Category Archives: Communication

Reading Dissent and Dissenting Readers in the Reformation World, 1500-1800

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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

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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.

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Review of the year

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Dear Members,

This is my third and last Christmas message and, like all past Presidents before me, I hardly know where the time went.

The year has been even busier than usual for the committee members. At long last, we have delivered one of our early promises : to make it possible to join the IJBS, and renew our subscriptions online, with Paypal or credit card. I would especially like to thank our General Secretary, Bob Owens, who has liaised for months with the banks, our treasurers, and an IT developer to secure the website and install the payment buttons. This should make it easier for our membership to grow.

BunyanXmas

A few months ago, we welcomed our 100th member. It’s a real pleasure to witness the steady growth of our Society, but at the same time this makes it difficult for us to operate along the lines we have known in the past and to make sure all our members are regularly appraised of new developments.

We have therefore taken the opportunity to have the website professionally redesigned, so that you can find information more easily. The front page is now static and the announcements have been moved to a dedicated section, so please don’t forget to check it regularly. We have grouped the ‘Resources and publications’ together, which is where you can now find The Recorder (the most recent issue, edited by Nathalie Collé, is now available also to non-members), as well as Bunyan Studies and the Bunyan bibliography that David Parry updates on a regular basis. We have created a new page for members’ publications. If you have recent books or articles out, related to Bunyan or early modern Nonconformity, please let us know. Our Vice President, David Gay, has also created a Facebook page that you can Like from the website.

On the academic front, we had an excellent study day last April in Bedford, which you can read about here. Bedford is of course an appropriate place to launch what we hope will become a regular series, alternating between Bedford and Newcastle, thanks to Bob Owens and David Walker.

Most of the year has been dedicated to preparing our triennial conference next July in Aix-en-Provence, and we were able to release the prelimary programme a month ago. Registration will open in February or March and all the details will be posted on the conference page on the website. As you know, ten doctoral students and early career researchers will be able to come to Aix to present their work, thanks to an anonymous benefaction that we received last year. The IJBS has also offered them free membership for a year, so we are delighted to welcome them.

Neil Keeble, and the members of the Greaves committee, Ann Hughes and Cynthia Wall, have been very busy, given the many publications in our field, and the shortlist of books selected for the Greaves Prize will be made known in the new year. The winner will be announced in Aix.

Finally, the next Bunyan Studies will be out very soon, and you can expect yet another wonderful issue.

As usual, many thanks to our committee, Nathalie, David G., Galen, Bob and David W., for all their hard work on behalf of our Society, and for their commitment and dedication to our author.

We wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year and hope to see you in the summer in Provence for a beaker full of the warm South!

Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université

IJBS on Facebook

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The IJBS has now a public Facebook page that you will find at: https://www.facebook.com/johnbunyansociety

This page will enhance public awareness of the Society. You can Like it and promote it in anyway you think fit.

In parallel, our Facebook group is still running; we now have over 70 members from all parts of the world. Should you want to become a member of the group, please contact our Vice President, David Gay, dgay@ualberta.ca.

 

 

 

Review of the year

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This time last year the IJBS Executive Committee set itself some ‘challenges’ for 2014, most of which (though not all!) have been met:

Xmas Greeting IJBS 2014

  • the first was to redesign The Recorder, which appeared last June for the first time in a magnificent electronic edition supervised by Nathalie Collé-Bak, now available to download;
  • the IJBS was beginning to suffer from the lack of a constitution and bye-laws. With the best of current practice in mind, and working from David Gay’s account of the role of the officers, the Executive Committee produced a new set of documents, overseen by our past Presidents, which are now also available on this site;
  • in December 2013, the possibility of a meeting at Harlington Manor was a mere glint in our eyes. Thanks to the diligence of General Secretary Bob Owens, and to the hospitality of the Blakeman family, it became a reality on 23 May 2014. As you will see below, such meetings are now a feature of IJBS;
  • finally, David Parry revised and updated one of our major resources, the online and fully-searchable Bunyan Bibliography, adding 167 new references for the period 2010 to 2014.

We had promised you that this site would be revamped, and in particular that the addition of payment buttons would allow you to renew your membership online. This has not yet been accomplished due to delays beyond the control of the Executive Committee, but we are now back on track and, as I write, ‘e-commerce’ solutions are being put in place. We are confident that you will soon be able to renew your subscription online. As this is put into operation, you may experience some small disruptions to the website in the next few weeks.

