The 10th Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society

Northumbria University, Newcastle (UK) 7–9 July 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

Plenary Speakers: Marie-Louise Coolahan (NUI Galway), Crawford Gribben (Queen’s University Belfast), Johanna Harris (Exeter), Nicholas Seager (Keele)

‘Reading Dissent’ is a major multi-disciplinary and international conference which seeks to investigate the multifarious ways reading proved vital, or potentially fatal, to the everyday lives of Puritans, Dissenters and/or Nonconformists, both to themselves, their households, wider communities and churches during the Long Reformation, 1500-1800.

POSSIBLE TOPICS INCLUDE:

• Tracing manuscript readers (marginalia/interlining/erasing/re-copying/editing).
• The buying, circulating & borrowing of prescribed/proscribed religious texts.
• Dissenting academies/libraries (their sponsors/users/legacies).
• Seditious reading (controversies/plots/debates/apologetics).
• Communal reading (at conventicles/homes/prisons/chapels).
• Ungodly reading (jestbooks/playbooks/romances/foreign histories/lewd poetry).
• Reading the ministry (through clerical ‘lives’/diaries/church & court books/parish registers/wills).
• Cross-confessional readers (of prayers/psalters/meditations/catechisms/devotional manuals).

Modest travel bursaries (on request via e-mail) are available for postgraduate students whose papers are accepted. Selected papers will form a special issue in the Society’s peer-reviewed journal: Bunyan Studies: The Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture.

Please send a biography (100 words), along  with a CV, title and brief abstract (250-words) of a 20-minute paper, or for panels (3 x 20 minute papers) – no later than 15 September 2021 – to Dr Robert W. Daniel: IJBSSecretary@outlook.com.

For a PDF copy of this CFP click here.