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Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century . Edited by T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990. vi + 204 pp.

The main weakness of this book is that even though Chilcote's research is superb, he often fails to analyze his findings. For example, in Appendix I (pp. 321-327) he reprints a sermon delivered by Mary Fletcher, yet he does not discuss this or any other sermon in the body of his text. Did women's sermons differ from men's sermons, or were they indistinguishable? In a brief paragraph at the end of the book, Chilcote suggests the latter (p. 240), but more information about what these women actually said in the pulpit would have been valuable. Overall, this book raises far more questions than it answers. How old were most of these women when they began preaching? Were most of them married or single? Were they well-educated, or was their authority based entirely on their claim to divine inspiration? Were most of these women from working-class families? In Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, 1985), Deborah Valenze argued that the rise of female preaching was tied to the social and economic disruptions of the commercial revolution. In contrast, Chilcote virtually ignores the issue of class, contributing little to the historical debate over whether Methodism represented a challenge or an accommodation to the rise of capitalism and industrialization. He also does not analyze the regional distribution of female preachers, although he does include a map in AppendixJ (p. 328). Despite these criticisms, Chilcote is to be commended for recovering the lives of scores of Methodist women preachers who have been virtually lost to history. His detailed information about these pioneering evangelists will be a boon to anyone interested in the history of women or Methodism in eighteenth-century England.