Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan 9780804768450

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TRAUMA AND TRANSFORMATION

Trauma and Transformation The Political Progress of John Bunyan

EDITED BY VERA J. CAMDEN

stanford university press stanford, california 2008

Publication assistance was provided by Kent State University Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trauma and transformation : the political progress of John Bunyan / edited by Vera J. Camden. p. cm. Includes essays originally delivered at the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society held in October, 2001, in Cleveland and Kent, Ohio. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5785-0 (alk. paper) 1. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688—Political and social views—Congresses. 2. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688—Psychology—Congresses. 3. Great Britain— Politics and government—1642–1660—Congresses. 4. Great Britain— Politics and government—1660–1688—Congresses. 5. Dissenters, Religious—England—History—17th century—Congresses. 6. Christian literature, English—History and criticism—Congresses. I. Camden, Vera J. II. International John Bunyan Society. Conference (3rd : 2001 : Cleveland, Ohio and Kent, Ohio) PR3332.T73 2008 828'.407—dc22 2007012977 Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/12.5 Palatino

For Richard L. Greaves “. . . and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” —John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II

Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors xi

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1. Introduction: The Political Progress of John Bunyan vera j. camden 2. Dissociation and Decapitation peter l. rudnytsky 3. A Response to Peter Rudnytsky david norbrook 4. Young Man Bunyan vera j. camden

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5. Bunyan’s Women, Women’s Bunyan margaret j. m. ezell

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6. One Soul Versus One Flesh: Friendship, Marriage, and the Puritan Self thomas h. luxon

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7. Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John Bunyan michael davies

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8. Bunyan and the Antinomians roger pooley

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9. John Bunyan and the Politics of Remembrance sharon achinstein Notes Index

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Acknowledgments

this collection of essays emerged from the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society held in October 2001 in Cleveland and Kent, Ohio. My first debt of gratitude is to the participants in that conference who, Bunyan-like, plugged their ears to all protests and found their way to Ohio in the troubled aftermath of 9/11. All of the essays in this collection, save my own, were delivered by the keynote speakers at this conference. I am grateful that everyone remained dedicated to the volume’s completion. My essay was delivered at the Fourth Triennial Conference of the Bunyan Society held in Bedford, England, in 2004, organized by W. R. Owens, and I thank him for encouraging me to publish it here. Particular thanks are also due to Nigel Smith for many helpful suggestions in the early stages of this project. The late Richard Greaves, magisterial Bunyan scholar, and first president of the International John Bunyan Society, was meant to have had the last word in this book. With great sorrow for his loss, we dedicate our collection to him. Norris Pope, Editor of Stanford University Press, offered immediate and enthusiastic support for a new Bunyan collection; he and his assistant, Emily-Jane Cohen, have been most helpful. The Office of Research and Graduate Studies, the Office of the Provost, and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University, as well as the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, generously supported the 2001 conference. Kent State University helped support the publication of this volume. Colin Gale of the Museum of the Royal Bethlem Hospital in London brought the work of Thomas Hennell to my attention and kindly

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granted permission to reproduce Hennell’s engraving of “John Bunyan in Prison.” My fellow editor at American Imago, Peter Rudnytsky, has sustained me with scholarly insight, editorial clairvoyance, and friendship in this project, as in so many others. Thanks are also due to Kevin Cahill, Roger Craik, Don-John Dugas, Mystye Gorgan, Kim Hill, and Kristen Smith, who have provided generous assistance.

Contributors

sharon achinstein is Lecturer in English at Oxford University. She is the author of Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England and Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, which won the Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America. The author of many articles on John Bunyan, she is currently working on a study of early modern feminism. vera j. camden is Professor of English at Kent State University, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. The author of articles on Bunyan and other seventeenth-century writers, she has edited The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont. She is co-editor of American Imago. She is past President of the International John Bunyan Society. michael davies is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan and has published widely on a range of writers from Shakespeare to John Calvin. margaret j. m. ezell is the John Paul Abbott Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She is the author of The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, Writing Women’s Literary History, and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. In 2004, she held a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is presently at work on a volume in the new Oxford English Literary History series covering 1645–1714.

