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People Called Methodists

  

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The project is now divided into twelve units, based upon the format and chronology of material. Units will not necessarily be published consecutively; rather material will be published when it becomes available for microfilming or in accordance with priorities established by the publisher’s market research. The twelve units are as follows: 1. Catalogues of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester
2. Reference tools for the history of Methodism, 1738-1932
3. Anti-Methodist publications, 1738-1800
4. Methodist controversial pamphlets, 1791-1856
5. Methodist pamphlets, 1857-1932
6. Methodist local histories to 1932
7. Methodist magazines, 1791-1932
8. Methodist newspapers, 1849-1932
9. Manuscript sources on the history of Methodism, 1738-1800
10. Manuscript sources on the history of Methodism, 1801-1850
11. Manuscript sources on the history of Methodism, 1851-1907
12. Manuscript sources on the history of Methodism, 1907-1932


In 1932 the present Methodist Church of Great Britain was formed by an amalgamation of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Primitive Methodist Church, and the United Methodist Church, denominations into which Methodism had sub-divided during the nineteenth century. Domestic Methodist affairs are the focus and no treatment is given to the overseas missions undertaken from the British Isles. The decision to terminate the project in 1932 reflects: the disproportionate concentration of scholarly interest on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodism; the impossibility of selecting a representative corpus from the vast amount of post-1932 material, much of it imperfectly catalogued; the fact that many collections of post-1932 archives and manuscripts are embargoed to a greater or lesser extent; and the copyright difficulties that would be attached to the reproduction of more recently published or unpublished sources.

The Methodist Church
The Methodist Church is by far the largest of the various Free Church or Nonconformist denominations in Great Britain and Ireland. During the height of its influence in the early twentieth century it had an estimated three to four million members and adherents. This influence was not solely confined to the religious sphere but extended to the social, economic, cultural and political arena as well. Methodism’s reputation was founded on a dual concern for man's spiritual and physical needs, as reflected (respectively) in its evangelistic successes (including amongst the working classes, not reached by other denominations) and its active involvement in movements of social and moral reform.

Through its various missionary agencies, the Methodist Church's message has been disseminated from Great Britain and Ireland to many parts of Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Australasia. The story of this missionary work is documented in the Methodist Missionary Society Archives (held at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London) which have already been published on microfiche by IDC and which directly complement The People Called Methodists.

At a scholarly level the history of the Methodist Church in Great Britain and Ireland is intensively studied by both secular and ecclesiastical historians alike, not just in the British Isles but also in North America, Japan and many other countries. The quantity and quality of this ongoing international scholarship on the Wesleys and Methodism is fully reflected in the ‘Bibliography of Methodist Historical Literature’, published annually as a supplement to the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. Some 3,500 new publications on the history of British and Irish Methodism have been noted here from the years 1974-98 alone.