 Other developments, we had not fully anticipated :

    • following the regional Harlington meeting in 2014, an IJBS one-day conference has now been set up by David Walker and Bob Owens. This will take place on 10 April 2015 at the University of Bedfordshire. Many thanks to our two officers for organising this day, which promises to be a great success and a good opportunity for our members to meet again. You can download the call for papers here. Please do not forget to register to attend;
    • we have instituted two new kinds of membership: an Institutional Membership for libraries, and an Honorary Membership. In November 2014, Stanley Fish, Isabel Rivers, Terry Waite and David Wykes accepted to become the first Honorary Members of the IJBS. From 2016 our members will be able to nominate personalities who will be voted on at the AGM;
    • IJBS publicity leaflets have been prepared by our General Secretary and members should all have received some copies. Please distribute them as you see fit as they are a good way of increasing the visibility of the Society;
    • finally, although we knew that the Aix 2016 conference was shaping up, little did we know that we would be the recipients of a major private donation that would allow young researchers to join us (see the Post below). At this festive season, let us thank our anonymous benefactor.

May I also take this opportunity to announce that four wonderful scholars have accepted to give plenaries at the 2016 conference : Alec Ryrie (Durham), Andrew Spicer (Oxford Brookes), Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) and Helen Wilcox (Bangor). We look forward to welcoming them in Aix. The call for papers will be out in January, so watch this space.

In the coming year, your Executive Committee will do its utmost to ensure new benefits for the IJBS. There will be the Bedford day-conference, another issue of The Recorder, preparations for Aix 2016 will mature, and this site should offer the opportunity to renew membership online. As I urged you last spring in The Recorder, please do not hesitate to get in touch to suggest new ideas, propose directions in which you think IJBS should develop in the near future and ponder opportunities for regional meetings.

None of this could have been achieved without the time and dedication of the IJBS officers: Nathalie Collé-Bak, David Gay, Galen Johnson, Bob Owens and David Walker.

 Wherever you are, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year,

 Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université

 

Honorary Members

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The international John Bunyan Society is delighted to announce that four distinguished scholars and personalities have been honored with Life Membership on 1st November 2014:

Professor Stanley Fish

Professor Isabel Rivers

Terry Waite CBE

Dr David L. Wykes

“Life-membership is conferred upon scholars, experts, or public personalities of international standing whose life and work have promoted awareness of Protestant history and literature and/or contributed significantly to research, teaching and public engagement in the field of Protestantism and Dissenting studies.”

For more information about our Honorary Members, click here.

A donation for IJBS

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It is with very great pleasure that I announce that an anonymous donor has donated the sum of £10,000 (€12,500/US$16,500) to the International John Bunyan Society.

The donation is primarily intended to establish a number of bursaries for doctoral students, and for young researchers not in full-time employment, who wish to attend and present a paper at the 2016 triennial conference in Aix-en-Provence, with the remainder to be targeted towards key strategic areas identified by the Executive Committee for the development of the Society.

Thanks to the bursaries, young scholars will be given a unique opportunity to present their work and projects at the conference. More information about the application and selection process will be posted in due course on the website, but may I encourage all supervisors to start publicising the bursaries as widely as possible in their institutions and among their students.

I know all members will all join me in expressing our deepest thanks to our donor whose generosity will ensure that the IJBS carries on promoting the study of Bunyan and the history and culture of Dissent, through a renewed attention to its young and talented scholars.

Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université

Aix-en-Provence 2016

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“Voicing Dissent in the Long Reformation”

The Eighth Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society

(Aix-en-Provence, 6-9 July 2016)

The preparations for the Aix-en-Provence triennial conference of the IJBS are well under way and we have posted a preliminary announcement on our ‘Conference’ page. Please check the page regularly as we will keep updating it. The Call for Papers will be issued in January 2015 and proposals for papers and panels will be accepted until 31st May 2015.

We are looking forward to hearing from you all in due course and welcoming you to Provence!

Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université

By Guillaume 1995 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sénanque Abbey. By Guillaume 1995 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Appeal from Bunyan Meeting, Bedford

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The IJBS is happy to relay this appeal from Bunyan Meeting, Bedford

‘Bunyan Meeting in Mill Street, Bedford is one of the most important Nonconformist churches in the UK. Its origins go back to 1650, when a group of men and women began worshipping in Bedford outside the confines of the Church of England. In 1672, shortly after John Bunyan was elected pastor, the congregation purchased an orchard in Mill Lane (now Mill Street), and a barn in the orchard was licensed for preaching.

