Disciplining youthful Methodist bodies in nineteenth-century Cornwall

Discourses of Methodist temperance and teetotalism in Cornwall, U.K., show geographical relationships that link religious constructions of moral sanctity with specific forms of bodily performance. Understanding religious attitudes toward youthful spirituality and the histories of children informs theoretical debates concerning the embodied religious subject, citizenship, and public performance, expressed in the activities of Sunday schools and the Band of Hope (a temperance organization in which children took a pledge of total abstinence from alcohol). Methodist communities sought to regulate young people's behavior beyond the spaces of the chapel. Methodists' beliefs in autodidacticism, temperance, and social engagement have a spatiality as well as a history that demands attention.