The Reproductive Word: Gender and Textuality in the Writings of John Bunyan

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 11; p. 23
• Main Author: Brown, Sylvia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2003
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

[...]the impossibility of the hermaphroditic preacher, especially for the patriarchal Christianity in which both the Apostle Paul and John Bunyan operate, signals this lack of ownership.6 In other words, the use of these and other estranging metaphors, like the common one of Puritan ministers as breasts,7 is a kind of disowning. Sermon texts, books of practical divinity, spiritual autobiography, instructive allegories like The Pilgrim's Progress: these are often simply called 'good books' and their goodness lies in their fertility. [...]the sixteenth-century Puritan Robert Cawdrey hopes that his book of similes, which 'so lively, and truly' express 'the plaine meaning of the word of God', will 'breede and increase ... knowledge, wisedome, and vertue'.18 Bunyan understands (and advertises) The Pilgrim's Progress in these same terms. [...]the arrival of texts in the mind does not even seem to depend on the act of opening a book and seeing what is in it. Aston traces resemblances to the title pages of other Bibles where the distributing monarch is crowned (e.g. pp. 156 and 158), which Henry is not in the 1539 frontispiece. Since the picture in the Interpreter's House does not seem to have a counterpart in the emblem books, it is possible that the iconography there represented textually might have come from a Bible frontispiece such as these. 12 See OED 'authorized' ppl. a. 3.