Isabel Rivers, Ph.D.

Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture, Queen Mary University of London 

Isabel Rivers is a literary and intellectual historian of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in the history of religion and philosophy and the history of the book. She is a Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society.  

Her books include Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800 (2018); Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, vol. 1, Whichcote to Wesley, vol. 2, Shaftesbury to Hume (1991-2000); and Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry (2nd edn, 1994). She has also edited Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (2001), and, with David Wykes, Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008) and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011).

Her articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, Available here) include Philip Doddridge (1702–1751), James Hervey (1714–1758), William Law (1686–1761), John Tillotson (1630–1694), and Isaac Watts (1674–1748).

She currently directs the Dissenting Academies Project. The main outcome to date is Dissenting Academies Online, two fully searchable databases covering dissenting academies and their tutors, students, archives, and libraries for the period 1660 to 1860; the second outcome, in preparation, is A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, of which she is editor, with Mark Burden as assistant editor.

Her future work includes the introductory essay to John Wesley's Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, in The Works of John Wesley: The Bicentennial Edition, general editor Randy P. Maddox.

Professor Rivers gave the 2008 MWRC Annual Lecture titled: ‘John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards’, with a focus on Wesley’s edition of Edwards’ The Life of David Brainerd.

Select Chapters and Articles

‘The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Evangelical Revival’, in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W. R. Owens  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Available here.

‘Inward Religion and its Dangers in the Evangelical Revival’, in Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England and Ireland, 1690-1850, ed. John Coffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Available here.

‘Whitefield’s Reception in England, 1770-1839’, in George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, ed. Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Available here.

‘Thomas Jackson (1783–1873), Book Collector, Editor, and Tutor’, Wesley and Methodist Studies, 6 (2014), 63-89.

‘Scougal’s Life of God in the Soul of Man: the Fortunes of a Book, 1676–1830’, in Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain, ed. Ruth Savage (2012). Available here.

‘Philip Doddridge’s New Testament: The Family Expositor (1739-56)’, in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones (2010). Available here.

‘John Wesley as Editor and Publisher’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, ed. Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (2010). Available here.

‘Religious Publishing’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695–1830, ed. Michael Suarez and Michael Turner (2009). Available here.

‘William Law and Religious Revival: The Reception of A Serious Call’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71:4 (2008), 633-649.

‘The First Evangelical Tract Society’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 1-22.

‘Religion and Literature’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (2005). Available here.

‘Joseph Williams of Kidderminster (1692–1755) and his Journal’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 7 (2005), 358–78.

The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error: Philip Doddridge’s Academy Lectures (Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Fifty–Sixth Lecture: Dr Williams’s Trust, 2003).

‘John Wesley and Religious Biography’, in John Wesley: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Jeremy Gregory, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 85 (2003), 209–26.

‘Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001), 675–95.

‘Prayer-Book Devotion: the Literature of the Proscribed Episcopal Church’, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble (2001). Available here.

‘“Galen’s Muscles”: Wilkins, Hume, and the Educational Use of the Argument from Design’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 577-97.

‘Shaftesburian Enthusiasm and the Evangelical Revival’, in Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh, ed. J. Garnett and C. Matthew (Hambledon Press, 1993).

‘Grace, Holiness, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Bunyan and Restoration Latitudinarianism’, in John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford University Press, 1988).

‘ “Strangers and Pilgrims”: Sources and Patterns of Methodist Narrative’, in Augustan Worlds, ed. J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones and J. R. Watson (Leicester University Press, 1978).

email: i.rivers@qmul.ac.uk