The Routledge Companion to John Wesley

Methodists have always loved statistics. In the final and longest chapter of this impressive volume, ‘A Quantitative Assessment of the Global Expansion of Wesley’s Methodism’, David Jeremy notes that ‘the legacy of John Wesley’s mind has been sliced and diced into 104 denominations’ (522); in an earlier chapter, Isabel Rivers records the ‘astonishing range’ of Wesley’s publications, running to some 1,570 items in the English Short Title Catalogue (53). It comes as no surprise, then, that a book setting out to explore Wesley’s ideas and to analyse and assess the ‘Wesleyan mind’ (1) should comprise no fewer than forty chapters and exceed 500 pages in length. This is in itself a considerable achievement, especially given the challenge of producing such a work during the COVID-19 pandemic (ix). The editors are to be congratulated both on assembling a very distinguished team of scholars and on ensuring a high degree of consistency in the delivery of the chapters: nearly all sustain a uniform length of ten to twelve pages, with two or three suggestions for further reading; the chapter bibliographies, not unexpectedly, vary from a handful of titles to fifty or more.After the editors’ introduction, the book is organized into seven parts. Part I establishes John Wesley’s historical context, with chapters on Britain, the Atlantic World, and Wesley’s education and early spiritual formation. Part II examines Wesley’s ‘major works’, beginning with his ‘publishing strategy’ and then looking at his journals, sermons, Christian Library, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, the 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, Primitive Physic, the 1763 Compendium of Natural Philosophy, Wesley’s 1784 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and the 1742, 1761, and 1780 collections of tunes. The editors explain that this part covers ‘some of Wesley’s major works’ (3): this reviewer wondered whether ‘major’ had been determined by length, by significance as an indicator of Wesley’s thinking, or by contemporary or subsequent impact, and why doctrinal treatises like Original Sin (1757) and A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766) had not made the cut. That said, every chapter in this section richly deserves its place.Part III of the volume is subdivided into three. Part IIIA considers the principles of Wesley’s thinking: theology; metaphysics; epistemology; psychology and psychotherapy; ethics; and social and political thought. Part IIIB turns to ‘humankind and society’: race, enslavement, and othering; gender, sexuality, and marriage; education and children; money and business; war; poetry and aesthetics; food, drink, and dress; and engagements with non-British cultures. Part IIIC moves on to ‘humankind and the world’: providence and history; the natural and supernatural worlds; science and technology; and animal welfare.With parts IV and V, the focus moves from ‘discerning the Wesleyan mind’ to questions of reception and legacy. Part IV looks first at Britain and Ireland and then at America (‘America’ here meaning the United States) up to c. 1820, and then follows a chapter on Wesley portraiture, focusing on the sixty years after Wesley’s death. In part V four chapters sketch ‘Wesley’s longer-term legacy’ in the Atlantic World; Africa; Australasia, Asia, and Oceania; and Latin America and the Caribbean, before Professor Jeremy concludes the volume with the ‘quantitative assessment’ of Methodist statistics mentioned above. The authors in part V had perhaps the most difficult brief in trying to summarize the impact of Wesley and Methodism on a continent (or several continents) over a couple of centuries. A case might perhaps have been made for staying with the exploration of Wesley’s mind and his intellectual legacy and not trying to cover the diffusion of the Methodist movement across the centuries and the continents as well. This endeavour, as well as necessitating great skill in synthesis and summary, also raises the question of the relationship between John Wesley’s mind and the ‘Wesleyan’ mind, and whether twentieth- and twenty-first-century world Methodism has created Wesley in its own image, just as Victorian Methodists reshaped Wesley’s portrait to match the denominational foundation myth (437).The sheer breadth of coverage and the consequent need for concise treatment mean that scope for original research in this volume is limited, although many of the authors reference their own articles and monographs that explore chapter themes in greater depth. The particular strengths of this collection are the summaries of key themes in John Wesley’s thought, the cross-referencing between chapters, and the detailed bibliographies. By bringing so many expert studies together in one place, Dr Norris and Dr Cunningham have provided an invaluable resource for students and scholars of John Wesley and the Methodist movement. Their achievement is deserving of the highest praise.