The International John Bunyan Society (IJBS) is pleased to welcome submissions to its new blog series. Discussions can include any aspect of religious nonconformity in Britain and abroad from the period between 1500-1800.
IJBS BLOG SERIES 2021
Category Archives: Announcements
The Recorder 2021
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
The annual IJBS newsletter The Recorder will be composited together close to the end of the summer, and is still looking for more pieces. We already have an excellent portion of content, but more pieces are always appreciated. Please share more of what you’re writing, reading, and hearing about.
We are happy to accept entries throughout July, but would prefer to receive confirmation of all entries by 30 June 2021. We’re looking for the following sorts of things, but anything in the spirit of interest to the society would be splendid:
- Notes
- Short Articles
- Meditations/reflections/strategies on teaching and researching Bunyan in the era of COVID-19
- Reviews and/or descriptions of recent publications (yours or others’)
- Reports on past and upcoming events (including the upcoming tenth triennial IJBS conference)
- Calls for papers
- Book and media reviews that have direct or indirect relevance to Non-conformist writing (if not already consigned for Bunyan Studies)
- Interviews
- Dissertations and post-doctoral research (abstracts, announcements, etc.)
We are especially interested in hearing about forthcoming books or edited collections! Images of all types should serve, though ones in JPG or .PNG with better resolution are preferred.
If you want to see how entries have functioned in the past, the previous issues are available at https://johnbunyansociety.org/the-newsletter/past-issues/. Please send your submissions to the following addresses, preferably with a subject heading referring to The Recorder: rbergen@corpuschristi.ca; or richard.angelo.b@gmail.com.
If you have any questions, please let us know. We greatly look forward to seeing your contributions.
Wishing safety and wellness to all!
Richard Bergen (Editor of The Recorder)
Reading Dissent and Dissenting Readers in the Reformation World, 1500-1800
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.
2021 IJBS Early Career Essay Prize Winner
The International John Bunyan Society is pleased to announce that its 2021 Early Career Essay Prize has been awarded to Michelle Pfeffer (@michpfeffer) for the essay: ‘Mortalism and the Social Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy in Yorkshire at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’. The winner’s certificate and cash prize of £300 has been sent to Michelle by Professor David Walker, IJBS President. The selection panel was chaired by David Walker, and its members were Rachel Adcock, David Parry and Robert W. Daniel.
Glorious Sounds: Exploring the Soundscapes of British Nonconformity: 1550-1800
Virtual Conference, 14-15th April 2021
The International John Bunyan Society welcomes you to the Glorious Sounds: Exploring the Soundscapes of British Nonconformity: 1550-1800 – a virtual conference hosted by Northumbria University, Newcastle and organised in association with the University of Bedfordshire, Keele University, Loughborough University and the University of Warwick.
This major two day multi-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the various ways that sound impacted the lives and writings of early modern Nonconformists and, in turn, their spiritual practices. It will consider:
Hymns/sermons/prayers/catechisms.
Sacred/profane songs.
Ambient noise/s (in houses, churches, prisons).
Psychoacoustics.
Oral culture/s and reading aloud.
Early modern deafness.
Sound, suffering and trauma.
How did godly noises/speeches/music compete with and/or complement one another? Did the propinquity of households/meeting houses/churches hinder or help religious worship? How were the same prayers and sermons spoken/heard differently? Did silence, or its lack thereof, effect the delivery/auditory of God’s Word? In short, what sounds defined and defied British Nonconformity? The full conference programme can be accessed here.
Registration is free, but essential, as places are limited. For more information please visit the conference website.
2021 IJBS Early Career Essay Prize
Image
SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN
Deadline: 1 March 2021
The annual International John Bunyan Society (IJBS) Early Career Essay Prize recognises the cutting-edge research of junior scholars in the field of early modern religion and dissent.
Criteria:
- The competition is open to PhD students and post-doctoral researchers up to two years after their viva.
- To be eligible, applicants MUST be members of the IJBS. Membership enquiries/ subscriptions can be made via the Society’s UK Treasurer: r.c.adcock@keele.ac.uk.
- Applicants can submit an essay of up to 8,000 words (e.g. part of a chapter or a draft of an article or a written version of a conference paper) by 1 March 2021 (as an email attachment). The word count includes footnotes, but excludes title, bibliography and any appendixes (which, however, should not be longer than the text of the essay).
