Calvin Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. ISBN : 978-0-773536-71-5.

THIS FORCEFULLY ARGUED and finely researched study presents a fascinating account of the growth of Methodism in Newfoundland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first part of the study is primarily conceptual and throws down a highly provocative thesis about the character of Newfoundland Methodism and, more generally, about the social and cultural history of the island. Hollett asserts that Methodism in Newfoundland was “a robust popular movement of the religion of experience.” It was rooted in local communities, led by lay preachers and class leaders, and sustained by ongoing revivals of religion that carried Methodism throughout the colony. The author, in effect, rejects the missionary-led, “middleclass Methodism of St John’s” and focuses instead on the lay-centred “artisan” Methodism that prospered along the island’s many bays and coastlines. The study also challenges the long-held belief that, outside its one significant urban centre, the colony consisted of isolated (and depraved) communities that had little economic and social intercourse with each other and the larger world. This, then, is hot religion — shouting, embracing, and dancing — a far cry from the sedate bourgeois religion that dominates the study of Canadian religious history.

The second part of the study illustrates these assertions. Organized geographically, it describes the actual practice of this “lay and bay” Methodism as it grew up and spread all around the small coastal settlements of the colony: Notre Dame, Trinity, and Conception Bays — Fogo, Twillingate, and Moreton’s Harbour.

There are several notable features in this fine study. Readily acknowledging one’s own shortcomings, the uninstructed Canadian will come away from the book with a much finer appreciation of the geography and social life of the island. I can now grasp the relationship between religion and the rhythms of fishing and sealing, understand the distinctive structure of credit and business relations, and, if told a body were going down to Bonavista, know with reasonable certainty that person’s putative destination. More importantly, the type of Methodism the study propounds — ecstatic, demotic, iconoclastic, and contested — helps to free Hollett’s analysis of religion from the increasingly entrenched paradigms of middle-class hegemony and reminds us once again of the critical role religion can play in the process of working-class community formation. Finally, the study raises the very important question of popular religion: what does one find when one looks beyond the missionaries, the educated elites, and the propaganda of religious institutions and tries to retrieve the religion of those believers who were actively engaged in forming their own spiritual life?

In the study of religion one should never undervalue the harvest from small seeds planted in unlikely ground, and this localized study inevitably raises important questions about the relationship between Methodism in Newfoundland and the many iterations of Methodism in the English-speaking world. Do, for example, the dialectical tensions between clergy and laity, centre and periphery, help us to understand the progress of the disruption of Methodism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Do they offer a way of understanding the massive battles within the British Wesleyan movement, as Todd Webb has pointed out, between the ceaseless controlling tyranny of Jabez Bunting and those who demanded more independence in both the Old World and the New? How were the tensions between Methodists and Anglicans (especially concerning Tractarian ritualism) that Hollett describes played out in other parts of British North America? Finally, for all its strengths, the study also illustrates some of the larger methodological problems around the writing of the history of popular religion. We need more descriptions of Methodists as they danced, embraced, and shouted with ecstasy. Unfortunately, the primary sources are dominated overwhelmingly by those who controlled and spoke for the interests of religious institutions, and who drew dark veils across these popular practices. Nonetheless, the ability of this book to open our eyes and reveal so much is a considerable accomplishment.