ENTHUSIASM DELINEATED: WEEPING AS A RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN.

Abstract

Eighteenth-century Europe and its renowned cult of sensibility have a special place in the history of tears. This article revisits weeping in eighteenth-century Britain, seeking especially to recover the religious practices, texts, and ideas involved in the production and interpretation of tears. Some of the most prolific and public weeping of the period was produced by the Methodist revival, and especially the preaching of the "Weeping Prophet", George Whitefield. A different, more melancholy form of enthusiasm was the keynote of Henry Mackenzie's famously lachrymose novel The Man of Feeling (1771), reinterpreted here as a handbook of Christian sensibility and religious weeping. On both sides of the French Revolution debate in Britain in the 1790s, tears were shed, but were also denounced. The retrospective belief that tearful sensibilities had given rise to dangerous ideologies and bloody violence cast the practice of weeping in a new light. Suspicions of religious "enthusiasm" from earlier periods were now applied to revolutionary sympathisers in Britain, and commentators, including Helen Maria Williams, began to discuss the idea that it was un-English to weep.