Scott McLaren | York University (original) (raw)
Books by Scott McLaren
University of Toronto Press, Sep 2019
When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagio... more When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century during a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.
The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, bankrolled the bulk of Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in the province’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial part in opening the way for what would later become the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the province as a whole.
Papers by Scott McLaren
College & Research Libraries News
Book History, 2014
went to his eternal reward shortly before ten o'clock on 2 March 1791. Having spent much of his l... more went to his eternal reward shortly before ten o'clock on 2 March 1791. Having spent much of his long life crisscrossing the British and Irish countryside to preach in churches, fields, and barns, Wesley had become one of the eighteenth century's most recognizable figures. In the process, Methodism, the renewal movement that he had started fifty years earlier within the Church of England, had expanded to become the fastest growing religious society in the three kingdoms. Part of the reason for his success lay in the fact that Wesley used more than the power of his own voice to call people to repentance. Throughout the course of his life, Wesley published more than fifteen hundred separate editions-some authored, others edited, abridged, or prefaced by him-to be sold everywhere by his travelling preachers as well as through the growing number of Methodist preaching houses that dotted the British and Irish countryside. 1 By the 1790s, this publishing business, known by Methodists simply as the Book Room, was bringing in annual revenues of as much as £10,000. 2 Wesley had hardly breathed his last before obituaries and short biographies began to appear in London newspapers accompanied by speculations about who would write the famous preacher's life. "His history, if well written, would certainly be important, for in every respect, as the founder of the most numerous sect in the kingdom, as a man, and as a writer, he must be considered as one of the most extraordinary characters this or any age ever produced," enthused the London Chronicle. 3 "The death of John Wesley will afford food to the biographers who continue to pick a snug living from the remnants of mortality," quipped the Star, while the Morning Chronicle commented that Wesley's "bones will afford good picking to the biographers, a legion of whom are now brandishing their grey goose quills about his life." 4 Meanwhile, the crowds that pressed into London to
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2017
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2016
Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture, Sep 2015
New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume IV, Modernity, Colonialism, and Their Successors, 2015
The Bible is not like other books. Except when it comes to questions of production and distributi... more The Bible is not like other books. Except when it comes to questions of production and distribution. Beginning with the British Foreign Bible Society and several of its immediate predecessors, this chapter traces the rise and development of bible societies of various kinds from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. As the balance of geopolitical power shifted in the twentieth century, so too did the role national bible societies played on the global stage. As the British and Foreign Bible Society receded in importance, it was replaced first by the American Bible Society and later the United Bible Societies. Remarkably, as these larger societies emphasized the global nature of their mission by increasingly placing bibles in the hands of readers that could be read in their own native languages, they inadvertently provided many indigenous populations with the tools they needed--particularly in the form of organizational methods and a written language--to preserve their own cultural practices and thereby subvert, at least partially, the colonial agenda.
Book History, 2014
When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. B... more When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. But early confusion over whom Wesley intended to safeguard his property and take possession of his personal papers led to a protracted struggle over who ought to have the sanctioned right to interpret Wesley’s long life to the wider reading public. This paper argues that as the dispute over Wesley’s biography intensified among his followers, the themes and language that emerged helped to prepare the ground for later conflicts and schisms between preachers and people that would define Methodist history for decades to come.
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2013
When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist ... more When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist preacher, wrote to defend a clause in the 1846 Common School Act banning the use of American textbooks, he pulled out all the stops. Not only were such books “anti-British, in every sense of the word,” they were a threat to the colony’s very survival. “[I]n precisely those parts of Upper Canada where the United States School Books had been used most extensively,” he railed, “there the spirit of insurrection in 1837 and 1838, was most prevalent.” While Ryerson thundered in public, however, his fellow preachers quietly went about their usual business of filling the shelves of the colony’s burgeoning Sunday school libraries with books imported in bulk from the United States. Although historians have tended to take Ryerson’s public censure of American schoolbooks at face value, this paper argues that his views were more complicated and can only be fully understood in the context of Methodist efforts to establish Sunday school libraries across the colony in the preceding decades. More than just early sites for the promotion of basic literacy and sectarianism, these denominational libraries functioned as vibrant transnational spaces where Canadian Methodists developed an experienced and complex understanding of a wider North American market for schoolbooks and juvenile literature. Although at times constrained by political necessity, Ryerson soon recuperated this broader understanding of the market to develop policies in the early 1850s that not only eschewed his earlier anti-American rhetoric, but also led to the pervasive adoption of American schoolbooks in Upper Canada’s emergent common school and public libraries.
Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, 2011
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2011
This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada... more This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada after the War of 1812 had a profound influence on the evolution of Methodist religious identity north of the border. While they helped to foster the denomination’s remarkable postwar recovery, these periodicals also served to reinvigorate languishing transnational ties binding Canadian and American Methodists together at a time when anti-Americanism was on the rise. As Canadians and Americans read about Methodism’s advances on both side of the border, and as Canadians patterned the growth of Sunday schools and other missionary activities on American models, the linkages uniting North American Methodists into a single imagined community of readers only strengthened. The sustained distribution of these periodicals also did much to prepare the ground for the later introduction of Canadian Methodism’s own denominational weekly, the Christian Guardian, in 1829.
Christianity and Literature, 2006
Mythlore, Jan 2006
This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's e... more This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's early novels: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), and the Greater Trumps (1932). It argues that Williams used these objects as more than furniture around which to build compelling narratives, but as material artifacts imbued with mystical and magical properties to illustrate his own deeply held Christian belief about the fundamental relationship that exists between goodness and mere being itself.
Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association, 2005
While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, J... more While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, Joss Whedon demonstrated a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its successful spin-off Angel. Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon's reliance on folkloric antecedents resulted in two distinct but fundamentally irreconcilable portrayals of the human soul as both a metaphor for human moral agency and as the reified seat of individual identity and conscience. This paper argues by contrast that the ongoing tension between these two representations—one existential and the other ontological—opened the way for Whedon and his writers explore questions about human identity from inexact and shifting moral perspectives that were unusually nuanced.
Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 2004
Book Reviews by Scott McLaren
Historical Studies in Education, 2020
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2012
University of Toronto Press, Sep 2019
When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagio... more When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century during a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.
The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, bankrolled the bulk of Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in the province’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial part in opening the way for what would later become the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the province as a whole.
College & Research Libraries News
Book History, 2014
went to his eternal reward shortly before ten o'clock on 2 March 1791. Having spent much of his l... more went to his eternal reward shortly before ten o'clock on 2 March 1791. Having spent much of his long life crisscrossing the British and Irish countryside to preach in churches, fields, and barns, Wesley had become one of the eighteenth century's most recognizable figures. In the process, Methodism, the renewal movement that he had started fifty years earlier within the Church of England, had expanded to become the fastest growing religious society in the three kingdoms. Part of the reason for his success lay in the fact that Wesley used more than the power of his own voice to call people to repentance. Throughout the course of his life, Wesley published more than fifteen hundred separate editions-some authored, others edited, abridged, or prefaced by him-to be sold everywhere by his travelling preachers as well as through the growing number of Methodist preaching houses that dotted the British and Irish countryside. 1 By the 1790s, this publishing business, known by Methodists simply as the Book Room, was bringing in annual revenues of as much as £10,000. 2 Wesley had hardly breathed his last before obituaries and short biographies began to appear in London newspapers accompanied by speculations about who would write the famous preacher's life. "His history, if well written, would certainly be important, for in every respect, as the founder of the most numerous sect in the kingdom, as a man, and as a writer, he must be considered as one of the most extraordinary characters this or any age ever produced," enthused the London Chronicle. 3 "The death of John Wesley will afford food to the biographers who continue to pick a snug living from the remnants of mortality," quipped the Star, while the Morning Chronicle commented that Wesley's "bones will afford good picking to the biographers, a legion of whom are now brandishing their grey goose quills about his life." 4 Meanwhile, the crowds that pressed into London to
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2017
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2016
Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture, Sep 2015
New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume IV, Modernity, Colonialism, and Their Successors, 2015
The Bible is not like other books. Except when it comes to questions of production and distributi... more The Bible is not like other books. Except when it comes to questions of production and distribution. Beginning with the British Foreign Bible Society and several of its immediate predecessors, this chapter traces the rise and development of bible societies of various kinds from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. As the balance of geopolitical power shifted in the twentieth century, so too did the role national bible societies played on the global stage. As the British and Foreign Bible Society receded in importance, it was replaced first by the American Bible Society and later the United Bible Societies. Remarkably, as these larger societies emphasized the global nature of their mission by increasingly placing bibles in the hands of readers that could be read in their own native languages, they inadvertently provided many indigenous populations with the tools they needed--particularly in the form of organizational methods and a written language--to preserve their own cultural practices and thereby subvert, at least partially, the colonial agenda.