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thomas luxon is Cheheyl Professor of English at Dartmouth College and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. He is the author of Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation and Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship. He is the current President of the International John Bunyan Society. david norbrook is Merton Professor at Oxford University. He is the author of Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance and Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660. He is the editor of Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder as well as The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659. roger pooley teaches English in the School of Humanities at Keele University. He is the author of English Prose of the Seventeenth Century and a number of articles on Bunyan and other seventeenth-century topics. His edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress is forthcoming from Penguin Classics. peter l. rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida and editor of American Imago. He is the author of Freud and Oedipus; The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud; Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commentators, and Critics; and Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, and Groddeck, which received the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. He was the Fulbright/Sigmund Freud Society Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis in Vienna. He is an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

“Do you recollect the date,” said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, “when King Charles the First had his head cut off?” I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine. “Well,” returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. “So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

CHAPTER

Introduction: The Political Progress of John Bunyan

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david hume writes in his History of England that the “confusion which overspread England after the execution of Charles I” was defined by the “dissolution of all authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, by which the nation had ever been accustomed to be governed.” He proceeds to lament the individualism incipient in the spirit of the English Revolution. “Every man had framed the model of the republic; and however new it was, or fantastical, he was eager in recommending it to his fellow-citizens, or even imposing it by force upon them. Every man had adjusted a system of religion, which, being derived from no traditional authority, was peculiar to himself” (386).1 Hume’s description of the dissenting religious sects that cast off the authority of the Church of England, along with the sovereignty of the Crown, bitterly elaborates on the peculiar intolerance that in his estimation made the Parliament during the Commonwealth more tyrannical than any king. To illustrate Parliament’s inconsistent treatment of even the various religious factions that flourished during the Commonwealth, Hume with masterful irony tells the by-then notorious story of the Quaker James Nayler whose messianic delusions threatened Oliver Cromwell’s supporters enough to land him in Bridewell Prison: James Nayler was a Quaker, noted for blasphemy, or rather madness. He fancied, that he himself was transformed into Christ, and was become the real savior of the world; . . . As he bore a resemblance to the common pictures of Christ, he allowed his beard to grow in a like form: he raised a person from the dead: he was ministered unto by women: he entered Bristol mounted on a horse (I suppose, from the difficulty in that place of finding an ass:) . . . When

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carried before the magistrate, he would give no other answers to all questions than “Thou hast said it.” What is remarkable, the parliament thought that the matter deserved their attention. Near ten days they spent in inquiries and debates about him. They condemned him to be pilloried, whipped, burned in the face, and to have his tongue bore through with a red-hot iron. All these severities he bore with the usual patience. So far his delusions supported him. But the sequel spoiled all. He was sent to Bridewell, confined to hard labor, fed on bread and water, and debarred from all his disciples, male and female. His illusions dissipated; and after some time, he was contented to come out an ordinary man, and return to his usual occupations (523–24).

Infused with the “inferences and conclusions” that he deems it the proper “duty of an historian” (518) to disclose, Hume’s perspective flies in the face of the “Whig” version of the history of the English Revolution more familiar to students of dissent. The latter, of course, looks back on the turbulent events of the mid-seventeenth century as having played a crucial role in the emergence of individual rights and freedom that we now regard as indispensable for citizens of a democratic society. The majority of recent studies of John Bunyan likewise rest on historical assumptions that celebrate his grounding in dissenting traditions and cast him as a lonely pilgrim who foreshadowed the possessive individualism that is the hallmark of the modern subject. It is not necessary to dispute the validity of such interpretations to note that they were not familiar—and indeed would not even have been fathomable—to the vast majority of people who lived through the events in question. Hume, who writes at the remove of only one century from the struggles we now recognize as having yielded the triumph of individual rights and representative governments, does not respond to the debates of a fledgling parliament over Nayler’s threat to political and religious order with the enthusiasm of the “Whig historian.” Despite his tone of satirical mockery, however, Hume’s account of Nayler’s torture and eventual degradation from mounted prophet to “ordinary man” registers the price that had to be paid by the individual whose radical nonconformity brought him or her up against the religious authorities of the most turbulent decades in seventeenth-century England. Against the backdrop of an age in which, as Hume wrote, the “violence of the English parties exceeded anything which we can now imagine” (518), John Bunyan (1628–88) reached maturity. His father was probably a Royalist sympathizer, yet Bunyan himself served in the parliamentary army at the Newport Pagnell Garrison. His dissenting

