A fascinating account of the daily life and spirituality of early Methodists by a prize-winning gender historian.

Quaker women were unusually active participants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural and religious exchange, as ministers, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders. Drawing upon documentary evidence, with a focus on women's personal writings and correspondence, Naomi Pullin explores the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750. Through a comparative methodology, focused on Britain and the North American colonies, Pullin examines the experiences of both those women who travelled and preached and those who stayed at home. The book approaches the study of gender and religion from a new perspective by placing women's roles, relationships and identities at the centre of the analysis. It shows how the movement's transition from 'sect to church' enhanced the authority and influence of women within the movement and uncovers the multifaceted ways in which female Friends at all levels were active participants in making and sustaining transatlantic Quakerism.

John William Fletcher (1729-1785) was a seminal theologian during the early methodist movement and the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Best known for the Checks to Antinomianism, he worked out a theology of history to defend the church against the encroachment of antinomianism as a polemic against hyper-Calvinism, whose system of divine fiat and finished salvation, Fletcher believed, did not take seriously enough either the activity of God in salvation history or an individual believer's personal progress in salvation. Fletcher made the doctrine of accommodation a unifying principle of his theological system and further developed the doctrine of divine accommodation into a theology of ministry. As God accommodated divine revelation to the frailties of human beings, ministers of the gospel must accommodate the gospel to their hearers in order to gain a hearing for the gospel without losing the goal of true Christianity. This book contains insights for pastors, missionaries, and Christian thinkers on true Christianity from Fletcher, who devoted himself, according to Wesley, to being "an altogether Christian."