- The name of the author, their affiliation and their role (e.g. final-year PhD student) as well as the word count should be indicated on the title page.
- A brief biography outlining the applicant’s current research project (150 words) is to be included.
This year the IJBS particularly welcomes contributions discussing the pastoral care, medical practices, and welfare of religious Dissenters during the Long Reformation (global perspectives are especially welcome). All submissions will be judged by members of the Society’s Executive Committee who may ask other experts to join them. Candidates will be informed of the outcome by email within a month of the submission date. The winner will be officially announced at the next Regional IJBS Conference in April 2021 (TBC) and will receive a certificate, a financial award of £300, one year’s free membership to IJBS and a year’s subscription to the Society’s peer-reviewed journal: Bunyan Studies.
Please send all submissions by 1 March 2021 to the Society’s General Secretary, Robert W. Daniel, via IJBSSecretary@outlook.com.
2020 IJBS Early Career Essay Prize
The International John Bunyan Society is pleased to announce that the 2020 Early Career Essay Prize has been awarded to Eleanor Hedger, for her essay entitled ‘Singing in the Face of Death: Making Martyrs on the Scaffold during the English Reformation’. The prize was intended to have been announced at the Regional IJBS Conference planned for 16 April 2020, but this event had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the winner’s certificate and prize has been sent to Eleanor by David Walker, IJBS President. The selection panel was chaired by Bob Owens, and the members were Rachel Adcock, Isabel Rivers, and David Walker. 
Eleanor Hedger is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, funded by the Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. A musicologist by training, she completed a BMus in 2014, followed by an MA specialising in Early Music. Her PhD thesis is exploring two unusual and extensive questions: what did the unsettled, conflicted, and turbulent world of post-Reformation England sound like? And what did the sounds associated with conflict, violence, and punishment signify to those that made and heard them? To answer these questions she is carrying out research into the sonic and musical characteristics of conflict and punishment from the start of Mary I’s reign in 1553 until the death of Charles I in 1649. This includes examining the ways in which sound functioned during rituals of punishment, such as public executions and charivari, and also how sound reflected and heightened aspects of social and religious conflict in spaces such as the early modern prison and the parish church. Her argument is that consideration of the sonic experience of such rituals and spaces can serve as a conduit for investigating the complex social, political, and religious tensions that surfaced during this period. Her essay, ‘Heinrich Isaac’s Missa Comme femme desconfortée: A Musical Offering to the Virgin Mary’, has been published in Stefan Gasch, Markus Grassl, and August Valentin Rabe (eds.), Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450–1617): Composition – Reception – Interpretation (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2019), pp. 177–188.
This is the inaugural year of the IJBS Early Career Essay Prize, which is open to PhD Students and to post-doctoral researchers within the first two years after their viva. Applicants must be members of IJBS. The prize is for outstanding scholarly work in the field of early modern religion and Dissent, including its literature, history and reception. Further details about the prize will be posted on the IJBS website.
9th Triennial IJBS Conferenc
NETWORKS OF DISSENT: CONNECTING AND COMMUNICATING ACROSS THE LONG REFORMATION: THE NINTH TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL JOHN BUNYAN SOCIETY
The draft programme for the Ninth Triennial IJBS Conference is now available. Download the conference schedule here.
Wednesday August 14
12:00-6:00 Registration Table: Business Atrium
1:00-2:00 Salter Room HC 3-95: Reception for graduate student delegates.
Plenary Panel 1: 2:15-3:45: Writing and Reading Among Dissenting Clergy
Chair: Roger Pooley
Helen Wilcox (Bangor University): “The Dissenter’s Journal as a Textual Network: the Case of Oliver Heywood”
Tim Cooper (University of Otago): “The Correspondence of Richard Baxter”
Robert Daniel (University of Warwick): “’Read their lives in Mr. Clarke’s collection’: Writing and Reading Networks amongst Dissenting English Clergymen, 1650-1700”
4:00-6:00 Bruce Peel Special Collections
The official opening of the Bunyan Exhibition in Bruce Peel Special Collections (curated by Sylvia Brown). The Bruce Peel is one of the four largest repositories in the world for rare Bunyan editions.
