ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a close contextual reading of the four-volume Biographia Evangelica, published between 1779 and 1786 by Anglican Calvinist Erasmus Middleton. It argues that Middleton’s historically informed understanding of ‘evangelical’ identity was both broader and narrower than modern usage. It demonstrates core features of the author’s perspective: his pervasive anti-Catholicism and English ethnocentrism, and his attraction to subjects who endured hardship and modelled ‘vital Christianity’. Middleton included many reformers and puritans in his evangelical catalogue, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while consciously excluding eighteenth-century Wesleyans because of their Arminianism and paying little attention to the transatlantic nature of the revivals.
