Despite the existence of a few specialist organizations, local record societies remain the most important publishers of editions of historical material in England. When it comes to religion, their focus, perhaps understandably, has been on the older churches—the Church of England and its medieval predecessors, leading to a neglect of more recent arrivals on the scene, especially the Protestant Nonconformist churches. The Oxfordshire Record Series has, hitherto, been no exception to this rule, producing over a dozen volumes of institutional sources for the Anglicans and their predecessors, but none for the Nonconformists. The society is to be congratulated, therefore, on finally breaking its duck with the very welcome appearance of Martin Wellings’s edition of two nineteenth-century minute books for the Oxford Wesleyan Methodist Local Preachers’ meeting, providing an almost unbroken record between 1830 and 1902. A well-crafted introduction adds considerable value to the edited material. It first sketches the broader...
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