Religious Experience, the Public Sphere, and Evangelical Lay Women's Writing in Eighteenth Century England Andrew O
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Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-2-2013 Drawn Out In Love: Religious Experience, The Public Sphere, And Evangelical Lay Women's Writing In Eighteenth Century England Andrew O. Winckles Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Winckles, Andrew O., "Drawn Out In Love: Religious Experience, The ubP lic Sphere, And Evangelical Lay Women's Writing In Eighteenth Century England" (2013). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 810. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. DRAWN OUT IN LOVE: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THE PUBLIC SPHERE, AND EVANGELICAL LAY WOMEN’S WRITING IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND by ANDREW O. WINCKLES DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2013 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved By: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY ANDREW O. WINCKLES 2013 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION For Christy, who continues to fight for religious women’s voices to be heard. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have happened without the support of numerous individuals at three institutions over the course of ten years. First, many thanks go to Marsha Daigle- Williamson, Brent Cline, Paul Patton, Robert Woods, and Mary Darling at Spring Arbor University for fostering my passion for learning during my undergraduate years and encouraging me to go to graduate school in the first place. Laura George, at Eastern Michigan University, taught my first ever graduate seminar – on British Romanticism – and I have never looked back. Thanks to Laura for being such an accommodating advisor and friend during my two years at Eastern Michigan and for amply preparing me for my Ph.D. Studies. At Wayne State University I would first and foremost like to thank Michael Scrivener for guiding me through my course of study and the dissertation project. From the moment I stepped on campus, Michael has been a constant source of support and encouragement, always providing thought provoking feedback on all of my work. Thanks as well to Lisa Maruca for providing invaluable expertise on eighteenth-century print culture and assisting me in seeing my first article to print. Simone Chess and Colin Jager (Rutgers University) also provided ample and useful feedback on my dissertation draft. Many thanks also go to Ellen Barton, who has been a constant source of encouragement to me during my time at Wayne State. Thanks to the Graduate School at Wayne State University for providing me with Rumble Fellowship during the 2012-13 school year to assist with dissertation completion and the English Department for awarding me the Terrance King Memorial Scholarship. Both greatly assisted in completing my dissertation in a timely manner. Finally, thanks to my family – to my parents, Larry and Katie Winckles, who have always supported me no matter what I chose to pursue and especially to my wife, Christy iii Mesaros-Winckles, an excellent scholar in her own right who has put up with my quirks and obsessions now for seven years and who is always there as a knowledgeable and erudite sounding board for my ideas. A portion of Chapter Four appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies under the title “’Excuse what difficiencies you will find’: Methodist Women and Public Space in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine .” Thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing it to be reprinted here and to Cathy Fortner and Kate McGinn at the Marston Memorial Historical Center in Indianapolis, IN for allowing me access to their copies of the Arminian Magazine . iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Abbreviations vii Chapter 1: Reasonable Enthusiasm: Evangelical Women’s Writing and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century 1 Evangelicalism and Experience 5 Enlightenment and the Evangelical Public Sphere 13 Romanticism and Secularization 17 Evangelical Women’s Writing 23 Chapter 2: Developing a Spiritual Sense: The Body as Location of Religious Experience 31 Women’s Religious Experience and Subjectivity 36 Spiritual Senses and Emotion from Locke to Wesley 43 Spirit, Mind, Body, and the Formation of the Evangelical Subject 50 Methodist Women and Embodied Spirituality 58 Chapter 3: Hunting the Wesleyan Fox: Constructing an Evangelical Public Sphere 77 Evangelicalism and the Public Sphere 85 Mary Bosanquet Fletcher and a Women’s Counterpublic 106 Women’s Counterpublics, Romantic Sociability, and Secularization 126 Chapter 4: “Excuse what difficiencies you will find”: Methodist Women and the Religious Subject in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine 130 The Evangelical Conversion Narrative 134 The Arminian Magazine: History and Purpose 141 v Women in the Arminian Magazine 144 Women’s