6:15-7:30 Plenary Address 1: Kathleen Lynch (Folger Institute): “‘We Protestants in masquerade’: Burning the Pope in London.” Chair: Sylvia Brown
Thursday August 15
8:45-10:00 Plenary Address 2: Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmith’s. University of London): “Social networks and the publication of continental European writings during the English Revolution” Chair: David Walker
Concurrent Session 1: 10:30-12:00
Bunyan’s Contemporaries
Chair: Helen Wilcox
Jameela Lares (University of Southern Mississippi): “There Is No Way but Or: Method in Bunyan and Milton”
Gary Kuchar (University of Victoria): “The Sounds of Appleton House: Andrew Marvell’s Poetic Audioscapes”
Paul Dyck (Canadian Mennonite University): “Dissenting and Conforming Herbert: tracing the uses of The Temple in the later 17th century”
Towards the Modern and Contemporary
Chair: Rachel Adcock
Andy Draycott (Talbot School of Theology): “Bunyan and Bonhoeffer: honoring prison writers among evangelical inheritors of dissent”
Devin Fairchild (Kent State University): “Anarchy in the UK and Terror in the Garden: a Postcolonial Reading of Paradise Lost and V for Vendetta”
Margaret Breen (University of Connecticut): “Toni Morrison, Temporality, and Networks of Dissent”
12:00-1:00 Lunch
Concurrent Session 3: 1:00-2:30
Travel and Translation
Chair: Kathleen Lynch
Rev. Susanne Gregerson (Independent Scholar): “The first translation of “Pilgrim’s Progress” into Danish”
Shitsuyo Masui (Sophia University, Tokyo): “Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and the 18th-century Transatlantic Evangelical Protestantism”
Roger Pooley (Keele University): “Dissenting Itinerancy”
Memory and Meditation
Chair: Tim Cooper
Rachel Adcock (Keele University): “Memorable Acts and Restoration Dissenting Networks”
Tom Schwanda (Wheaton College): “Remembering John Bunyan through the Writings of George Whitefield”
David Walker (University of Northumbria): “Defoe’s Meditations”
Plenary Panel 2: 3:00-4:45: Women, Print Networks, and Publishing
Moderator: Sylvia Brown
Part 1: Jenna Townend (Loughborough): “Print and literary cultures of dissenting poetry and its readers, 1642-89:
Gary Kelly (University of Alberta): “Sixpenny Print Networks: Bunyan, the Number-trade and Dissent in the Onset of Modernity”
Part 2: Adrea Johnson (University of Alberta): “’I send thee forth’: Bunyan’s Language of Agency in the Work of Susannah Spurgeon”
Vera J. Camden (Kent State University): “Earthly House and Earthly Testimony: Mary Franklin’s Experience” (read in absentia)
7:00-9:00 Anglican Parish of Christ Church, Oliver Neighbourhood
The Appeal of John Bunyan
Friday August 16
8:45-10:00 Plenary Address 3: Alison Chapman (University of Alabama) “Tithes of War. The Early Modern Law of Tithing and Milton’s War in Heaven” Chair: Arlette Zinck
Concurrent Session 5: 10:30-12:00
Allegory and Hermeneutics
Chair: Paul Dyck
Michael Arbino (Kent State University): “Predestination and Divinely Appointed Companionship in The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman”
Richard Bergen (University of British Columbia): “The Word and the World”
Noam Flinker (University of Haifa): “Psalm 51: From Christian Silencing to Judaic Messianism in Mid-17th-Century England”
Bunyan Texts and Contexts
Chair: Jenna Townend
Donovan Tann (Hesston College) “Early Modern Brewing Discourse and Networks of Culpability in John Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman” (1680)
Maxine Hancock (Emerita, Regent College) “Mercie’s Mirrors: Reflections and Deflections in the Pilgrim’s Progress, part 2”
Robert Wiznura (MacEwan University), “Anxiety About Complacency: The Holy War”
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:15 Plenary Address 4: Feisal Mohamed (Graduate Centre CUNY): “Bunyan and the Annus mirabilis of English Law.” Chair: David Gay
AFTERNOON EXCURSIONS: 2:30-5:30
IJBS Business Meeting: 6:15-7:00 Place TBA all are welcome
7:00-10:00 Conference Banquet Papaschase Room: University of Alberta Faculty Club
Announcement of the Fifth Richard L. Greaves Award / Adjournment
2019 IJBS Day Conference Programme
HONEST LABOUR:
EXPLORING THE INTERFACE BETWEEN WORK AND NONCONFORMITY
A Regional Day Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, organized in association with the University of Bedfordshire, Keele University, Loughborough University and Northumbria University.
