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By the time of Charles Wesley's death in 1788 his public and Methodist profile outside London and Bristol was greatly diminished. His relationship with his brother had been strained since the beginning of the 1750s, while some important preachers expressed little sadness at his death. Charles Wesley's Church‐Methodist viewpoint did not, however, die with him; many lay people and some preachers retained a dual loyalty to both Methodism and the Church of England and carried on the struggle into the 1790s and after. The legacy of Church Methodism was an inclusive 19^th century Wesleyan denomination whose members were at liberty also to regard themselves as Anglicans if they wished. Also, as late as the 1880s, important features of Wesleyan Methodist polity and worship referred back to the movement's origins within the Church of England.

Charles Wesley's reputation has been affected by his sometimes difficult personality and the controversial views that he championed, which has resulted in comparative neglect of his life and ministry. A strong case can, however, be presented for Charles having made a more positive contribution to the long‐term success and character of Methodism than is commonly acknowledged. His championship of a considerable body of pro‐Anglican opinion within the movement helped to stave off separation until the movement was in a position to flourish independently of the Church of England and also contributed to the unique character of the Methodist Church. Detailed study of Charles Wesley's life and ministry underlines the case for a new examination of aspects of Methodist history, complementary to but separate from the traditional focus on John Wesley.

The traditional image of Charles Wesley is that of a loyal Anglican whose attachment to the parent Church of England led to his isolation within Methodism in his later years. There is a contradiction in this viewpoint as Charles Wesley, despite his protestations of Anglican loyalty, contributed a great deal to the establishment of an evangelical popular movement. The more that one examines the activities of Charles Wesley, the clearer it becomes that he was in fact a radical conservative, whose high Sacramental theology was combined with the promotion of new worship practices such as congregational hymn singing and the class meeting. This mix of different elements produced a Methodist movement that was a combination of High Church theology, strict discipline, and innovative forms of structure, devotion, and worship.

By 1749 Methodism had put down firm roots in communities across the British Isles. The movement's size and the increasing sophistication of its structure and worship life imposed a distance with the parent Church of England and this was worsened by the hostility of many Anglicans. Some Methodist preachers started to react against the Church and also against the discipline imposed by the Wesley brothers. The rising tension boiled over in 1754 when preachers in London and Reading administered the Sacraments contrary to Anglican practice. The resulting crisis was worsened by Charles Wesley's suspicion that his brother was sympathetic to the separatists. John eventually decided against separation from the Church of England, but his brother's fears for the future were not eased, establishing a pattern for the future of his relationship with John Wesley and the Methodist movement.

After retiring from the itinerancy in 1756, Charles Wesley exercised a localized preaching and pastoral ministry in Bristol, and then from 1771, in London. He also established himself as the foremost member of an unofficial pro‐Anglican Church‐Methodist party that included some of the wealthiest and most influential lay people in the movement. The strength of this pro‐Anglican feeling, which has often been ignored by Methodist scholarship, can be seen to best effect by close examination of local reactions in London and Yorkshire to the Norwich sacramental dispute of 1760.

Sacraments of Memory’s conclusion affirms the contention that Catholicism operates as a site of oppositional discourse in contemporary narratives of slavery, wherein alterative ways of remembering the past are realized. It reminds the reader, however, that these “sacraments of memory” should never be considered unproblematic or pure modes of dissent. Rather, they remain deeply conflicted discursive strategies.

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

This chapter takes up the Augustinian idea of sacraments as “sacred signs” or “visible words,” by focussing on questions of efficacy and meaning. It discusses the idea of the sacrament as cause, as sign, and as causal sign before turning to the question of meaning-making in community and community-making by reading. Sacraments are made by the communities that they form in turn, and, insofar as they remain enticements to the sacred, they maintain the openness of the boundaries of those communities. This chapter uses semiotic theory from Eco, Baudrillard, and Augustine to argue for what Eco (following Peirce) calls abductive signification, a creative construction of meaning, as a way of reading the sacraments. In this particular seduction of signs is the communal construction of the meaning of the sacred as something more engaging and more open than simple reference.

This chapter looks at the period around 900 to argue that, below a surface of change brought about by wars, invasions, and local upheavals, a more significant process of transformation was unfolding, determined by socio-political, institutional, and religious alterations initiated several decades earlier. Two observations are essential to understanding this phenomenon. First, that the reorganization of the female monastic landscape in these decades resulted primarily from the progressive reorganization of Lotharingian regional politics. And second, that some religious groups at least continued to rely on the ‘coping strategies’ discussed in the preceding chapter. Far from being the fortunate survivors of processes over which they had had no control, the women in these houses and their male associates were actively involved in securing the continued existence and societal relevance of female communities.

This chapter begins by examining a passage from Hugh of St. Victor's discourse, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, which contains linguistic transfers as examples of extension or metonymy. Hugh confirms the transcendent source of his metonymies and justifies the need for an interpreter, and since God permits the practice of metonymy, the interpreter is only enabled but obliged to declare them. On another note, Abbot Suger combined his religious and political campaigns into one single project: the construction of the Abbey Church of St. Denis. Suger wrote about the construction and treated it as an integral part of the project. The chapter cites these writings and affirms that Suger supports his message by echoing scriptural and sacred authorities. The latter part focuses on Dante's questioning of the problematic relations between fiction and facticity in connection to theological tradition.