Martha Claggett : Another woman’s experience serves to illustrate in more detail the private and personal narrative identity of countless evangelical laypeople. One of the Wesleys’ first converts was a woman named Martha Claggett. On 24 July 1738, exactly two months after John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, she wrote her spiritual autobiography in a letter to his brother Charles.

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-41

Chapter

ABSTRACT

Like Margaret Austin, Martha Claggett emerged from the silent mass of lay Christians down through the ages, all those who like John Pawson and Sarah Middleton thought that religion consisted entirely in going to church and sacrament – she emerged from this silent throng of laypeople with a name, and a voice, and a story. When we hear the voices of laypeople in the eighteenth century it is often in this autobiographical form of personal conversion narrative. The sense of having been specified, individuated, is strong and even surprising.