The Department of History, Philosophy and Religion are pleased to offer two MA by Research studentships, one in the field of Methodist History and Culture and the second in the field of Religious History. Both studentships are offered part-time and will be supervised by staff from the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History (OCMCH). Applications are invited for proposals in a field of either Religious History or Methodist History in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth-centuries.
Research supervision from the OCMCH can be offered in the following fields: Religion in Britain 1660-1900, Church and State in the Eighteenth-Century, Religion and Art in the Eighteenth-Century, History and Historical Theology of Methodism and Evangelicalism 1700-1900, History of post-reformation Wales, Book History and Biographical Study in the period 1600-1900. Previous students have gone on to take PhDs and have gained book contracts with Routledge and Oxford University Press.
The successful candidates will receive funding to cover the costs of the University’s part-time research degree fees, currently £2,112, for two years. Applications for both studentships should be made by Monday 7th November 2016. Applications are invited from Home/EU students only. Applicants should have a good honours degree (upper second or first class) in a relevant field, e.g. history or theology. To request an application pack and for further details of how to apply, please contact hss-researchdegrees@brookes.ac.uk
“This is a great opportunity for a scholar interested in religious history to explore an area of interest in depth and to use the resources of the Centre and the University to obtain a research degree.” – Professor William Gibson, Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History
Richard Bell (l), great nephew of Donald Bell, and Professor Alistair Fitt (r), Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, placing a wreath on the memorial window to Bell in the chapel at Harcourt Hill. Richard Bell is wearing a replica VC.
The annual reunion of the Westminster Society in September 2016 concluded with the usual service in the chapel at Harcourt Hill. This year’s event was made special by inclusion of a commemoration of the award of the Victoria Cross to Donald Simpson Bell, who attended Westminster College in London between 1909 and 1911. When he left Westminster he became a teacher near Leeds and then a professional football player for Bradford Park F.C. He enlisted in Alexandra Princess of Wales’s Yorkshire Regiment (later the Green Howards) and fought in the Great War. He won the VC. in a heroic action at Contalmaison on the Somme in July 1916 but died in a similarly heroic action five days later.
Attending the reunion service were representatives of the Professional Football Association, as well as members of the Yorkshire Regiment, the Green Howards, and the local OTC.
The John Rylands Library has recently announced the publication of digitised versions of documents from their collections pertaining the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. These include letters of the Wesleys, George Whitefield , and many others.
The University of Manchester Library has digitised a collection of 156 manuscript conversion narratives written during the 18th century Evangelical Revival. These testimonies provide a vivid insight into a dynamic and often disturbing spirituality that fuelled an explosion in popular religion to create one of the building blocks of the modern world. This previously unpublished collection, part of the official archive of the Methodist Church of Great Britain, is now made available to scholars as well as members of faith communities interested in the roots of some of the world’s leading denominations.
Approximately one third of the collection has been transcribed and these copies can be accessed on the library website with the digital images of the original documents.
The testimonies document the grassroots response to revival meetings held across the British Isles during the middle decades of the 18th century. At these unruly and often violent gatherings, crowds sometimes numbering in tens of thousands were told of the transforming power of God and offered the choice between heaven and hell. Delivered by charismatic preachers of the calibre of George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers, this message had a shocking impact. The testimonies report cases of physical and emotional collapse with long term effects on the mental and emotional state of converts.
For more information and access to these resources, visit
The Chapel, Oxford Brookes University, Harcourt Hill Campus
The bell that now hangs at Harcourt Hill is a seventeenth-century bell originally from All Hallows by the Tower in London, and has a notable history. The bell was cast in the 1650s following an explosion that damaged the tower in 1650, when some barrels of gunpowder stored in the churchyard ignited. It hung in the tower from which Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire of London spread across the city of London. In the next few years the tower was rebuilt and new bells installed in 1659. Almost certainly the Harcourt Hill bell was the sanctus bell, from its fairly high tone. It rings every morning for morning prayer led by the Methodist chaplain on the campus.
Although the campus was built between 1956 and 1959, Westminster College brought to the campus a bell given to it by Dr Phillip (“Tubby”) Clayton. Clayton was an Anglican parson, well known for founding TocH, an international charity that emerged from a soldiers’ club in Belgium during World War I (at Talbot House, and named after its call sign T. H.). TocH became famous for its work with leprosy sufferers.
For forty years, from 1922, Clayton was vicar of All Hallows by the Tower, an historic London parish. In 1940 All Hallows was bombed during the Blitz and almost completely destroyed; only the steeple remained. Between 1940 and 1958 Clayton worked to rebuild his church. He did so with the aid of the Canadians who adopted All Hallows as their own. Canadian wood was used for the interior and pews of the new church and a Canadian, J. W. McConnell of Montreal, gave a carillion of eighteen new bells. Clayton therefore had the old bells of All Hallows spare and gave one to the governors of Westminster College to bring to Oxford. The governors’ minutes for 6 November 1958 record the gift to the College of ‘a fine seventeenth century bell’ from Clayton.
