Bunyan, John

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.

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 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.

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.