Reformation,
Revolution, Restoration: The Texts and
David
Gay, University of Alberta
The third
triennial conference of the International John Bunyan Society convened in
Cleveland, Ohio under the auspices of Kent State University. The conference was a rich
intellectual and cultural experience envisioned by Vera Camden, President of
the Society, and brought into being with the superb assistance of Kimberly Hill
and others.
A remarkable range
of perspectives marked the presentations, but several distinct themes and
prominent issues emerged. Margaret Ezell's opening plenary address,
"Bunyan's Women, Women's Bunyan" established gender as a key issue
for the conference. Tom Luxon developed this in the second plenary address,
"Friendship, Marriage, and the Puritan Self," a paper that focused on
relations between marriage and male friendship in Paradise Lost. Gender
issues remained a strong focus for a number of panels, including the special
panel convened by the Brown University Women's Writing Project (panelists Julia
Flanders, Teresa Feroli, Sylvia Brown, Kimberly Hill) and chaired by Margaret
Breen. Doctoral candidate Kelly
Laycock offered a challenging new reading of Bunyan entitled "Gendering
Mansoul: Bunyan and the Female Body in The Holy War," presented in
a panel on “Gendering Bunyan” with papers by Michael Davies, David
Hawkes, and Jean Graham. A session on "Women as Context and Content"
included papers on Mary Rowlandson (Katherine Gillespie), Jane Turner (Arlette
Zinck), Quaker women preachers (Maryanne Cole) and women's literacy (Maxine
Hancock). David Norbrook's plenary helped to link this focus to a range of
other political and cultural themes by comparing Milton's Paradise Lost
with Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder in the context of republican
writing and epic poetry.
Several memorable
papers explored Bunyan's presence in a range of historical contexts and time
periods. Robert Collmer documented evocations of The Holy War in the
context of three crises from the nineteenth century to the First World War.
Dayton Haskin uncovered Bunyans' place in "English 15," the first
seventeenth-century English course offered at Harvard in the 1880's, a course
that would be taken by T.S. Eliot in later decades. Sharon Achinstein's closing
plenary, "Bunyan and the Politics of Remembrance," reflected on
aspects of Bunyan's legacy with attention to the memorial in Bunhill Fields.
Further, linked
themes included the relationship between psychology and literary history. Peter
Rudnytsky, a distinguished historian of both
psychoanalysis and seventeenth-century literature, spoke on the subject
of trauma in seventeenth-century literature, with emphasis on the civil wars
and regicide in a paper entitled "Dissociation and Decapitation."
David Norbrook, his respondent , replied with a critique of the notion of a
"dissociated sensibility" separating the literary cultures of the
period. This session was an extraordinary meeting of disciplines and
professions as it was attended by many of Vera Camden’s fellow
practitioners from the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society.
Nigel Smith's
plenary address, "Living in the 70's," extended the issues of trauma
and crisis from the standpoint of social history by mapping the opening of The
Pilgrim's Progress onto the great Fire of 1666. Nigel elucidated some
memorable connections between the fires that swept through London and the image
of fire in literature and its associations with the power of language and with
rebellion.
His address resonated with other presentations
emphasizing social history, including those by Katsuhiro Engetsu, Kathleen
Lynch, and others. The three broad categories of the conference title also
served to focus key issues. If Revolution offered a context for the political
dimensions probed by David Norbrook and Nigel Smith, Reformation framed studies
of rhetoric and biblical interpretation by Jameela Lares, Hannibal Hamlin, and
Linda Mitchell as well as studies of Quaker and other dissenting literature by
Galen Johnson, Sylvia Brown, Rhoda Cairns, Dana Och. Roger Pooley’s
probing examination of antinomianism in Bunyan and the period can also be set
within this context. Restoration framed treatments of Royalist iconography by
Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, and interdisciplinary treatments of literature,
science and visual art by Matthew Hunter and Angelica Duran. Papers by U. Milo Kauffman and
Maryanne Cole examined the theme of travel in Bunyan and in the journey
narratives of Quaker women preachers.
The cultural
experience of the conference was as rich as the conference program. Delegates
toured the city of Cleveland, making memorable stops at the Cleveland Museum of
Art and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the latter a natural site of
pilgrimage for all scholars of nonconformity. Apollo's Fire, an early music
consort, presented a narration of The Pilgrims Progress in reverse order
from the Celestial City (with sacred music) to the Vanity Fair and the City of
Destruction (with the more "profane" ballads of the period). An
excursion to the campus of Kent State University included a moving visit to the
site where four students were killed in a confrontation with the National Guard
in 1970 at the peak of the anti-war protest movement. A display of rare
editions of Bunyan, augmented by Robert Collmer's exceptional personal
collection, and including many fine illustrated editions, was presented in the
Special Collections Room at the university library.
In a final session
on the future of Bunyan in teaching and research, Tom Corns, whose paper was
read in absentia, issued a provocative challenge to Bunyan scholars set
against various trends in seventeenth-century literary scholarship. Tom's
attention to the role of Bunyan in literary anthologies stimulated some
important reflections on how and where Bunyan appears in undergraduate
teaching. While the discussion Tom encouraged focused rightly on Bunyan and his
works, the broad perspective created on Bunyan and his times by the conference
as a whole implied the potential strengths of scholarship that takes Bunyan as
a center within a widening and inclusive compass. All three of the conferences
held so far have emphasized Bunyan's England, and this inclusiveness has
strengthened the community of scholars who find Bunyan in their field of
critical vision. For that strength
and inclusiveness, we are indebted to Vera Camden and her able supporters. Professor Camden is planning a volume
containing plenary addresses and selected papers, and a special issue of Bunyan
Studies on Bunyan and gender.
Bob Owens, a distinguished Bunyan scholar and editor, succeeds Vera as
President. We will all look
forward to the next conference in England in 2004.