In 1649, the English people suffered a tremendous wound, a psychic lesion, as they both instigated and endured the killing of their king, Charles I. John Bunyan came of age in the shadow of this rupture in the political, social, and religious order of the nation; his life and works follow the contours of the Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. Yet when compared with such contemporaries as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or Samuel Pepys, he is strikingly silent about the political events of those tumultuous years. In his single-minded spirituality, Bunyan endures as an intrigu ... More

In 1649, the English people suffered a tremendous wound, a psychic lesion, as they both instigated and endured the killing of their king, Charles I. John Bunyan came of age in the shadow of this rupture in the political, social, and religious order of the nation; his life and works follow the contours of the Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. Yet when compared with such contemporaries as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or Samuel Pepys, he is strikingly silent about the political events of those tumultuous years. In his single-minded spirituality, Bunyan endures as an intriguing figure, but his conflicted political legacy remains subject to dispute. This book brings together eight early modern scholars who radically reassess the crises of authority, agency, and sexuality that have surrounded Bunyan since he first began to preach and to write. In his anguished, self-conscious pursuit of salvation, Bunyan augurs the dilemmas of modernity, and at the same time, vigorously espouses dissent and liberty. The essays in this collection examine the societal and psychological fault lines in the early modern culture that Bunyan himself epitomizes.