereby suggesting the impact of what was (at the time) a nascent trend of mass gatherings. Hammond and Minkema examine Whitefield's relationships with fellow revivalists (John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, respectively), which were marked by tensions, controversy, and collaboration. Hammond's close analysis of Whitefield and Wesley's letters shows how the correspondents’ language revealed growing rifts in their relationship. On the other hand, writes Minkema, Whitefield and Edwards developed a stronger alliance as each moderated his stance on the other's role in leading revivals. And co-authors Beebe and Jones place Whitefield in the context of local revivals in the Celtic countries of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland to show how he came to occupy a central place in those revivals as he spread Calvinistic evangelicalism.

Whitefield's cultural innovations were not limited to revivals; he also engaged literary and popular culture. To that end, Emma Salgård Cunha and Mark A. Noll consider Whitefield's wider cultural impact. Cunha uses critical literary analysis to study the affective impact of Whitefield's sermons. She argues that although Whitefield sought to excite the emotions, he considered his sermons’ emotional impact to be secondary to their transformative religious impact; in other words, affection was a means to conversion, not an end. Similarly, Noll considers Whitefield's 1753 hymnody with a literary analysis that explicates Whitefield's doctrinal and theological approach just when the heat of earlier revivals had cooled. Noll reveals Whitefield's attempts to unite disparate segments of the movement by including hymns that most of its participants could embrace. The contents of the hymnody, then, reflected not just Whitefield's evolution, but also his continued engagement with evangelicalism writ large.

Finally, Isabel Rivers and Andrew Atherstone reflect on Whitefield's impact in the decades and centuries after his death. Rivers shows how Whitefield's supporters and detractors clashed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Calvinistic and Wesleyan Methodists, evangelical Anglicans, and others tangled over his legacy and smoothed over differences. Much later, argues Atherstone, followers in different times and places memorialized Whitefield for reasons that reflected their own identities and priorities more than a comprehensive consideration of Whitefield's life. As a result, Whitefield's admirers revived his memory even as they manipulated his past. Ultimately, Atherstone's argument underscores the importance of this volume as a whole. As Whitefield's public memory obscured the nuances of his context and influence, recent scholars have had to dig deeper to get at the truth. The essays in this volume, buoyed by the recent wave of Whitefield scholarship, have paved the way for students of the Grand Itinerant to do just that.