Call for Papers
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
June 18-20, 2025
Plenary Speakers: Angelica Duran (Purdue University), Edward MacDonald (UPEI)
‘Nonconformist Teaching’ is a multi-disciplinary and international conference which investigates approaches to learning, teaching, and education generally among Puritans, Dissenters and/or Nonconformists, during the Long Reformation, 1500-1800, building on the discussions of “Reading Dissent” at the 2022 conference. Possible topics include
In conjunction with the L. M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we also invite sessions on the intersection between Montgomery and Bunyan studies. Miscellaneous sessions on your own work and work in progress on any theme relating to the Society’s scope are also encouraged.
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 brief biography (100 words), along with a title and brief abstract (250-words) of a 20-minute paper, or for panels (3 x 20 minute papers) – no later than October 15, 2024 – to Shannon Murray: smurray@upei.ca.
SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN
Deadline: 28 June 2024
The International John Bunyan Society’s (IJBS) annual Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize recognises the cutting-edge research of junior scholars in the field of early modern religion and dissent.
Criteria:
Please send all submissions by 28 June 2024 to the Society’s General Secretary, Michael Arbino, via JohnBunyanSociety@outlook.com.
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.
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.
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.
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 readingThe 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The International John Bunyan Society 