Report on the International John Bunyan Society Conference in Alberta, Canada, September 28 to October 1, 1995

• Published in: Bunyan studies Vol. 6; no. 6; p. 87
• Main Author: Spargo, Tamsin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Bunyan Studies 01.01.1995; Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
• Subjects: Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); Conferences
• ISSN: 0954-0970

The plenary addresses by Richard Greaves, '"Let the Truth be Free": John Bunyan and the Restoration Crisis of 1667-73' and Neil Keeble, "Till one greater man/Restore us...": Restoration Images in Milton and Bunyan', exemplified the confident but careful work of the historian with an acute sense of the importance of texts and of a literary critic with a fine knowledge of historical difference. Achinstein presented a compelling analysis of Bunyan's use of riddles in the construction of a collective readership and of reading as a means of active resistance within seventeenth-century culture, while Hancock argued that the process of reading texts with extensive marginal notation may have been very different from the reading experience of twentieth-century scholars. Lesley Cormack's paper on religious ideology and the early development of the British empire suggested a number of intriguing connections between emergent scientific, economic and religious discursive fields, focusing on the conjunction of millenarianism and speculative economics. Bunyan's few engagements with the role of women in religious affairs have proved as fruitful an area of research as female autobiographical writing of the period for those exploring issues of gender in seventeenth-century culture, and attention to the implication of Bunyan's writings within the history of relations between races and cultures may prove as productive an area of study.