{"id":1603,"date":"2018-11-06T15:24:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T15:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/jrri-blog\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2018-11-06T15:38:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T15:38:23","slug":"early-career-research-fellow-michael-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/jrri-blog\/2018\/11\/06\/early-career-research-fellow-michael-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Career Research Fellow: Michael Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Michael Smith is an Early Career Researcher who works on the history of emotions and religious culture in the early modern period. <\/strong>During summer 2018, Michael held an Early Career Fellowship at the John Rylands Research Institute, and his project was focused on devotional affections in the John Rylands Library Collection. Here he talks about his experiences at the JRRI and how the fellowship has helped him to develop a larger postdoctoral project.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was lucky enough to receive a three month Early Career Researcher (ECR) Fellowship with the John Rylands Research Institute (JRRI) in June.\u00a0 I used the time to work on my postdoctoral project, \u2018Affect and Affections in English Protestantism, c.1649-c.1745\u2019.\u00a0 I already had some familiarity with the collections having read for my PhD at Manchester but this was a great opportunity to explore them further and particularly get to grips with the Methodist collections.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My doctoral thesis read emotions back into the Protestant religious cultures of Restoration and Augustan England.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Scholarship has often downplayed the emotional aspect of faith in the period.\u00a0 Most recently, scholars have suggested that social utility was the motivating ideology of the period\u2019s religious cultures.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 In addition, the vigour of Church of England and dissenting religiosity in the period has been unfavourably compared in the historiography with that of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival, which emerged from the 1730s. In contrast my research found feeling to be central to the lives of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Protestants, both conforming and nonconforming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new project looks to build upon this foundation.\u00a0 It will provide a model for the role emotions played in the religious lives of Protestants between the execution of Charles I and the end of the Jacobite threat.\u00a0 One of the interesting discoveries of my doctoral research that I am looking to develop is the way in which Protestants of all parties sought to manage their emotions.\u00a0 This was not motivated by a stoic desire to supress displays of religious fervour.\u00a0 In fact, a range of emotions were embraced by these early modern men and women as part of their devotional practice. Without them, they frequently recorded religious duty as improperly performed.\u00a0 It seems also to have had a broader significance, helping them to balance their mood and achieve an overall godly disposition.<\/p>\n

These preoccupations can be seen within the life-writings in the Rylands\u2019 collections. One such example is Richard Viney\u2019s, a sometime Moravian and contemporary of John Wesley\u2019s, methodical diary.\u00a0 His entries for each day were structured around the headings \u2018Employ\u2019, \u2018Mind\u2019, \u2018Health\u2019, \u2018Weather\u2019 and \u2018Occurrences\u2019.\u00a0 His record of his \u2018mind\u2019, in particular, was dominated with accounts of his emotional state and demonstrated his desire to monitor, and manage, his feelings as part of his spiritual life.\u00a0 The entries of his diary often followed a similar pattern to that which I observed during my PhD research.\u00a0 Personal duties were dominated by confessional self-reproach, while public duties by joy and comfort in hearing the word of God and sharing in his sacrifice.<\/p>\n

On Saturday 8 January 1744 Viney bemoaned having \u2018spent this day to little profit, and indeed have many days and weeks. May ye lord forgive me all my Faults\u2019. The next day, however, he recorded that his \u2018Mind<\/u> [was] more compos\u2019d and \u2026 easy. At Smithouse I was very cheerful and glad of an opportunity of speaking something of our saviour.\u2019[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Viney\u2019s spat with his Moravian congregation, and his subsequent denominational homelessness, certainly influenced his account.\u00a0 Yet, it also demonstrated the way in which different emotional states were attached to different devotional practices. This entry showed how devotional practice was an exercise in feeling and managing feeling.\u00a0 Public worship both contributed to, and was defined by, his cheerfulness.\u00a0 By listening to a sermon, with its attendant affective high, he balanced out his low mood from the previous day.<\/p>\n

These findings in the Rylands\u2019 collection offer the promise of further continuities to be found within the role of emotions in Protestant religious culture between 1649 and 1745.\u00a0 The close association between feeling and faith can be witnessed in these accounts.\u00a0 Moreover, they show how feeling was managed and measured by these Protestants.\u00a0 The employment of different emotions at different times paralleled the balance they sought in bodily health. The body itself was often presented as the arena on which they managed their devotional affections.\u00a0 It is this parallel that I am increasingly interested in providing a model for in my new project.<\/p>\n

For more information about the funding opportunities available to Early Career Researchers, keep an eye on our website<\/a> or follow us on Twitter.<\/a><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Smith House was the location of a Moravian congregation in Halifax; JRULSC, Moravian Chruch Manuscripts, GB 133 Eng MS 965, Diary of Richard Viney<\/em>, p.7<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Michael A. L. Smith, \u2018The Affective Communities of Protestantism in North West England, c.1660-c.1740\u2019, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, (2017).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680-1730<\/em> (London, 2014); William J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648-1715<\/em> (Cambridge, 2015)<\/p>\n

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