Experience and the Public Sphere in the Arminian Magazine 149 Religious Experience, Agency, and the Public Sphere 169 Chapter 5: The Medium is the Message: Spiritual Experience, Spiritual Text, and Seditious Literacies in Hannah More’s Sunday Schools 174 Hannah More and Sunday School Education in Britain 179 Early Sunday School Textbooks 188 Catechisms and Moral Literature 193 Medium and Message 212 Chapter 6: “Masculine Robustness of Intellect”: Agnes Bulmer, the Poetry of Evangelical Experience, and the End(s) of the Eighteenth Century 216 A Brief Biography of Agnes Collinson Bulmer 221 Experience and Analogy in Messiah’s Kingdom 234 Victorian Methodism and a Shifting Space for Women 253 Appendix A: The Occasional Poetry of Agnes Bulmer 266 Notes 292 References 305 Abstract 320 Autobiographical Statement 321 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS JWW : The Works of John Wesley . 14 Vols. Ed. Thomas Jackson. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007. AM : The Arminian Magazine MM : The Methodist Magazine WMM : The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine AJR : The Anti-Jacobin Review vii 1 CHAPTER 1: REASONABLE ENTHUSIASM: EVANGELICAL WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY In December of 1785, an extraordinary disturbance occurred at the house of William Mallit of Long Stratton, just outside of Norwich in East Anglia. Mallit was a respectable tailor and local Methodist preacher whose niece, Sarah, had come to visit the previous May and had taken ill. Later, in an account of the event published in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine , Mallit recalled that her condition worsened until December 15 th when “she was seized with an uncommon fit” (XI:92), which from that time on recurred every twenty-four hours and continued for hours at a time. According to Mallit these fits would come suddenly – in the middle of a conversation his niece “leaned back in her chair, and lost her senses, her eyes were wide open, her face like that of a corpse, her hands quite cold, all her limbs stiff and immoveable” (XI:92). She appeared to be dying but on December 18 th everything changed, and during one of her fits she began to speak, saying “Father, turn to God,” and “earnestly exhort[ing] her sisters to seek God in their youth” (XI:92). This behavior continued for days until on the 25 th she began to preach from full texts of scripture during her fits. Her uncle records that, on several occasions she “thought herself to be in the preaching-house at Lowstoff, before a large congregation; and that she took her text from Rev. iii. 20. Behold, I stand at the door and knock…. The next day she preached again in Mr. Byron’s hearing, on John vii. 37” and that “She continued to preach in every following fit, speaking clear and loud, though she was utterly senseless” (XI: 93). As might be imagined, word of this behavior got around the small community of Long Stratton, and by December 30 th over 200 people were gathering to here Sarah Mallit preach during her fits. However, the story is more complicated than William Mallit’s rather straightforward narrative would have us believe. We also have Sarah Mallit’s recollections of these events appended to her uncle’s account in the Arminian Magazine . Her narrative of what occurred, 2 while corroborating her uncle’s story, also testifies to the tremendous internal struggle that precipitated these extraordinary events. Sarah had frequently been ill in her youth and yet she traces the reason for her affliction in September through December of 1785 to events that happened in March when, as she writes, “the Lord set my soul at full liberty, by applying those words, I will, be thou clean! ” (XI:186). This tangible feeling of salvation was relatively common during the evangelical revival in Britain and marked the experience of what Methodists called justification, or being made right with God. Yet Sarah’s experience was different in that, almost immediately after her justification, she felt called to preach publicly – she writes that “those words were continually before me. Reprove, rebuke, exhort! Nor could I by any means drive them out of my thoughts” (XI:187). This was an extraordinary calling for the time period. Though there were precedents in women like Margaret Fell, very few women in England preached during the eighteenth century and, as Sarah notes, she was “no friend to women’s preaching” (XI:187). Though a few Methodist women like Sarah Ryan, Sarah Crosby, and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher did preach during this time period with John Wesley’s explicit approval, it was in fact rare and many lay people shared Sarah’s apprehensions about women’s preaching. Nevertheless, the call to preach continued to haunt Sarah in the months leading up to her visit to Long Stratton in September of 1785. She writes that during this time her “soul was filled with darkness and distress: while I was more and more convinced, that I ought to speak for God” (XI:188).