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1 Women in eighteenth-century Methodism O 0n her forty-second birthday Catherine Cowlin O’Bryan sat down to reflect on her Methodist conversion experience nearly a quarter-century before. She had lived in the Devon village of Stoke Damerel for about a year. It was probably in one of the new small villas that were filling in the area between Stoke Damerel and the rapidly growing town of Dock (soon to be renamed Devonport), where she often preached in the newly opened Bible Christian chapel on Prince’s Street. She probably did not feel settled; the family had
A response to the prominent Methodist historian David Hempton's call to analyse women's experience within Methodism, this book deals with British Methodist women preachers over the entire nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians. The book covers women preachers in Wesley's lifetime, the reason why some Methodist sects allowed women to preach and others did not, and the experience of Bible Christian and Primitive Methodist female evangelists before 1850. It also describes the many other ways in which women supported their chapel communities. The second half of the book includes the careers of mid-century women revivalists, the opportunities, home and foreign missions offered for female evangelism, the emergence of deaconess evangelists and Sisters of the People in late century, and the brief revival of female itinerancy among the Bible Christians.
This article seeks to re-examine the arguments among early nineteenth-century Welsh Calvinistic Methodists about Calvinist beliefs. In particular, it uses the example of John Elias to explore the appropriation and re-appropriation of aspects of the theological heritage of the sixteenth-century Reformation in Wales. Examining the tensions between Calvinism‘s tendency to ever stricter interpretation and pressure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to liberalize Calvinistic Methodisms position under the influence of evangelicalism, it argues that Elias emerged as a defender of the moderate Calvinism that had been forged by Howel Harris and Daniel Rowland in the previous century.
2 Women preachers’ place in a divided Methodism ‘Dear friends,’ she said at last, ‘brothers and sisters, whom I love as those for whom my Lord has died, believe me, I know what this great blessedness is; and because I know it, I want you to have it too. I am poor like you: I have to get my living with my hands; but no lord nor lady can be so happy as me, if they haven’t got the love of God in their souls. Think what it is – not to hate anything but sin; to be full of love to every creature; to be frightened at nothing; to be sure that all things will turn to