Richard L. Greaves Prize: 2016 Committee

The Executive Committee of the IJBS is delighted to announce that the selection Committee of the 2016 Richard L. Greaves Prize has been appointed (see corresponding page on this website). The jury will examine works published between 2013 and 2015 and present the Prize at the 2016 8th Triennial conference in Aix-en-Provence (France).

You can download the Prize’s regulations and procedures here.

Chairman

N. H. Keeble is Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling. His research interests lie in English cultural history of the period 1500-1700, in particular: (i) the Puritan tradition (Baxter, Bunyan, Cromwell, Fox, Marvell, Milton); (ii) prose (fictional and non-fictional); (iii) the Civil War and English Revolution; (iv) constructions of woman and writing by women; (v) the Restoration; (v) early modern print culture. His publications include Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in later seventeenth-century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002). He has edited John Bunyan, Conventicle and Parnassus (1988) and John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing (2003), as well as The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Oxford World’s Classics (1998). He is currently leading a team preparing a scholarly edition of Reliquiae Baxterianae for Oxford University Press. More about Neil Keeble on his institutional website, http://rms.stir.ac.uk/converis-stirling/person/11778.

Judges

Ann Hughes is from February 2014 Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emerita at Keele University, where she was Professor of Early Modern History between 1995 and 2014. She specialises in the history of early modern England with particular interests in the culture, religion and politics of the English civil war or English Revolution. In recent years she has worked on religious debate and polemic, print culture, gender and radicalism. Her publications include Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (2004), Gender and the English Revolution (2011) and, edited with Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009). Her work has benefited from the influence of literary scholars and she is committed to inter-disciplinary approaches. Current projects include a book on preaching during the Revolution, and work on financial accounts and memorialisation during the civil war.More about Ann Hugues on her institutional website,      http://www.keele.ac.uk/hss/facultycontacts/annhughes/.

Cynthia Wall is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Virginia and a specialist of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998) and The Prose of Things (2006) and we owe her the Norton Edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress (2008). She has edited The Concise Companion to the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Blackwell, 2005) and Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms (2001, with Dennis Todd), as well as the Penguin Edition of A Journal of the Plague Year (2003). Her Norton Critical Edition of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is forthcoming in 2014. More about Cynthia Wall on her institutional website, http://www.engl.virginia.edu/people/cw5p.

Nathalie Collé-Bak as new editor of The Recorder

This November has seen a change in the IJBS’s Executive Committee. Our long-standing editor of The Recorder, Chris Garrett, has decided to step down after two terms on the IJBS’s board, and Nathalie Collé-Bak (Université de Lorraine, France) has agreed to replace him. A very warm welcome to Nathalie, and our deepest thanks to Chris for looking so well after our newsletter, a vital link between the IJBS and its members throughout the world. Nathalie will edit her first Recorder next spring (2014), and we wish her the very best in her new task.

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May I take this opportunity to remind all our members that they have premium access to The Recorder as soon as it  is published. The latest issue is then made available to all on this site with a six-month delay.

All enquiries/submissions to The Recorder should now be forwarded to the address especially created for editorial correspondence: IJBSrecordereditor@yahoo.com.

Anne Page, Aix-Marseille Université, November 2013

Pilgrim’s Progress begins 100-part list of best novels

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The Pilgrim’s Progress begins The Observer‘s 100-part list of best novels written in English. Robert Mc Crum explains his enduring popularity: “The Pilgrim’s Progress is the ultimate English classic, a book that has been continuously in print, from its first publication to the present day, in an extraordinary number of editions.

There’s no book in English, apart from the Bible, to equal Bunyan’s masterpiece for the range of its readership, or its influence on writers as diverse as William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, CS Lewis, John Steinbeck and even Enid Blyton”.

