With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, historians of revival have avoided local micro-history, focusing more upon leading figures and larger movements. The assumption is that you can make extrapolations about local revivals based upon the general tendencies of more regional (or even national) awakenings. In Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts, David Bebbington turns this received approach on its head. The result is a groundbreaking work of scholarship that will likely exert considerable influence on the field.

Bebbington is one of the most respected scholars of modern religious history and has been at the forefront of renewed scholarly interest in global evangelicalism. This is not his first foray into the world of religious revivals. Over the past two decades, Bebbington has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on the topic. Revival has also been a major factor in his more general studies of modern English evangelicalism and Victorian evangelicalism, respectively. His years of research have culminated in the present volume.

Victorian Religious Revivals could be divided into two unofficial sections. In his first two chapters, Bebbington describes several historical patterns of revival, contributes an extensive historiographical study of revival history, and advances his own paradigm for interpreting local revivals. Eighteenth-century revival patterns reflected denominational tendencies among Congregationalists (and Baptists), Presbyterians, and Methodists before giving way to a more synthetic approach in the next century and eventually modern mass revivalism from the 1870s onward. As a general rule, awakenings gradually evolved from semi-spontaneous (though not always unexpected) phenomena to planned events led by a class of professional revivalists.

Bebbington's historiographical chapter extensively summarizes how scholars have interpreted revivals, endearing the author to a generation of graduate students. According to Bebbington, “providentialist” historians, many of whom are clergy rather than professional scholars, focus on how they believe God worked during a given revival, often avoiding nuanced discussions of historical contextualization. Earlier academic historians went in a very different direction, offering psychological analyses of revival participants, suggesting that revivals arise from social factors such as frontier expansion and economic uncertainties, and arguing that revivals are a form of social control. Recent historians have given greater attention to intellectual history, local religious practices, the presentation of revival movements to the wider world, and the international links between revival movements. Bebbington proposes that the intersection of culture and piety, local context and lived religion, offers a fruitful way forward for historians.

The book's second unofficial section, comprised of eight chapters, applies Bebbington's “culture and piety” paradigm to seven local revivals and summarizes the conclusions. Each of the local revivals took place in the English-speaking world between 1840 and 1880. None of them occurred in an urban setting. (Because of the influence of the so-called Businessman's Revival of 1857-1858, most historians of this era focus upon citywide revivals.) Three revivals were in North America, three occurred in Britain, and one took place in Australia. None of the revivals was connected to a larger regional movement, and few of them have been examined in previous scholarly studies. In each case, Bebbington not only focused upon the events of the revivals themselves, but also discussed geography, social context, theological undercurrents, polemical considerations, and attempts to reign in or capitalize on the revival.

In the closing chapter, Bebbington moves from the particular to the general, offering some summary observations about revival in the Victorian Era based upon his case studies. Each revival occurred in a community where a single occupation dominated the local economy, though there was no corollary between relative prosperity and spiritual awakening. In several communities, dangerous occupations (e.g., mining and fishing) produced a regular fear of death among the locals. Most of the revivals were colored by the theology and emphases of a particular denomination and in many cases new ideas were introduced, debated, and eventually embraced due to the revival. Many of the awakenings occurred among people with a growing commitment to evangelical activism, especially foreign missions or temperance advocacy. None of the revivals were preplanned events, but few of them were wholly spontaneous; in almost every case, the community had experienced an earlier revival or recent smaller and/or shorter movements of spiritual vitality. Laypeople, including women, played a role in advancing most of the revivals, and some of them were multiethnic in nature. The one universal factor in each local revival was expectant prayer on the part of the participants for spiritual awakening in their church(es) and community.

Bebbington's emphasis on localism as interpreted through the lens of culture and piety is a welcome contribution to revival studies. He avoids the types of overgeneralizations that plague the literature as well as extremes such as the borderline ahistorical interpretations of many providentialists and the uncharitable psychological or merely social interpretations of many academic historians. Simply put, Bebbington takes matters such as beliefs, doctrine, personal testimony, and devotional practices seriously, but without divorcing them from their historical context or detaching them from non-religious social phenomena. This type of balance is sorely needed among historians of religion in general, not just evangelical revival.

Some historians will likely criticize this book because the emphasis on local revivals means that any conclusions drawn by Bebbington, insightful though they may be, do not necessarily hold true of other local revivals beyond his case studies. The very nature of local history is that it explodes simplistic interpretations-even those made when several local revivals are compared. It may well be that some non-urban Victorian revivals were even less spontaneous or were more interdenominational or involved less prayer for revival. But this is not so much a weakness of the book, which by its very nature is a limited study, as it is an invitation for others to apply Bebbington's methodology to other local contexts and other historical eras. Hopefully, a generation of historians will take up this challenge.

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