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beliefs were crystallized during the Interregnum, during which he began to preach and write. A comparison of his career to the foiled mission of James Nayler is by no means far-fetched considering that Bunyan’s own blasphemies, profligacy, mental instability, and unlicensed preaching led him to be accused of practicing witchcraft and other crimes and nearly brought him to a violent end on many occasions. Following the restoration of Charles II, he indeed suffered persecution and was imprisoned for some twelve years. This lengthy ordeal fostered his greatest literary creativity. While in prison he wrote his classic spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, as well as his allegorical masterpiece, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Despite his dissenting beliefs, Bunyan in his later years seems increasingly to have valued stability and peace, and he by no means unequivocally supported the Glorious Revolution that brought an end to the Stuart dynasty in 1688, the year of his own sudden death. His dramatic life thus followed the contours of his tumultuous times: his spiritual pilgrimage was also a political “progress” both in its traversing of a perilous landscape and, ironically, in its ultimate quiescent resignation to the monarchy against which he had once rebelled. Like Nayler, he may be said first to have undergone a trauma in his conversion years by seeking to imitate Christ and then a transformation into an “ordinary man” as he embraced his role as father to his flock. Bunyan’s early writing is awash in metaphors of torture and violence, yet his conversion from profligate soldier to Puritan preacher prepares the way for a final period of conservatism in which he enjoyed considerable influence—and even ease. In his youth, he was drawn to radical sects such as the Ranters, but he later took it upon himself to contend with the Quakers. Indeed, one could argue that much of his career was spent resisting the pull of radical rhetoric that led to the kind of freewheeling individualism identified in Hume’s critique of the assault on the monarchy. Throughout his career, his relationship to authority— both internal and external—was ambivalent, mirroring the upheaval and uncertainty engendered by the crisis of authority within his society. The civil liberties won by political revolution opened up religious challenges, personal anxieties, and often libertine occasions for a young man whose “nature,” as he puts it, was “in its prime.” The essays here collected thus take up the question of Bunyan’s “political progress” from the many different perspectives engaged by such public and private interaction; they each recognize that the political culture of seventeenth-century England is reflected in and reflective of

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the religious, social, cultural, and psychological lives of its subjects. All but my own contribution on Bunyan’s young adulthood were delivered in the shadow of the traumatic events of 9/11 at the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society on October 11, 2001, in Cleveland, Ohio. Certainly, the challenge of gathering together in the United States scholars from around the world so shortly after this national trauma influenced the atmosphere of the conference and has in turn shaped this volume. In retrospect, it seems uncanny how our ongoing crisis appears to have been adumbrated in the cultural cataclysms of Bunyan’s England. Because of this conjunction between his time and ours, our scholarly discourse about religious pluralism and intolerance, rebellion against authority and the temptation to tyranny, the psychological impact of military and domestic service, the gendering of dissent and the dissent from gendered imperatives, and the impact of cultural change on the experience of national subjects—to name just a few of the topics treated in this volume—took on an immediacy that could not have been premeditated but that now appears to have been—to follow Bunyan—“foreordained.” The essays in this volume pretend to no resolution of the problems of political and personal trauma and their transformation in Bunyan’s life and times or in our own. What they do offer, however, is a palette of fresh perspectives on the contexts of Bunyan’s world and work that collectively yield a deeper understanding of his political progress. For John Bunyan’s life and writings follow the contours of the Civil War, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution that shaped seventeenth-century England. Yet when compared to such contemporaries as John Milton, Samuel Pepys, or Andrew Marvell, Bunyan is strikingly silent about the events of those tumultuous years. In his single-minded spirituality, Bunyan endures as an intriguing figure, but his political legacy is more conflicted and remains subject to dispute. He augurs the dilemmas of modernity in his anguished yet self-conscious pursuit of salvation. At the same time, he vigorously espouses dissent and liberty. This volume reassesses the tensions that have surrounded Bunyan since he first began to preach and write. The crises of authority, agency, and identity that pervade his writings reflect the societal and psychological fault lines of the modern culture he himself epitomizes. Most notably, the essays in one way or another all recognize that in 1649 the English people suffered a tremendous wound, a psychic lesion, as they both instigated and endured the killing of a king. This rupture in the social,

