This collection of essays deals with the evangelical awakening, focusing on one of the main aspects of the British Protestant religious experience during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century: heart religion. By any measure, it is an accomplished and engaging volume. Though it must be said, at the very beginning, that the subtitle of the book is too unambitious for its actual content. As the editor, John Coffey, demonstrates in his masterful overview of the book, as well as of the study, sources, and trajectory of evangelical piety, it was and remains impossible to confine any discussion of the origins and course of the awakening to England and Ireland. It was a geographically widespread phenomenon, with evangelical ministers and laity in the British Isles, Europe, and the territories on the western side of the Atlantic inspiring, alarming, and sometimes angering one another as they sought to warm the hearts of all and sundry.

These essays, particularly in the first half of the book, are very good at laying out the complex and overlapping temporal, geographical, and denominational worlds of the evangelical awakening. The roots of the Protestant quest for a religion of experience—a faith that ideally affected the heart as much as, if not more than, the head and that broke away from the formalism of Protestant orthodoxy—could be traced back to the heyday of English Puritanism in the seventeenth century. John Coffey makes this case through a careful examination of dissenting communion hymns. Equally striking is the strong support that several articles give to the view advanced by W. R. Ward and others that the evangelical awakening in England and Ireland has to be seen as one part of a broader movement, including groups like the Pietists of central Europe, represented here by the subject of Daniel Brunner's carefully argued essay, Anthony William Boehm, who became a champion of a “transconfessional Christianity that transcended labels” (87) among British evangelicals. The articles by Patricia Ward, Tom Schwanda, and Isabel Rivers also point to the important influence of mystic, Catholic, and other continental traditions and practices on English and Irish heart religion, though mediated and rendered safe—or, at least, safer—for British Protestant consumption by figures like John Wesley and John Cennick.

Taken together, several other essays in the volume emphasize a critical tension between enthusiasm and respectability that was always present within Protestant evangelicalism. This theme comes out with particular force in Phyllis Mack's innovative chapter on dreaming and emotion among the Quakers and Methodists. Drawing on a range of published and manuscript sources, Mack makes a case for a gendered division between male ministers, who developed a theory of dreams, and women, who actually experienced nighttime visions of “sanctification and the supernatural” (159). At the same time, Mack points out that the tradition of seeing dreams as a “prophetic summons” (169) faded over time as both Quakers and Methodists made the difficult transition from sect to socially acceptable church. The days of the self-proclaimed prophet announcing their heaven-sent message in the middle of the town square were numbered by the mid-eighteenth century and were certainly over a hundred years later, along with the dissenting “culture of dreaming” (179), at least among Britain's mainstream Protestant denominations. David Bebbington makes a similar point in his article on the deathbed piety of the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists. Like the dreamscapes of early Quaker and Methodist life, the experience of death among Bebbington's three dissenting groups became progressively more constrained and drab the longer Queen Victoria ruled her empire.

That some sort of move toward a socially accommodating respectability might be seen as a necessity by denominational leaders is made plain by the sheer eccentricity of several of the figures whose lives and thoughts are expertly examined in this collection. There was, for instance, the mid-seventeenth-century Independent William Barton who, as John Coffey wryly points out, published communion hymns alongside “provocative battle hymns in praise of the New Model Army” (36). Or there was that ardent champion and expert reconciler of Calvinism and heart religion, George Whitefield. As David Ceri Jones notes in his fascinating and sprightly article, early English evangelicals frequently had to suffer for their faith, with Whitefield himself, by his own account, walking out “in the cold mornings, till part of one of my hands was quite black” (95). Or, again, there was Nicholas Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, who led the Moravian brethren into a period of freewheeling religious experimentation that bordered on the anarchic and whose shockingly vivid hymns glorying in the gory details of Christ's blood and wounds can be compared to, though they did not originate from, what Tom Schwanda demonstrates were the only somewhat less shockingly vivid hymns of John Cennick. It is no wonder—when considering examples like these and the equally rambunctious activities of nineteenth-century professional revivalists like the American Charles Finney—that the evangelicals of Ulster Presbyterianism who gathered around Henry Cooke, examined by Andrew Holmes, opted to embrace the traditional means of grace and a return to first principles.

There is much, then, to recommend this collection. It invites readers to rethink the nature of the evangelical awakening in England and Ireland as well as its relation to heart religion elsewhere in the Atlantic world and to uncover a wealth of altogether different themes than the ones highlighted in this review. All of the articles are of a high quality, in terms of research and argument, with, here and there, only a few minor infelicities of expression that can hardly take away from the value of the whole. The fact that there is so much that is new and exciting to say about what may appear to be a well-covered topic gives one hope for the future of the study of evangelical piety.