Dr Emmanuel Betta, associate professor at the University of Rome, Sapienza – OCMCH visiting research fellow 2016/2017
The aim of my research is to develop the history of Catholic biopolitics, meaning the creation of a doctrine of the Catholic Church concerning the ways in which the different aspects of life are governed. From the mid nineteenth century to 1930, the Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, which had a decisive role in the definition of orthodoxy of Catholic discourse, started to create rules on topics concerning the control of life and body. From the forties onwards it focused on magnetism and hypnosis, birth control methods, surgical-obstetrical therapies for high-risk pregnancies, cremation of the bodies of dead people, human artificial procreation, whereas from the first years of the twentieth century it started to deal with sterilization and eugenics. These topics all had in common the body, and above all the fact that they were the product of a secularized view of the body itself, of life and death. These elements were no longer conceived and governed starting from a religious and Catholic semantics, but they were increasingly interpreted as starting from biomedical knowledge and perspectives.
I’m particularly interested in this change and in the way in which the Catholic Church reacted to the loss of control over the production of the semantics for the government of the body and the health. This interest has pushed me in the last ten years to examine specific aspects of this articulated disciplinary process, from the therapeutic interruption of pregnancy and the artificial insemination, to which I dedicated my first two books, to my last article focused on the discourse concerning birth control, in which emerged a relevant role of the English case for the inquisitorial disciplinary decisions. During my Visiting Fellowship I will work on the interplay between national case, in particular the English one, and this disciplinary process, with particular attention to the reception of the Inquisitorial documents in the medical and religious journals and to the analysis of the role of English Catholics in the eugenics discussions.
Simon Lewis, OCMCH visiting research fellow 2016/2017.
Simon Lewis, who is a visiting research fellow in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for 2016-17, writes of his research for the year;
During my Visiting Fellowship, I will be completing my doctoral thesis, which is entitled ‘Anti-Methodism as an Aspect of Theological Controversy in England, c.1738-c.1763’. It is well known that Methodism was a divisive phenomenon, which generated a torrent of printed criticism throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century. While these early polemical attacks on such figures as John Wesley and George Whitefield have gained some scholarly attention, historians have tended to view anti-Methodism as an isolated category of literature. My research aims to address this issue by reintegrating anti-Methodism into the wider theological controversies of the age. More specifically, it considers the way in which these polemics interacted with and informed contemporary debates regarding such issues as Deism, miracles, and Hell.
Much of my time on the Fellowship will be dedicated to completing the final chapter of my thesis, which discusses the use and misuse of history in anti-Methodist polemics. Amongst other things, it investigates why High Church Anglicans often associated Methodists with a wide variety of religious groups (e.g. Puritans, Quakers, and Muslims) that had seemingly little in common. By referring to the polemics of such seventeenth-century authors as Roger L’Estrange and Charles Leslie, it is argued that Methodists were only the latest in a long line of religious ‘enthusiasts’ whom High Churchmen had associated with popery in their polemics. This, along with the fact that many of Wesley and Whitefield’s opponents cited these earlier authors in their tracts, suggests that one should view early anti-Methodist literature as the latest manifestation of these polemical assaults on the Church of England’s ‘enthusiastic’ enemies. Importantly, this will reinforce one of the key points in my thesis – that these debates between Methodists and their opponents should be viewed, not as part of some ‘Great Awakening’ that suddenly occurred in the 1730s, but, rather, as part of the ‘long Reformation’, which continued into the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
Lord Griffiths pictured with Professor William Gibson
At Oxford Brookes University’s graduation ceremony on Friday 24th June 2016, Lord Griffiths of Pembrey and Burry Port, patron of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, received the honorary degree of Doctor of the University (DUniv) for his contribution to the Centre and to wider public life. Leslie Griffiths is Superintendent Minister of Wesley’s Chapel in London and has been patron of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History since 2007.
Lord Griffiths served as a Methodist minister in Haiti for ten years, which led to his role as an election observer there in 1990. He was president of the Methodist Conference (the senior office in the church) in 1994-5; and in 2004 was made a life peer. His charitable roles, among many, include the presidency of the Boy’s Brigade; the board of Christian Aid; trusteeship of the Addiction Recovery Foundation and patron of the Missing Persons Helpline. He is the author of seven books and has been a regular contributor to ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 and ‘Pause for Thought’ on Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast programme.
Leslie has been a good friend to Oxford Brookes University, he hosted a reception at the House of Lords to introduce members of both houses of parliament to some of our excellence in research in 2009.
Toasting Dr Linda Ryan’s success with supervisors Prof William Gibson, and Prof Joanne Begiato.
Dr Linda Ryan graduated from Oxford Brookes University on 24 June 2016 with a PhD, having been supervised by Professor William Gibson, Joanne Begiato and Dr Peter Forsaith. Dr Ryan’s thesis is titled, Child-rearing and Education: The Thinking and Practice of John Wesley and some of his Contemporaries, Evaluated within its Eighteenth-century Context, which she is now engaged with revising for publication.
The Ashgate Methodist Studies Series of monograph research studies is now part of Routledge, following a purchase of Ashgate by Routledge earlier this year. The series is edited by Professor William Gibson and a distinguished international editorial board of noted Methodist scholars has already published six books which can be found here;
The most recent book in the series is Mary Riso’s The Narrative of the Good Death, The Evangelical Deathbed in Victorian England. Mary Riso was a visiting research fellow in the Centre to work on her study of deathbed narratives.
Westminster Oxford Research Network 