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political, and religious order of the nation severed the old from the new: it was a beginning in an end, a birth from a death. Indeed, in Hume’s estimation, “no people could undergo a change more sudden and entire in their manners, than did the English nation during this period” (518). This change, both radical and irreversible, is what Trauma and Transformation charts in the life, works, and times of John Bunyan. In his anchoring essay, “Dissociation and Decapitation,” Peter L. Rudnytsky throws down the revisionist gauntlet by reviving T. S. Eliot’s theory of the seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility” as a watershed of the modern experience, but also links that experience of dissociation to the oedipal victory enacted by Parliament in its violation of the primal taboo against regicide. Rudnytsky’s claim that Eliot’s theory can be “deemed to have been the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century” is grounded in his sophisticated psychoanalytic understanding of the decapitation of Charles I as a cultural, social, and literary trauma. In addition to its oedipal dimension, the regicide was widely assimilated to the biblical paradigm of the Fall, observes Rudnytsky, “thereby fusing religious and political discourses” only to become “enmeshed with private psychological issues of sexuality and self-consciousness” in such major writers of the period as Marvell and Milton. Applying Freud’s theory of “deferred action” to interpret the “epistemological rupture that did occur with the decapitation of Charles I,” Rudnytsky further argues that the cataclysmic events of 1649 collapse history into fantasy and myth in a way that imbues a historical event with ancient meanings. Such events, however historically constrained, create in those who live through them specific and recognizable symptoms of trauma, yielding to a transformed awareness of the self. David Norbrook, in “A Response to Peter Rudnytsky,” resists the notion that there was a collective trauma suffered by England as a whole. Norbrook finds the model of a dissociation of sensibility to entail an unnecessary collapsing of the “process of dialectic in which contending interests” are in constant conflict and their concomitant ideologies are likewise always in dispute. Norbrook thus regards the revival of Eliot’s notion to be politically backward looking and intellectually suspect as it propels Rudnytsky into ferreting out guilt for primal sin in historically and politically complex circumstances that might more persuasively be explained, for instance, by the classical idiom of tyrannicide. Such an idiom might be only “as central a part of

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the national psyche as divine right kingship,” while a longing for a return to a conception of monarchy when the king “was a feudal primus inter pares, not a presumptuous absolutist,” might be no less culturally resonant than Royalist fantasies of a golden age. Despite his reservations concerning Rudnytsky’s rehabilitation of Eliot, however, Norbrook acknowledges the far-reaching impact and implications of Charles’s execution, conceding that it must indeed have been traumatic, a “huge disruption” in what Eliot ventured to call the “mind of England,” the unconscious as well as the conscious dimensions of which still need to be charted. Although he does not take up Bunyan directly, Rudnytsky’s psychoanalytic reading of English literary history applies to his case extremely well, as the succeeding essays in this volume demonstrate. Indeed, insofar as the English Revolution may be said to herald the birth of the divided modern self, which mirrors the sundered royal and natural bodies of the King, it is Bunyan who can be seen as its exemplary embodiment. Fueled perhaps by his own oedipal conflicts— like Hamlet, Bunyan might have claimed that the meats from his mother’s funeral meal were best served “coldly-furnished” as leftovers at his father’s hasty remarriage—Bunyan as a young man enlisted in Cromwell’s army to take up arms against the reigning patriarch. Upon his discharge from military service, however, Bunyan, as it were, moved the war inward and made it into an immensely productive and devotedly chronicled psychomachia from which he never fully emerged. His first sustained narrative, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, delineates the internalization that followed his conversion, an experience that can be described as self-conscious, traumatic, and ultimately transformative. Having been a soldier in Cromwell’s New Model Army, Bunyan returned to English village life as a sportsman, bellringer, dancer, braggart, and hooligan-in-chief, only to “split” before the reader’s eyes into page upon page of spiritual torment. In his autobiography, Bunyan records his personal sense of rupture and restoration. As an ur-text of the Puritan hero, Grace Abounding chronicles Bunyan’s emergence as a prototype of the “divided” modern subject. Here is where the unconscious dimensions of Bunyan’s response to a national trauma become enmeshed with his psychological history. The essays here collected challenge the received wisdom that Bunyan was, throughout his life, unconflicted in his identity as a radical Dissenter. Such an ideologically constructed portrayal of Bunyan has held

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sway at least since Christopher Hill’s influential biography of Bunyan published some twenty years ago and often carries with it a vision of a Bunyan who is a hale and hearty defender of the republic throughout his career. Such a picture must give ground to Richard L. Greaves’s more recent Bunyan biography, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent, which offers instead an intensely drawn picture of a man suffering from, but ultimately sublimating, a mental illness. Bunyan was as conflicted politically as he was psychologically. His career is compulsive, creative, and at times quite conservative in relation to the pressing causes of his day. Never losing sight of the Bunyan who dominates the pages of English dissenting hagiography, this volume shows that ambivalence and anxiety, as much as faith, mobilized his history. The political affiliations that motivated his enlistment in Cromwell’s parliamentary army lead to his persecution during the Restoration, during which time his most creative and psychologically complex writing occurs. His release from prison affords him freedom, as pastor to his flock, to build upon the stunning productivity of his prison years. From hooligan to husband, father to pastor, soldier to prisoner, preacher to prophetic writer, Bunyan progresses within an ever-changing political culture that is inextricably woven into the fabric of his literary productions. My own essay, “Young Man Bunyan,” maps Bunyan’s participation in the national cataclysm of civil war. Drawing upon Erik Erikson’s groundbreaking psychobiography of Martin Luther, whose evolution from a troubled rebel into a defender of the status quo strikingly anticipates Bunyan’s, my analysis of Bunyan’s early years highlights how the regicide, the impact of which touched the lives of all English subjects, resonates with young Bunyan’s “masterless” state. Bunyan’s military service served ironically as a moratorium—in the Eriksonian sense of the term—from the deviancy of his youth. The regimentation of army life provided him with the external discipline he needed to maintain his psychic structure. Hence, upon his discharge he succumbed to an intense period of “acting-out”—playing the madman like the Tom O’Bedlam he describes himself to have been in Grace Abounding. Bunyan’s profligacy upon leaving the army is notorious and may very well have been a panicked response to having deposed the patriarchy as represented by both King and father. Indeed, he settled down only when he embraced a heavenly Father—and the Bedford pastor, John Gifford—to whom he was introduced through the gentle discourse

