The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. By D. Bruce Hindmarsh. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Pp. xiii, 384. $110.00.) The English conversion narrative is hardly a neglected topic, but this new study offers fresh approaches and an array of intriguing insights based on a mountain of scholarship. The core of the book deals with the period from the 1730s to the 1790s. Its author, Bruce Hindmarsh of Regent College in Vancouver, discusses the Methodists in some detail, as might be expected, but he also includes Moravians, Scottish Presbyterians, Anglican Evangelicals, and the Old Dissenters. On the whole, it is an outstanding monograph. Before arriving at the main part of his work, Hindmarsh provides extensive background information-often too extensive. At times, it seems as if he were under the spell of an obsessive thesis advisor who demands discussions of antecedents ad infinitum. Among other things, Hindmarsh traces his subject back through the Puritan era to the Renaissance, with further glances at the Middle Ages and the ancient world. He follows many others in concluding that widespread discussion of inwardness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries actually corresponded with a new sense of inwardness, especially with regard to the importance of inward conversions. The author furnishes a useful survey of early spiritual autobiographies in England, but he inexplicably gives short shrift to James Jan eway and his Token for Children (London, 1671). Versions of the Token were being published in large numbers as late as the nineteenth century, and there were also numerous imitators featuring early conversions as prerequisites to the happy deaths of children. Surely this influential literature deserves more than a comment in a footnote (56 n. 72). When the author finally turns his attention to George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley, he has to admit that they relied on their printed journals to present significant autobiographical episodes to the public. This causes Hindmarsh, characteristically, to backtrack and give his readers a history of the journal form. When he finally turns to the early Methodistjournals, his analysis bristies with unexpected insights. It is soon after this discussion that a major flaw in Hindmarsh's research strategy becomes apparent. When confronted with thousands of conversion accounts, he naturally had to rely on samples. In most cases, these samples turn out to be convenient clusters of accounts that are often quite narrow in geographical or chronological focus (and sometimes narrow in both senses). For the Moravians, he concentrates especially on the manuscript memoirs at the Moravian Church House in London and largely ignores contemporary printed autobiographies, including diose found in periodicals. For the Scots Presbyterians, he relies heavily on accounts from the 1742 revival that were gathered by a Cambuslang minister. …

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