View the complete article on The Observer’s website: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/23/100-best-novels-pilgrims-progress

Harlington Manor

Capture d’écran 2013-11-18 à 15.15.01Harlington Manor (previously Harlington House) is arguably the last standing domestic building where John Bunyan is known to have been. Bunyan was interrogated there, probably in the Hall or the great parlour, after his arrest at Lower Samsell (Bedfordshire) in November 1660, by the magistrate who had issued the warrant, Sir Francis Wingate. Tradition has it that Bunyan might have spent the night after his interrogation in a room in Harlington House that was still known as ‘Bunyan’s cell’ in the nineteenth century, but there is no mention of this in Bunyan’s own account of his interrogation. Wingate was joined in the interrogation by the vicar of the nearby Harlington parish Church, William Lindall, who was referred to by Bunyan as ‘an old enemy to the truth’. Ironically, Wingate’s eldest son, also named Francis, married Lady Anne Annesley, the fourth daughter of Arthur Annesley, first earl of Anglesey, and cousin to Samuel Annesley, the Presbyterian minister. When Francis died in 1690, Anne might have shown sympathies towards the Nonconformists and three of their children, Frances, Anna Letitia and Rachel, became members of Bunyan’s former congregation in Bedford. Anna Letitia became the second wife of John Jennings, the tutor of the Dissenting Academy at Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire), where Philip Doddridge studied. We’d be glad to hear from any member of the Society who has more information about the episode of Bunyan’s arrest and interrogation at Harlington.

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 Harlington Manor is now in private hands, and its owners provide accommodation and tours for the public. If you happen to be in Bedfordshire, it is well worth a visit, http://harlingtonmanor.com.

room67Further reading: John Bunyan, A Relation of my Imprisonment, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962); John Brown, John Bunyan (1628-1688): His Life, Times, and Work, tercentenary ed., rev. by Frank Mott Harrison (London, Glasgow, Birmingham: The Hulbert Publishing Company, 1928), p. 125-150; Beth Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 23-33; Richard Greaves’s Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 130-145; Clergy of England Database, http://theclergydatabase.org.uk, Dissenting Academy Online, http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html; David L. Wykes, ‘Jennings, John (1687/8–1723)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14759, accessed 18 Nov 2013]; Newton E. Key, ‘Annesley, Samuel (bap. 1620, d. 1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2013 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/566, accessed 18 Nov 2013]. Of related interest: Harlington Church, http://www.harlingtonchurch.org.uk

The IJBS at Dr Williams’s Library

If you happen to be in London on Saturday 9 November 2013, join us for a one-day conference on dissenting experience, co-convened by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, in partnership with the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. There are distinguished members of IJBS among the speakers (Michael Davies, N. H. Keeble and Kathleen Lynch), and acting Secretary Bob Owens and UK treasurer David Walker will also be in attendance; check the accompanying blog for further details http://dissent.hypotheses.org, and download the full programme here.

© Trustees of Dr Williams's Library

© Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library

Michael Davies (scroll down for a presentation of his forthcoming edition of the Bedford Church Book) will be talking about the Bunyan Church in a paper entitled  ‘Life after Bunyan: Ebenezer Chandler and the Pastorship of the Bedford congregation’. There will be three of these conferences (2013, 2014, 2015), each on a different theme, and we hope that they will also serve as stepping stones to the IJBS 2016 triennial gathering.

John Bunyan in the Virtual Library System (Dissenting Academies Online)

Dr Williams’ s Centre for Dissenting Studies has just launched an augmented version of its Virtual Library System (part of Dissenting Academies Online), the union catalogue of holding and loans of dissenting academies, with the addition of Northern Congregational College. This is a unique opportunity to find out how Bunyan’s works were acquired and circulated (including translations) and is strongly recommended to Bunyan scholars. The IJBS would be keen to hear from members intending to use that tool in their work and analyse the results.

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IJBS Facebook Group

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“I am glad […] that we can walk as Companions in this so pleasant a path.” (The Pilgrim’s Progress)

The International John Bunyan Society Facebook group provides a space for IJBS members and anyone else with a personal and/or professional interest in Bunyan to interact informally. The group provides an opportunity to share news, views, pictures, and web links relating to Bunyan and the IJBS. The group has recently been used to share photos from the IJBS conference, announcements of new publications, calls for papers, and blogs of interest to Bunyanists. All are welcome to join the company!

To join, click on the link below and then click on “Join Group” in the top right hand corner of the page. (You may have to wait for a short time before your request is approved by a group administrator.)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/361527619207/

Welcome to IJBS’s new website

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The International John Bunyan Society (IJBS) exists to promote and support scholarship about Bunyan, his contemporaries, and his influence. We invite all scholars, students, teachers, and members of the general public interested in Bunyan and in early modern nonconformist culture generally to join us.

This new website was designed following the business meeting held at the 7th Triennal Conference, Princeton University, on 13 August 2013. It is currently in progress and will be gradually updated in the next few months. Please contact one of the officers if you cannot find the information you need.