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of the Bedford women. The mediation of these feminine figures permitted his perception of his calling. Yet, this connection—between his embrace of the feminine and his embrace of the Dissenter’s cause—has not yet been adequately specified. Bunyan scholars have instead insisted upon seeing Bunyan’s affiliation with the Dissenters as fully integrated in his life as a soldier and thus have missed the crucial role played by the Bedford women and their congregation in solidifying his identity as a Dissenter. Indeed, as Margaret J. M. Ezell’s essay on “Bunyan’s Women, Women’s Bunyan” insists, Bunyan’s relations to women, and theirs to him, are far more historically, artistically, and psychologically complex than most previous critics have allowed. Bringing to Bunyan studies her grasp of seventeenth-century women’s literary history, Ezell decisively reorients our perspective on Bunyan’s place in the gender politics of the early modern landscape. Through archival investigation of a neglected historical episode in Bunyan’s life, Ezell demonstrates that critics have curiously colluded with Bunyan himself in averting their gaze from the powerful feminine figures who inform and emerge from his writings. She takes as departure point the controversies surrounding one Margaret Pryor, who was accused of witchcraft after having been turned into a bay mare! This reported incident, Bunyan’s pamphlet about it which is now lost, along with the more renowned scandal of church member Agnes Beaumont riding behind him on horseback, highlight the historical reality of the women who populate Bunyan’s writings but who are usually treated as mere footnotes in critical discussions. Ezell’s argument is that Margaret Pryor transformed as “horseflesh” and Agnes Beaumont reviled on “horseback” cannot be reduced to mere abstractions in Bunyan’s life. Bunyan’s involvement with these women was real and intense. Yet Bunyan’s admirers have rushed to close ranks around their hero, perhaps rightly repudiating all accusations of adultery, witchcraft, and lewd living; but in so doing they have robbed his writings of much of their fervor and flair. Bunyan’s disavowal of vulnerability to the flesh has seemed to undermine the capacity of critics to recognize that the pervasively erotic—and gendered—quality of Bunyan’s writings derive from the flesh and blood women who populated his world, yielding complex characterizations of femininity, throughout his “nearly thirty years worth of writing.” Bunyan’s critics have by and large joined Bunyan in a disavowal of the flesh, being as “shie” of looking at Bunyan’s depictions of women as he himself claims to have been “shie” of looking at their bodies.

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But Bunyan cannot paint the threats of the flesh in the blood-red colors he does without splattering some on himself and the reader. No amount of rational determination can undo the incipient realism, individualism, and sensibility that make Bunyan’s impassioned discourse a precursor of the modern testimonial. Bunyan’s passive submission to the will of God dictates dissociation from his body and enforces a “cutting-off” which might well distance him from traumatic memory—both personal and political. But its traces inevitably emerge in the body of his works. Whereas Ezell invites us to tour that region—the body in and of Bunyan’s writing and world—Thomas H. Luxon, in “One Soul Versus One Flesh: Friendship, Marriage, and the Puritan Self,” shows us a different province altogether by aggressively analyzing Bunyan’s repudiation of the female body in terms of its resonance with classical idealization of homoerotic friendship between males and the concomitant relegation of the feminine to a lesser spiritual capacity. Through a comprehensive interpretation of Bunyan’s treatises on marriage and “Christian behavior” as well as his imaginative works, Luxon exposes the disparagement of marriage and heterosexual union as a kernel of Bunyan’s antihumanistic ideology. Bunyan’s depiction of human sociality, however inflected by historical incident, turns on a denied but deeply cherished view of “homosocial and homoerotic relation . . . as the foundation of self-recognition.” The relation of oneness with the risen Christ celebrated in Bunyan’s vision is fundamentally narcissistic; the believer’s identification with Christ becomes the only reality of which all human bonds are mere shadows. For Luxon, Bunyan’s allegorical dreamscape turns upside down the actual terrain of the English village mapped by Ezell. Luxon takes Bunyan at his word when the Puritan preacher protests he is invulnerable to feminine charm, identifying in Bunyan’s disavowal of sexual difference a refusal of the “real” in favor of an imaginary, dyadic surrender to the divine. For Luxon, Bunyan is a “pure Puritan,” one whose politics of exclusion finds no place for feminine flesh, insofar as it represents worldly affiliation and must be transcended. Indeed, he ties Bunyan’s repudiation of the feminine to a larger rejection of the “Other”—“the Jew, the black person, the Muslim . . . the not-self or the pre-self.” Thus armored, Bunyan can never “touch” the second self “embraced across difference.” For Luxon, Bunyan is forever complicit in a perverse politics of patriarchy. Agreeing, as it were, with both Ezell and Luxon, Michael Davies’s “Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John

