Past efforts to relate literature to contemporary religious discourse have been frustrated because the relevant texts have been inaccessible. Jeffrey Barbeau’s anthology not only furnishes the ready access readers have needed, it also provides a chronology and a historical overview of the religious strife, dissenting factions, and theological quarrels. Surveying the developments from the advent of Methodism to the Oxford Movement, Barbeau’s anthology enriches our understanding of the history and the literature of the period.
~Frederick Burwick, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Los Angeles
An outstanding anthology. We should be grateful to Barbeau for his judicious and illuminating selection of texts. The book constitutes a most discriminating guide to the religion of this momentous period of thought in the English-speaking world.
~Douglas Hedley, Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, University of Cambridge
Religion in Romantic England provides source materials essential to any student or scholar interested not only in religion but also in literary, political, and cultural developments. Selections from Wilberforce, Paley, Bentham, Law, Wesley, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Paine, Barbauld, Coleridge, Hemans, Keble, and a score more create a rich, full picture. Barbeau’s introduction provides excellent, highly informative context. No student or scholar of the Romantic Age should be without this volume, and every college and research library should have it on its shelves and in its digital resources.
~James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
The first of its kind, Religion in Romantic England is an excellent resource for students and scholars alike who are interested in the contours of the religious experience in this time and place.
~Eric Bontempo, Reading Religion
…Jeffrey Barbeau’s wonderful anthology Religion in Romantic England gives scholars and students alike tools for pursuing that more fine-grained, complex vision of Romantic religion beyond the purview of Methodism alone, from 1760 to 1832…in addition to providing important primary texts on major religious issues that scholars and students of Romanticism will find useful, taken as a whole the selections together with Barbeau’s focused and accessible introductions make for an inviting, reader friendly course in the religion of the period. The volume is genuinely the first of its kind and a resource no library or specialist in the period will want to be without.
~Lori Branch, European Romantic Review
Barbeau's work is to be commended for covering many different denominational perspectives...Taken together, they give a vivid picture of the many ways English Christian 'taught, preached, collaborated, defended, participated, argued, practiced, hoped, and imagined their own faith' (xxix). The seventy short introductions preceding each text may well be the greatest strength of this volume, as they amount to a concise history of religion in Romantic England.
~Philipp Reisner, Sixteenth Century Journal
