Devotion and Polemic in Eighteenth-Century England: William Mason and the Literature of Lay Evangelical Anglicanism

Abstract

William Mason (1719–1791), an Anglican evangelical layman of Bermondsey, London, published extensively on theological issues to educate the Anglican laity in the Church of England’s Reformed tradition. Despite the popularity of his writings, Mason has been neglected by scholars. By providing the first large-scale examination of Mason’s works, Simon Lewis shows that eighteenth-century Calvinist evangelicalism benefited from an active and vocal laity, whose evangelistic strategies were not limited to preaching; provides a model for how scholars can integrate piety and polemic in their explorations of religious print culture; and enhances our understanding of the laity’s engagement in theological controversies.