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Bunyan” acknowledges at the outset Bunyan’s “almost pathological revulsion towards sex,” while emphasizing his “equally powerful fascination with it.” In an interpretive tour de force, Davies inspects the puns that erupt from Bunyan’s texts as if from burst seams. Bunyan’s antipathy to the flesh, extending from his early dissent against the decadence of the tastes of both Ranters and religious “professors” to his condemnation of the debauched England of the 1680s, is belied by his own agitated and explicitly erotic language: “For it is precisely when Bunyan is being most unequivocal about sexual matters that the very language he uses begins to betray him: his words suddenly start to buckle and slip from his otherwise firmly pastoral grip.” But Davies is no Freudian: he rejects the notion that Bunyan is either oblivious or maladroit. In a mediation of seemingly contradictory positions, Davies demonstrates that Bunyan’s banter reveals an acute vulnerability to the flesh while at the same time it vents his outrage at its—and his own—sinfulness. Bunyan’s bawdy language is amusing but it is no laughing matter; it is rather a means of turning his reader away from sexual transgression and back to God. Davies’s Bunyan clothes the Lamb in wolf’s clothing, in order to bring the reader to repentance. In this sense, he neither puts Bunyan on the defensive, as one might suggest Luxon does, nor does he put critics on the defensive as one might suggest of Ezell, but rather he puts the reader on the defensive by following Bunyan’s invitation, to “come hither, . . . And lay my Book, Thy Head and Heart together.”2 For Davies, Bunyan’s seductive glance is not, so to speak, directed at (even if his designs derive from) the bodies of women. His “come hither” gaze is fixed on the souls of his readers. In “Bunyan and the Antinomians,” Roger Pooley bridges the sexual politics of the previous three essays by showing how the political unconscious resonates with the psychological, and indeed, how gender politics generates theological dispute: the antinomian doctrines of the seventeenth-century world turned upside down are dangerous because they appeal to the licentiousness in the individual English subject. Pooley’s essay examines Bunyan’s “moral panic” and “anxiety” when confronted with the religious, political, and sexual radicals of his day: the Quakers and the Ranters. Bunyan’s contempt for these sects arguably fueled much of his involvement in the theological disputes of his entire career but ultimately emerged from his conflict around his own impulses. While for some conservatives the Ranters’ espousal of egalitarianism and communal sharing of property might have been of