Book History, 2014
When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. B... more When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. But early confusion over whom Wesley intended to safeguard his property and take possession of his personal papers led to a protracted struggle over who ought to have the sanctioned right to interpret Wesley’s long life to the wider reading public. This paper argues that as the dispute over Wesley’s biography intensified among his followers, the themes and language that emerged helped to prepare the ground for later conflicts and schisms between preachers and people that would define Methodist history for decades to come.
Historical Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2013
When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist ... more When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist preacher, wrote to defend a clause in the 1846 Common School Act banning the use of American textbooks, he pulled out all the stops. Not only were such books “anti-British, in every sense of the word,” they were a threat to the colony’s very survival. “[I]n precisely those parts of Upper Canada where the United States School Books had been used most extensively,” he railed, “there the spirit of insurrection in 1837 and 1838, was most prevalent.” While Ryerson thundered in public, however, his fellow preachers quietly went about their usual business of filling the shelves of the colony’s burgeoning Sunday school libraries with books imported in bulk from the United States. Although historians have tended to take Ryerson’s public censure of American schoolbooks at face value, this paper argues that his views were more complicated and can only be fully understood in the context of Methodist efforts to establish Sunday school libraries across the colony in the preceding decades. More than just early sites for the promotion of basic literacy and sectarianism, these denominational libraries functioned as vibrant transnational spaces where Canadian Methodists developed an experienced and complex understanding of a wider North American market for schoolbooks and juvenile literature. Although at times constrained by political necessity, Ryerson soon recuperated this broader understanding of the market to develop policies in the early 1850s that not only eschewed his earlier anti-American rhetoric, but also led to the pervasive adoption of American schoolbooks in Upper Canada’s emergent common school and public libraries.
Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, 2011
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2011
This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada... more This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada after the War of 1812 had a profound influence on the evolution of Methodist religious identity north of the border. While they helped to foster the denomination’s remarkable postwar recovery, these periodicals also served to reinvigorate languishing transnational ties binding Canadian and American Methodists together at a time when anti-Americanism was on the rise. As Canadians and Americans read about Methodism’s advances on both side of the border, and as Canadians patterned the growth of Sunday schools and other missionary activities on American models, the linkages uniting North American Methodists into a single imagined community of readers only strengthened. The sustained distribution of these periodicals also did much to prepare the ground for the later introduction of Canadian Methodism’s own denominational weekly, the Christian Guardian, in 1829.
Christianity and Literature, 2006
Mythlore, Jan 2006
This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's e... more This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's early novels: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), and the Greater Trumps (1932). It argues that Williams used these objects as more than furniture around which to build compelling narratives, but as material artifacts imbued with mystical and magical properties to illustrate his own deeply held Christian belief about the fundamental relationship that exists between goodness and mere being itself.
Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association, 2005
While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, J... more While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, Joss Whedon demonstrated a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its successful spin-off Angel. Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon's reliance on folkloric antecedents resulted in two distinct but fundamentally irreconcilable portrayals of the human soul as both a metaphor for human moral agency and as the reified seat of individual identity and conscience. This paper argues by contrast that the ongoing tension between these two representations—one existential and the other ontological—opened the way for Whedon and his writers explore questions about human identity from inexact and shifting moral perspectives that were unusually nuanced.
Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 2004
Scholarly Resource: Children’s Literature Collection at York University Libraries, 2017
“Introduction to the Collection,” “Wilderness and Civilized Domesticity: Adventurous Boys and Res... more “Introduction to the Collection,” “Wilderness and Civilized Domesticity: Adventurous Boys and Resourceful Girls,” and “The Figure of the Indigene in Settler Canadian Children’s Literature.” Critical Commentary for Scholarly Resource: Children’s Literature Collection at York University Libraries. Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York U.