Category Archives: Uncategorized

2023 Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize

Posted on by

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN

Deadline: 30 June 2023

The annual International John Bunyan Society (IJBS) Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize recognises the cutting-edge research of junior scholars in the field of early modern religion and dissent.

  • 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 30 June 2023 (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 emotional history, and history of emotions, 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 on 1 September 2023. The winner receives 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 30 June 2023 to the Society’s General Secretary, Michael Arbino, via JohnBunyanSociety@outlook.com.

2022 Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize Winner

Posted on by

The International John Bunyan Society is pleased to announce that its newly renamed Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize has been awarded to Nathan Sherman (@nathansherman) for the essay: ‘The Wapping Baptists: The Varied Location of a Unified People’. The winner’s certificate and cash prize of £300 has been sent to Nathan by Professor Shannon Murray, IJBS President. The selection panel was chaired by David Gay, and its members were Rachel Adcock, Michael Davies and Naomi Pullin. Nathan’s winning entry will be published in the 2023 issue of Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture.

Nathan Sherman is entering his third year of doctoral studies at the University of Leicester as a part-time, international researcher. He currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the U.S. where he is the pastor of a Baptist church. His research focusses on the congregational minute book of the Wapping Baptist church (1677-1711), as both a valuable window into the particular social and cultural realities of this east London people, but also as a significant literary artifact in and of itself.

The annual Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize is open to all international 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.

Meet The Howes: A Family of Puritan Booksellers

Posted on by

As part of the IJBS Blog Series, Joe Saunders (@joe_saunders1), PhD candidate at the University of York, uncovers a new network of Puritan booksellers in seventeenth-century England. Joe’s research is part of a larger article to be published in the Society’s next issue of Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture (forthcoming Autumn 2021).

In the spring of 1638, the Stationer William Howes died, leaving few tangible marks of his young life. He had been a member of the Company of Stationers, the London guild which theoretically controlled most of the printing and bookselling in England. However, he is one of many who barely surface in the records of the Company. Nor does he appear to have been involved in the publication of any surviving texts. Despite this absence, William left a last will and testament in which he bequeathed to his brother Thomas (fl. 1617-1638) three books; ‘Armeniasme Dixon on ye Hebrews Aynswer’, ‘the Comunion of Saintes’ and the ‘Lamentacons of Germany’.[1] William’s membership of the print trade meant he would have acquired them directly through his work or indirectly through his knowledge and contacts within the trade network. However, they were seemingly personal texts, intended for someone William believed would appreciate them as he had done.

Continue reading →

Glorious Sounds: Exploring the Soundscapes of British Nonconformity: 1550-1800

Posted on by

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.

Obituary: Vincent Newey

Posted on by

We write to share the sad news that Vincent Newey, one of the great Bunyan scholars of his generation, has passed away.

Vince was born and raised in the West Midlands. His teaching career began at the University of Liverpool in 1967, where he remained for twenty-two years before his appointment as Professor of English at the University of Leicester. He took early retirement in 2006, due to ill health.

An outstanding literary critic, Vince’s specialisms encompassed the poetry of the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods (Cowper, Gray, and Goldsmith, as well as Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron) alongside the work of several nineteenth-century novelists (Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, and ‘Mark Rutherford’). He published two monographs – Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (1982), and The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (2004) – and edited numerous collections of essays.

Members of the International John Bunyan Society will be familiar with the publications that Vince produced on Bunyan. The first was his ground breaking edited volume, The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views (1980), which included his own fine essay ‘Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind’. Vince also contributed chapters in N. H. Keeble (ed.) John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus (1988), W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim (eds.) Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: Reception, Appropriation, Recollection (2007), and Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (2018). His articles on Bunyan included‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’ (1974);‘Dorothea’s Awakening: The Recall of Bunyan in Middlemarch’ (1984); ‘The Disinherited Pilgrim: Jude the Obscure and The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1987); ‘Mark Rutherford and John Bunyan: A Study in Relationship’ (2012); and ‘Centring Bunyan: Macaulay, Froude, Hale White’ (2013).

As with every piece Vince published, his writings on Bunyan present a master-class in the art of literary criticism. Each displays the hallmarks of his enviable style: one that combines acute insight and sensitivity to language and form with an ambitious intellectual vision, all shaped by a delicate yet robust prose crafted to convey something profoundly engaging and perceptive. A collection of essays, Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900, published in Vince’s honour in 2011, includes an ‘Afterword’ paying full tribute to his achievements, and to his incomparable strengths as a reader, teacher, critic, colleague, and friend.

Vince died on Saturday 16 May, aged 76. He is survived by his wife Sue and their two sons, Matthew and Nathan. A member of IJBS for many years, he will be missed, and we mourn his passing.

Michael Davies and Bob Owens

2020 IJBS Early Career Essay Prize

Posted on by

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. hedger-eleanor-Cropped-230x230

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.

2020 IJBS Regional Day Conference Programme

Posted on by

Glorious Sounds: Exploring the Soundscapes of British Nonconformity, 1550-1800

We are pleased to announce that the programme for the 2020 IJBS Regional Day Conference is now set.The conference is organised in association with University of Bedfordshire, Keele University, Loughborough University, Northumbria University and the University of Warwick. Details are below and a Conference Programme can be downloaded here.

Lipman Building (Room 121), Northumbria University,

 Newcastle, Thursday 16 April 2020

 

PROGRAMME

10.00–10.20      Registration and coffee

10.20–10.30      Introductory remarks: Robert W. Daniel

10.30–11.30      Plenary 1:
Rosamund Oates, Manchester Metropolitan
‘Speaking in Hands:  Preaching, Deafness and Sign Language in Early Modern Europe’

11.30–11.50      Coffee break

11.50–1.00        First Panel
Robert W. Daniel, University of Warwick:
‘Piety, but Quietly: The Devotional Soundscape of Dissenting Households’
Eleanor Hedger, University of Birmingham:
‘Acoustic Territorialisation and Sonic Conflict in the Early Modern English Prison’

1.00–2.00          Lunch

2.00–3.30          Second Panel
Matthew Stanton, Queen’s University, Belfast:
‘Charisma and Controversy: Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) and the Debate About Congregational Song’
Rosamund Paice, University of Portsmouth:
‘Sound Theology: Serious Punning in Paradise Lost’
Mary Fairclough, University of York:
‘Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Dissenting Art of Reading’

3.30–3.40          Coffee break

3.40–4.40          Plenary 2:
John Craig, Simon Fraser University:
‘Sounding Godly: from Bilney to Bunyan’

4.40–4.50          Concluding remarks and departure 
 

REGISTRATION

Attendance is free of charge, but prior registration by 1 March 2020 is essential as numbers are limited. The conference opens at 10.00am, and ends at 5.00pm. Morning and afternoon refreshments and a light lunch will be provided, costing £15 payable on the day. For further inquiries, please e-mail Robert W. Daniel (IJBSSecretary@outlook.com), Rachel Adcock (r.c.adcock@keele.ac.uk), or David Walker (david5.walker@northumbria.ac.uk).  Travel information for Northumbria University can be found here.

9th Triennial IJBS Conferenc

Posted on by

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

Call for Papers: 9th Triennial IJBS Conference

Posted on by

 

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!