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greater concern than their sexual libertinism, for Bunyan—whose fleshly nature was “in its prime” when he found himself pulled into Ranter rhetoric—the promise of spiritual freedom from biblical Law outweighed the threat posed by worldly lust or glory. It was his conflicted conscience that led him to Martin Luther and to embrace Christ’s “imputed” righteousness; the dangers of antinomianism were subordinated to his affirmation of the rights of the individual to obey his own conscience against all external authorities. This dissenting stance protected him from the extremes of antinomianism on the one hand and conformity on the other, since both were seen as representing a capitulation to worldly pressures and a turning away from the calling to follow Christ and conscience. Even in his final years, Bunyan makes it clear that while he does not resist the “divine right” of kings, he nonetheless retains “that Right which is Divine, to all / That is enjoyned, be they great or small.” In such an utterance, Pooley recognizes that Bunyan exposes the provisional nature of all outward authority when weighed against obedience to Christ and conscience. Whether he obeyed or bravely disobeyed, Bunyan continued to steer by this north star of his spiritual compass even as the political winds blew mightily first from one quarter and then from another. Although the primary emphasis of this volume places Bunyan’s life and work in the context of the English Civil War and the Restoration, the young soldier who struggled with the traumas of revolution and regicide, and the maturing writer who expressed the agon of his salvation against the lament of his imprisonment, are perhaps no less conflicted than the middle-aged preacher who was torn between his allegiance to James II and the call of a new order. For under James’s rule, Bunyan and his congregation enjoyed freedom of worship and expression, while facing pressures by his fellow Dissenters to resist the blandishments of this Catholic king. In “John Bunyan and the Politics of Remembrance,” Sharon Achinstein brilliantly ties his late political ambivalence to the difficulty experienced by Bunyan and other Dissenters in redeploying under James II the tropes of persecution by which they had been sustained during Charles II’s reign. For James not only tolerated but also shrewdly wooed the Dissenters in his Declaration of Indulgence in 1687. As Pooley disputes the tendency of critics and historians to lump Bunyan in with the most extreme factions of the Interregnum, so Achinstein concludes with an interrogation of Bunyan’s ambiguous relation to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

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As I have noted, 1688 was also the year of Bunyan’s swift and sudden death. Already sixty years of age, he was caught in a rainstorm, fell ill, and died of a fever while returning, on horseback, from a pastoral errand in which he had effected the reconciliation of an estranged father and son. He died in London at the home of his friend, the grocer John Strudwick. It being impossible to move his remains to Bedford, he was buried in Bunhill Fields in London. All his biographers make note of these circumstances of Bunyan’s end, though it was commemorated first by Charles Doe in a moving tribute to Bunyan as a minister. But Achinstein points out that there was very little contemporaneous commemoration or even acknowledgment of his death. There is no entry of his burial in the Bunhill Fields registry, no record of his funeral, and no marker of his grave until 1717. She ties this silence to the ambivalence of the Dissenters towards how his life and death would be represented. As Achinstein writes, “The Glorious Revolution seems inevitable only in hindsight and by fiat of a good deal of whitewashing of history,” and Bunyan may not have found himself on the winning side of the Revolution to come. Though he was indeed a persecuted Puritan under Charles II, the latter-day Bunyan may well have longed to be among those “old-fashion Professors, that covet to fear God, and honour the King,” if that King were prepared to give him freedom to labor in his religious vocation. Thus, Bunyan’s silence in the face of regicide in his youth is revisited in his advanced middle age when, once again, he is silent about his political loyalties. And when his death was met not with lamentation by the crowds of Londoners who had thronged to hear his sermons, but rather with yet more silence, we may well wonder if, as Achinstein suggests, Bunyan’s apparent cooperation with James II’s overtures of toleration necessitated a muted response on the part of those Whig dissenters who supported the Glorious Revolution: their silence about Bunyan’s death was the calm before the storm of William III’s landing. Such silences can be interpreted by historians and critics but never fully understood; they suggest both a remembering and a forgetting. Indeed, all efforts to appropriate Bunyan, whether in his life or death, seem to be thwarted by silence, his own or that of others. Trauma, whether personal or political, is not easily integrated into memory; its effects are not often clearly spoken but rather signified by mute repetition in an effort at mastery. For some, the Glorious Revolution surely signified that mastery and the inevitable culmination of the “Whig”

Introduction

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revolution started in the 1640s and then snatched away in the 1660s. But it is not clear that Bunyan would have seen things this way: he was, as Achinstein insists, “no Whig resistor.” “Bunyan tended to place his political hopes in kings rather than in other members of the legal and social establishment.” If, in his youth, Bunyan joined Cromwell’s army reeling from an oedipal rage at his Royalist father, thus making the personal political, it is reasonable to suggest that his death made the political personal. For as he insisted throughout his writings, God’s kingdom is not of this earth; Bunyan’s mission was primarily pastoral. His final act of mediation between an estranged father and son may thus be read in hindsight as a gesture of immense meaning for one who had lived through the “bloody” English Civil War and a prolonged period of persecution under Charles II, only to meet his own death in an act of ministerial service, on the eve of the “bloodless” Revolution.