Martin Hall, Loughborough University, Friday 5 April 2019
PROGRAMME
9.30-10.15 Registration
10.15-10.30 Welcome: Catie Gill
10.30-11.45 Plenary: John Rees (Goldsmiths): ‘The Levellers, Wage Labourers, and the Poor’
11.45-12.00 Coffee
12-1.00 First Panel
Edward Legon (QMUL): ‘Godly Weavers? – Cloth-work and Nonconformity in Seventeenth-century Britain’
Robert Daniel (Warwick): ‘“Work enough to do”: the Labour of Nonconformist Ministers and the Cost of their Ministries’
1.00–2.00 Lunch
2.00–3.00 Second Panel
Alison McNaught (QMUL): ‘Labour and Faith: the Work of Women Printers and Booksellers of Nonconformist Texts during the Long Eighteenth Century’
David Hitchcock (Canterbury Christ Church University): ‘Spiritual Vagrants? – The Troubled Relationship between Work, Mobility, and Nonconformity in England, c. 1650–1700’
3.00–3.25 Coffee
3.25–4.40 Plenary: Thomas N. Corns (Bangor): ‘“In the sweat of thy face”: the Status of Work in the Writing of Bunyan, Milton, and Winstanley’
4.40–4.45 Closing remarks (Rachel Adcock)
REGISTRATION: Attendance is free of charge, but prior registration by 3rd April 2019 is essential. Morning and afternoon refreshments and a light lunch will be provided, costing £15 payable on the day. To register, please access:
Call for Papers: 9th Triennial IJBS Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS
NETWORKS OF DISSENT: THE 9th TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL JOHN BUNYAN SOCIETY 14-17 AUGUST 2019, Edmonton, Canada
Founded at the University of Alberta, the IJBS returns to Edmonton for its 9th Triennial Meeting in 2019. Our conference theme is Networks of Dissent: Connecting and Communicating Across the Long Reformation. We invite proposals for 20-minute individual papers and full-session panels on our theme or any topic relating to the literature, culture and history of the Long Reformation, especially touching on the life, works, and legacy of John Bunyan and other dissenting voices of the seventeenth century. Papers in all disciplines are welcome.
POSSIBLE TOPICS MIGHT INCLUDE:
- Social, economic, political, and ecumenical networks
- Dissenting Academies and educational networks
- Networks of book production and distribution; news networks
- Epistolary networks; the circulation of dissenting culture; dissenting readers
- Transhistorical networks (the long 18th century, the Victorians, and beyond)
- Travel and trade related to dissent; itinerant preaching
- Transnational networks of dissent; global Bunyan
OUR PLENARY SPEAKERS WILL BE:
Alison Chapman (University of Alabama at Birmingham), author of The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law and Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern Literature
Ariel Hessayon (University of London), author of ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution
Kathleen Lynch (Folger Shakespeare Library), author of Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, winner of our society’s 2013 Richard L. Greaves award
Feisal Mohamed (Graduate Center CUNY), author of Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism and In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton.
PLEASE EMAIL YOUR QUERIES AS WELL AS PROPOSALS FOR INDIVIDUAL PAPERS OR PANELS (UP TO THREE PAPERS) TO THE ORGANIZERS at IJBS9@ualberta.ca. Please include a 300-word summary, a title, and a 1-page c.v. Our closing date is March 1, 2019
Organizing Committee: Sylvia Brown (University of Alberta, IJBS General Secretary), David Gay (University of Alberta, IJBS President), and Arlette Zinck (The King’s University, IJBS Founding Member).
Download our Call for Papers flier here: Call For Papers IJBS9
We look forward to your proposals and to welcoming you to Edmonton in 2019!
The International John Bunyan Society 