News and Reports (2013)

'John Bunyan: Conscience, History, and Justice' - The Seventh Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, Princeton University, USA, 12-16 August 2013Organized by Nigel Smith, President of the Society these past three years, this conference included some forty participants, primarily from the fields of literature, religion, and history.The conference began with a plenary lecture by Laura Knoppers (Penn State), on 'Bunyan's Judges'. Knoppers considered how Bunyan countered his experiences of judges who tried and imprisoned him by recognizing his own capacity for judgment, with conscience as his guide. Conscience, judgment, and justice in turn figure prominently in his work. Other conference participants took up these themes. Brett A. Hudson spoke of the biography of Nonconformist Joseph Alleine, and Teresa Feroli of the writing of Quaker Dorcas Dole. Will Revere focused on Bunyan's satiric imagination and, with it, the sustained concern for 'a neighbourly ethic of virtue' evident in his writings. Arlette Zinck rendered Bunyan's preoccupation with these themes relevant to a twenty-first-century political context. Drawing on Bunyan's Seasonable Counsel, she suggested how attention by US government officials to their conscience might 'produce meaningful leverage to provoke ethical reconsideration' of their participation in 'the war on terror'.A different kind of war, Bunyan's The War, was the focus of several scholars. For instance, Daniel V. Runyan reflected on the text's relation to The Pilgrim 's Progress and Sarah Ritcheson explored 'the politics of millennial waiting' in The and Milton's Paradise Regained, while David Walker examined both The and The City in terms of the 'stresses and strains of the Restoration Settlement and the developing history of religious nonconformity'. Finally, Robert G. Collmer's 'Using Bunyan for Holy War in the 1850s in the Crimea and China' not only discussed The as an inspirational text for British soldiers in the Crimea but also pointed out that Chinese translations of The Pilgrim 's Progress as well as the story of Bunyan's life may have played an inspirational role for Taiping king Hong Xiuquan, in the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-64.Translation was also the subject of inquiry for Sylvia Brown and Susanne Gregersen. Brown spoke of Bunyan's importance for German speaking communities and local print cultures in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania, where, for example, the Ephrata Commune produced two issues of Eines Christen Reise nach der seeligen Ewigkeit (The Pilgrim 's Progress) in the mid-eighteenth century. Gregersen looked at Danish translations of English devotional literature, primarily from the English but also from the German. These translations offered 'improvements' on the originals; by toning down Calvinist messages, the translations functioned as vehicles for disseminating the views of Lutheran Orthodoxy.A number of papers focused on Bunyan's importance for nineteenth-century writers and religious leaders. William Davis spoke of the common narrative patterns at work in Bunyan's writings and The Book of Mormon, while Peter Kozdrin sketched out interconnections between Bunyan and Tolstoy. W. R. (Bob) Owens, Catherine R. Harland, and Roger Pooley offered a panel devoted to the novelist William Hale White, who is the subject of the present special number of Bunyan Studies.Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic were the topics of another special panel. David Parry spoke of Bunyan's allegory in The Pilgrim's Progress as 'an alternate mode of rhetoric, seeking to persuade the reader to conversion through reinscribing the reader's perception of reality'. Bethany Joy Bear examined Bunyan's 'grammar of redemption' in A Book for Boys and Girls, while Jameela Lares discussed his 'satanic and salvific' syllogisms in a variety of works, including his earliest, Some Gospel-Truths Opened.Many conference participants took up the issue of spaces. …