Bunyan, John

This essay argues that Bunyan, especially through the narratives of his encounters in Restoration courts and imprisonment within a church-state system, provided a concrete, tangible model for political resistance that inspired American dissenters in their struggle for religious freedom, liberty of conscience and the abolishment of church-state systems.

This article examines the anonymous nineteenth century Russian work, The Way of the Pilgrim, and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and looks at the ways in which each author appeals to the Bible as authority, whilst at the same time allowing space for other interpretive authorities, thus enabling the Bible to be internalised as the Word of God in particular lives.

This article examines the treatment of prayer in the writing of two prominent religious writers of the seventeenth century, the Anglican priest-poet George Herbert and the Dissenting tinker-preacher John Bunyan, best known for his authorship of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The spiritual and literary sensibilities of Bunyan and Herbert overlap in substantial ways despite their differing positions in the religious politics of the period, positions that inform different and sometimes conflicting approaches to prayer. I argue that although Herbert and Bunyan have disagreements on the form of prayer, especially on the use of written liturgical prayers, they largely agree on the spirit of prayer.

Whilst in the Fleet in the summer of 1639 the Leveller John Lilburne made a dramatic claim: ‘I have read a great part of the Booke of Martyrs, with some Histories of the like kinde: and I will meantaine it, that such an unparaleld Act of crueltie and barborous tiranie, as have been exercised upon mee, is not to be found in them all’. Lilburne was not alone in depicting his prison suffering as far exceeding those recorded in John Foxe’s sixteenth-century martyrology 'Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Dayes' (1563), or the ‘Book of Martyrs’ as it was more commonly known at the time. When imprisoned in Oxford Castle in 1643, the Parliamentarian soldier and later General Baptist leader, Edmund Chillenden, exclaimed that his prison ordeal would ‘fill divers hundred sheets of Paper to make a second Book of Martyrs’, one that would even surpass it ‘with more sadder Stories then are to be found in Queen Maries cruelties’.This essay investigates how Nonconformist prison writers, contrary to the statements above, did inevitably and irresistibly re-do rather than out-do Foxe. By examining the Foxean cues they re-used and recycled, we can begin to see how their accounts were a complex palimpsest of conceptual, mnemonic and journalistic representations of imprisonment in early modern Britain.

In their endeavors to persuade their readers and hearers to conversion and godly living, Puritan writers and preachers in early modern England make use of the three modes of persuasion identified by Aristotle: logos (appeal to rational argument), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (appeal to the perceived credibility of the speaker). Although deploying rhetorical techniques, Puritan writers seek to manifest a Spirit-wrought sincerity, understood as earnest expression flowing from doctrinal conviction, inward spiritual experience, and a heartfelt desire to persuade others. This article explores these dynamics in the works of William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, and John Bunyan.

The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress is an extraordinary 8-foot by 800-foot painting that was created in 1851 and thought lost for a full century. Rediscovered in 1996 and fully restored in 2012, it illustrates John Bunyan’s iconic book The Pilgrim’s Progress—first published in 1678 and in print continuously since then—a heart-stopping allegory of trial and faith in which the hero, Christian, battles giants, monsters, tricksters, and his own weaknesses to reach the Celestial City. Moving panoramas were a mid-nineteenth-century precursor to the motion picture, massive canvases that were scrolled across a stage and accompanied by a lecturer and music. One of only a handful that survive today, the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the most popular and important moving panoramas of its day, with designs by rising luminaries of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting: Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Daniel Huntington, and others. Scholars and fans of theater and film, panoramas, American art, religious studies, literature, and The Pilgrim’s Progress itself will value this beautifully illustrated volume.

Bunyan's Pilgrim, an engraving first published 1853,  took 5 years to engrave, based on Hammatt Billings sketches of the same.  Produced only in Black and white, with some copies tinted with colour wash. Some of the art critics at the time had given the engraving very negative reviews, although the print was popular with the public at the time.  My aim was to find if it was possible to improve the engraving by colorizing using various software (2020)  The picture has a lot going for it, in spite of the critics, for sure I understand what they are saying ...Hopefully colorizing with today's technology will show this forgotten masterpiece in the way it should be. The paper based on a blog post gives a short history and explanation.  https://iparanastudio.blogspot.com/2020/09/bunyans-pilgrim.html

Online bibliography of books and articles related to John Bunyan published from 1988 to the present (last updated summer 2020). Compiled by Galen K. Johnson, Tabatha Raiees-Dana, Sarah Cory, and David Parry on behalf of the International John Bunyan Society. Freely available online at http://johnbunyansociety.org/bunyan-bibliography/ . Please feel free to notify me at d.parry@exeter.ac.uk of any omissions and new publications primarily or substantively focusing on Bunyan.

Ebook version available at https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319521978 .

Early modern writers of both literary and theological texts betray anxieties over how to distinguish between the work of God and the devil. Martin Luther, for instance, writes that “The devil so clothes and adorns himself with Christ’s name and works and can pose and act in such a way that one could swear a thousand oaths that it is truly Christ himself.”

This is due to Satan’s ability to transform himself into an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), a passage referenced by German humanist Johannes Susenbrotus in his rhetorical textbook Epitome troporum ac schematum (c.1540) in connection with the figure of paradiastole. As Quentin Skinner has explored, paradiastole is the technique either of extenuating a vice by describing it as the virtue that it most resembles, or of denigrating virtue to make it appear as a vice. While Skinner has highlighted how paradiastole was deployed in early modern political discourse, my chapter extends Skinner’s analysis to explore notions of diabolic deception in religious writing of the period and in literary works by Milton, Bunyan, and Shakespeare.

In English Puritan practical divinity, the paradiastolic dynamic of satanic rhetoric goes beyond the outward ethical sphere of classical rhetoric into one’s inward spiritual disposition – the devil seeks to confuse carnal presumption for saving faith and vice versa. John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative The Pilgrim’s Progress dramatizes the satanic paradiastolic dynamic in the person of characters such as the Flatterer. In a less overtly religious context, satanic paradiastole surfaces in the works of Shakespeare, both in verbal references to the devil, and in the characterisation of devilish human manipulators. I also suggest that satanic paradiastole offers a key to the interpretive crux in John Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan resolves, “Evil, be thou my good.”

The Recorder 22 (Spring 2016), 8–10.

A short note on a letter I discovered from John Brown of Bedford (Bunyan's 19th century biographer and successor as pastor to the Bedford Independent congregation), to J.B. Lightfoot, bishop of Durham and noted New Testament/patristics scholar. The letter is stuck into a copy of Brown's biography in the possession of the Cambridge Divinity faculty library, whose pages (as of the time of writing) have been cut only partway through.

Freely available at https://johnbunyansociety.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/2016-recorder1.pdf

Published in Luther and Calvinism: Image and Reception of Martin Luther in the History and Theology of Calvinism, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis and J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 379–407.

Chapter downloadable for $6 US from publisher, or contact me if interested:
http://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/abs/10.13109/9783666552625.379#.WVPlUWjyvIU
(First 413 hits for draft conference paper under revision.)