A scene from the Leben der heiligen Altväter (1482)
What is Wesley’s Christian Library?
My initial 2007 blog post here.
“the Puritans are the largest company, even though Puritanism was a largely Calvinist tradition.” Rupp, “The Future of the Methodist Tradition,” The London Quarterly and Holborn Review 184 (1959): 267
OCR text, flawed but still helpful, at NNU.
Perhaps move notes on primary text up here, leaving only secondary works in the Bibliography.
Annotated Bibliography
- List of places within the Library where Wesley explains what he is doing.
- Wesley, Works vol 15, includes a few letters about controversy over the Library.
- x
- Fallica, Maria. Il metodismo via media della Riforma. Progresso e tradizione nella Christian Library di Wesley. Carocci editore, 2022. This book is based on Fallica’s 2020 Ph.D. thesis at Sapienza University of Rome. I haven’t consulted it yet, but Fallica’s 2021 article on Wesley’s use of Macarius suggests that it will be worth reading.
- Ganske, Karl Ludwig. Religion of the Heart and Growth in Grace: John Wesley’s Selection and Editing of Puritan Literature for a Christian Library, Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2009. I have not found a copy of this yet. It’s available online via ETHOS, but the British Library hack has made it inaccessible for now.
- Heitzenrater, Richard P. “John Wesley’s A Christian Library, Then and Now.” American Theological Library Association: Proceedings 55 (2001): 133-146. So good.
- Kim, Kwang Yul. “A Tension Between the Desire to Follow the Example of Jesus’ Life and the Desire to Trust in His Redemptive Work: The Theology of John Wesley Reflected in his Christian Library.” Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1992.
- Rivers, Isabel. Vanity Fair and the Celestial City. Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England 1720–1800 (Oxford University Press, 2018).
- Rivers, Isabel. “Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity.” In Books and their Readers in Eighteenth Century England, edited by Isabel Rivers, 127-64. New York: St. Martins, 1982.
- Rivers, Isabel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780. Vol. 1: Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Rivers, Isabel “John Wesley as Editor and Publisher.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, edited by Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers, 144-159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Rivers, Isabel. “Religious Publishing.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. V: 1695-1830, edited by Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and Michael L. Turner, 579-600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- Yates, Kelly Diehl Limits of a Catholic Spirit. Very good!