Capture d’écran 2014-08-19 à 17.29.14

And so began the history of Bunyan Meeting. The Reverend Christopher Damp, the present minister, is the twenty-first minister of the church. The building that stands today is the third purpose-built church on the site. It was opened in 1849 and the schoolrooms which back onto Castle Lane were added in 1866.

Today, Bunyan Meeting is a thriving town-centre Church, which as well as still holding two services on a Sunday, is open throughout the week, Tuesday–Saturday, and is ‘home’ to various community groups as diverse as Sight Concern and Bedford Town Band.

 Why this appeal?

Unfortunately, time and the elements have caught up with the buildings and today’s congregation and trustees find themselves facing a repair bill of over £660,000. The roof over the schoolrooms, which was only re-slated about 30 years ago, has to be replaced as the Spanish slates which were used have reacted with our environment and climate and holes have appeared in as many as 60% of them’.

Carry on reading about the Appeal and how you can contribute here.

IJBS’s meeting at Harlington Manor

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Joel Halcomb, David Parry, Roger Pooley, Bob Owens, David Walker, Nathalie Collé-Bak, Tamsin Spargo, Michael Davies, Anne Page, Christopher Page, Lydia Saul and Vera Camden.

Joel Halcomb, David Parry, Roger Pooley, Bob Owens, David Walker, Nathalie Collé-Bak, Tamsin Spargo, Michael Davies, Anne Page, Christopher Page, Lydia Saul and Vera Camden.

To stand in the very room where John Bunyan waited to be interrogated at Harlington manor in Bedfordshire; to follow his footsteps into the main part of the house where the questioning took place; to find the same panelling on the wall that Bunyan would have seen and the same fireplace where the fire would have been roaring that chilly November evening in 1660: this was all an extraordinary experience for twelve members of IJBS when the society held its first ever spring-day meeting at Harlington Manor on 23rd May 2014. There were members from France, Britain and the USA.

Bunyan window in Harlington Church

After a short train journey from London St Pancras, we gathered for a pub lunch in the village before meeting the present owner of Harlington Manor, David Blakeman. David then gave us a most interesting and erudite tour of the house culminating in the visit to the two rooms mentioned above. This was a moving occasion for us all, since for most of us it was our first visit to the house and gardens.

We then retreated to the dining room for a meeting held in two parts: Vera Camden, currently on a research trip to Dr Williams’s Library, London, spoke about her forthcoming edition of Mary Franklin’s commonplace book and ‘experience’, a manuscript of the 1680s taken up a hundred years later by her granddaughter Hannah Burton. Then David Parry presented some of his current work on conceptions of rhetoric and allegory in Puritan writings.

???????????????????????David Blakeman’s six-year old son Alex is currently collecting for Addenbrookes charity, so during our break, after the two papers, we were served tea and delicious cakes for a modest contribution to this worthy cause.

The second part of the afternoon was dedicated to IJBS business, according to the following agenda:

  • 2016 Triennial Conference planning (report by President, Anne Page)
  • Links with other relevant societies
  • Membership (report by Secretary, Bob Owens)
  • Finance (report by European Treasurer, David Walker)
  • Website and communication with members (report by President, Anne Page)
  • The Recorder (report by Editor, Nathalie Collé-Bak)
  • Bunyan Studies (report by Editor, Bob Owens)

 IMG_0943The ensuing discussion concluded that the IJBS should pursue three main actions in the next few months: (1) to encourage institutional membership by targeting libraries and institutions with Dissenting interests, (2) to place panels, introducing the society and its work, in the programmes or accompanying literature for international conferences, and (3) to institute a category of Honorary Membership. Furthermore, Bob Owens and David Walker announced plans for an Annual Bunyan Symposium to be convened conjointly by the Universities of Bedfordshire and Northumbria. Those who have seen the magnificent (and imminent) edition of The Recorder prepared by Nathalie Collé-Bak were able to give her the warmest praise and thanks, while others wait in eager anticipation!

Owner David Blakeman with Committee members Bob Owens, David Walker and Nathalie Collé-Bak

Owner David Blakeman with Committee members Bob Owens, David Walker and Nathalie Collé-Bak

The IJBS Harlington day was a truly memorable event, combining historical interest, research, Society business and true companionship. We hope to hold another one of these before too long! We would all like to thank David Blakeman and his family most warmly, for welcoming us to a house of such very great significance to Bunyanists, Bob Owens, for devising the magnificent programme, and the members of the IJBS who were willing to contribute in this way to the life of our Society.

Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université