John Wesley's long life (1703-91) almost spanned the eighteenth century. Any Companion to him needs to provide some sense of this period. Scholarly biographies of Wesley have provided some attention to this topic, of which the most impressive and successful to date is Henry Rack's Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. Extended treatments of his age by Wesley scholars have been rare and rather unsatisfactory. For example, in 1938, the amateur historian J. H. Whiteley published Wesley's England: A Survey of XVIIIth Century Social and Cultural Conditions, as part of the celebrations marking the bicentenary of Wesley's conversion. The book is drawn from secondary sources, aimed at a Methodist readership, and fails to give a coherent sense of the period. However, Whiteley astutely recognized that “the difficulties of the project are manifold, for this is a century of England's story whose details are surprisingly contradictory and elusive.” Eighty years later, this characterization holds. There is no consensus among professional historians about Wesley's context. Indeed, at present they are probably more divided than they have ever been about how to conceptualize the period in which he lived.