Brands Plucked from the Burning: Essays on Methodist Memorialisation and Remembering.

This attractively produced and richly illustrated collection originated in the 2011 conference of the WHS, ‘Memorialising and Remembering: Life Stories in Methodism’. In an introductory essay Hart identifies the formative nature of stories on the establishment of Methodism, the role of memorialization in passing on the story to successive generations, and the relationship between collective and individual biography as tools for Methodist historians. Six essays on the role of remembrance follow, almost entirely focused on the Wesleyan tradition.Jeremy looks at a variety of aspects of memorialization within Wesleyanism, including tablature and statuary. His comparisons of the funeral arrangements of Connexional leaders hint at power struggles for status: John Wesley's rejection of a hearse and his burial in woollen garments to symbolize economic self-denial is contrasted with the opulence of Jabez Bunting's final journey, followed by sixteen mourning coaches and heralded with a forty-five-minute extempore prayer, and a four-hour eulogy!Jeremy's suggestion that Clarke's Commentary is ‘now unfairly remembered for its identification of the serpent in Genesis as an ape’ (37) is itself somewhat unfair on a work valued for its extensiveness within Methodism for many years. It also unclear why he thinks that Wesley's forty-four sermons were part of British Methodism's standard statement of belief only ‘until the late twentieth century’ (66 n. 118). Quibbles aside, Jeremy's treatment is engaging, especially in its account of the politics of Connexional remembrance around the 1839 Wesleyan centenary, re-examining the subtexts of Henry Perlee Parker's famous painting of the Epworth Rectory fire.Parker makes another appearance in Hurst's ‘Biographies in Church Monuments’, which is primarily a study of William Smith and Jane Vazeille, daughter of Mary from her first marriage. In the same churchyard where they lie in Newcastle upon Tyne is Parker's infant son Robert's grave, and Hurst speculates that had Henry not died penniless in London in 1873, it may have been his intention to be buried alongside. This sad postscript is testament to selective Methodist memorialization: A much-loved painting of the infant Wesley escaping death is long remembered, but the separation of its painter from his own infant in death due to financial hardship might be forgotten but for Hurst.Prosser traces the metamorphosis of the Arminian Magazine, from its origins in 1778 as John Wesley's theological repost to Calvinist periodicals like The Gospel Magazine, into the much broader ‘instructional miscellany which guided the movement into the new century’ by the late 1780s. Accounts both of the lives of living preachers and deathbed scenes, Prosser argues, ‘ensured that the voices of early Methodism would safely echo from its pages to tell their own inimitable story.’ These stories were instrumental in the later conversion of Hugh Bourne, and from the editorial control of the movement's narrative maintained by Wesley through the pages of the Arminian Magazine to the end of his life, echoes can be found in Bourne's similar vice-like grip on the Primitive Methodist Magazine up until the 1840s: here Methodist remembrance led to recurrence.In Lloyd's contribution on Methodism's remembrance of its founding he outlines how bickering about Wesley's legacy after his death and a lack of any nominated successor reinforced the idea that for Methodists there would never be another ‘King in Israel’. This pervasive mindset led to any perceived departure from ‘the old plan’ being a cause for dissension and even schism, as in the case of the proposal in the 1830s for a Theological Institution. Lloyd notes that later revivalists—the Bible Christians and the Primitive Methodists— did not use Wesley's name or image ‘to any significant degree’, though it is worth recalling with Beckerlegge that the United Methodist Free Churches were still issuing hymn-books with Wesley's portrait in as late as 1878. Lloyd concludes with the current state of Wesley remembrance, contrasting those who regard him as a contemporary spiritual and organizational resource, with others who feel that looking to the past belies an institution with no future to look forward to.In an extension of his far-reaching study John Wesley's Preachers (2009), Lenton focuses on the varied reasons why Wesleyan ministers left the Connexion. He reveals not only the varied reasons for resignations and expulsions but also the difficulties in tracing some individuals using the Minutes of the Conference. Making a valuable companion piece to Lenton's work is the research of Kelly, giving accounts of the preachers' wives of the Wesleyan itinerancy, who often showed great strength of character and faith in facing illness, child bereavement, and financial hardship.The final article in the collection, Field's study of collective biography in Methodism, covers similar methodological ground to Lenton and Kelly but widens the focus to look at sources of prosopography within all branches of Methodism. Field's comprehensive study serves as a starting point for any historian searching for biographical details from any Methodist tradition, and in bringing greater breadth to an otherwise largely Wesleyan-focused anthology is a fitting end to a fascinating collection.

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