For six weeks in July-August 2019, I was privileged to serve as the Manchester Wesley Research Centre postdoctoral fellow. I was working on a chapter, ‘Catholic Spirit and Catholic Devotional Literature’, to add to my thesis, ‘Testing the Limits of a “Catholic Spirit”: John Wesley, Methodism, and Catholicism’, before publishing it. Little has been written on Wesley’s use of Catholic devotional material.
I accessed some documents from the Methodist Archives at John Rylands Library. Jane Gallagher, Special Collections Librarian, met with me and provide some valuable research tips for navigating the collections. Everyone at Rylands was helpful. In addition, the MWRC had just had some rare books donated and several of them were exactly what I needed. These books were the Catholic devotional materials that Wesley used, published in the seventeenth century.
Some of my time was spent scanning documents for the MWRC. Most of these documents I had never seen, as they are not widely available. Herbert McGonigle, director emeritus of the MWRC wrote many of them. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the snatches of these materials as I scanned them. I was privileged to be a part of this project which will provide these documents for a broad audience.
Both Geordan Hammond and David Bundy provided assistance to my research with ordering books I needed, and suggesting research materials.
Because of the time and space provided by the MWRC, I was able to complete a major portion of the chapter I set out to write.