CHAPTER

Dissociation and Decapitation

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peter l. rudnytsky

To P. Jeffrey Ford “And, if we would speak true, Much to the Man is due.” Marvell, “An Horatian Ode”

1 With the benefit of hindsight, T. S. Eliot’s theory of the “dissociation of sensibility” in seventeenth-century English poetry, promulgated in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), can safely be deemed to have been the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century. As is well known, Eliot contended that whereas “the poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth century, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” during the seventeenth century “a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.”1 The enduring influence of Eliot’s theory can be seen in the way that it continues to be invoked and paraphrased, often without acknowledgment.2 It has, however, been buffeted, and nowhere more soundly than by Frank Kermode in his early book Romantic Image.3 Kermode proceeds by attacking the historicity of Eliot’s formulation. He demonstrates that analogous attempts to pinpoint periods of unified sensibility were made by a host of symbolist writers of the early twentieth century, but that they ascribed the decisive rupture to incompatible moments: Pound and T. E. Hulme blamed Petrarch, Yeats put it at

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around 1550, and so on. As Kermode observes: “It would be quite as reasonable to locate the great dissociation in the sixteenth or the thirteenth [century] as in the seventeenth; nor would it be difficult to construct arguments for other periods” (157). Branding all such accounts “quite useless historically,” Kermode concludes: “A once-for-all event cannot happen every few years” (161). Although Kermode is undoubtedly right that the concept of a dissociation of sensibility is but one example of a broader trend in modernist thought, it does not necessarily follow that Eliot’s model has been discredited. As Kermode points out, Eliot presupposes “an implicit parallel with the Fall. Man’s soul, since about 1650, had been divided against itself, and it would never be the same again—though correct education could achieve something.” But, Kermode admonishes, “it is not merely a matter of wrong dates; however far back one goes one seems to find the symptoms of dissociation” (156). As in his elucidation of the representative nature of Eliot’s theory, Kermode hits the mark both in comparing the dissociation of sensibility to the Fall and in dating it to “about 1650.” But what seems to have gone unremarked by previous scholarship is that the cause of the dissociation in Eliot’s theory must therefore be the execution of King Charles I in 1649. As I shall argue, moreover, the regicide was collectively experienced as a trauma for which the Fall, like the crucifixion of Christ, served as a prototype. Thus, to acknowledge that Eliot’s theory relies on a parallel with the Fall does not, as Kermode supposes, deprive it of historicity, but is paradoxically one of the strongest arguments in its favor. But if Eliot’s formulation can withstand an objection on the grounds of ahistoricity, what about its possible tendentiousness? In the preface to For Lancelot Andrews (1928), Eliot himself defined his outlook as “royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion.”4 What is more, Eliot in the same year published an anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement in which he lauded Sir Robert Filmer, the leading seventeenth-century proponent of the divine right of kings, as a writer “whose greatest fault was that his own time, as well as all succeeding times, had little sympathy with him” and whose views have never been “refuted or replaced.”5 That Eliot should contend that Filmer had not been “refuted” is indeed extraordinary given that Patriarcha, probably written during the 1640s but not published until 1680, elicited a rebuttal from Locke in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Eliot, it might be said, is then a latter-day Filmer, and the dissociation

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of sensibility a Royalist reading of history that amounts to nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia. To this objection I would answer that Eliot’s royalism, like Filmer’s, contains a kernel of psychoanalytic truth that transcends its political bias. Strikingly, Norman O. Brown begins his visionary work Love’s Body by proposing that Freud’s myth of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo “seems to project into prehistoric times the constitutional crisis of seventeenth-century England.”6 Brown compares Filmer to Freud in that he “derives constitutional structure from a primal or prehistoric mythical family, from the paternal powers of our father Adam” (4). “Like Freud,” Brown elaborates, “Filmer attributes to the primal father unlimited power over his sons, including the power and propensity to castrate them” (4). Citing Locke’s definition of Filmer’s idea of fatherhood as a “strange kind of domineering phantom,” Brown offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Locke’s ideological struggle with Filmer: “Locke kills Filmer’s fatherhood, lays that phantom. The battle of the books reenacts Freud’s primal crime” (4).7 Freud, who wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays in 1882 that “the reign of the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell” was for him “the most interesting” period of English history, who in 1891 named his second son Oliver after Cromwell, and who in 1907 described Paradise Lost to the Viennese bookseller, Hugo Heller, as one of his “favorite books,” had more than a passing interest in the revolutionary upheavals of seventeenth-century England; and Brown is clearly onto something important in pointing out the uncanny precision with which Freud’s paradigms in Totem and Taboo fit this historical crisis.8 As the title of Filmer’s treatise underscores, the principles of divine right monarchy are, after all, those of patriarchy: the analogy between the king and the father, with succession being determined solely by primogeniture.9 Thus, as the moment at which patriarchal culture literally acted out the killing of the primal father in the person of the king, the execution of Charles I is not only a collective trauma, but one to which a traditional Freudian perspective is singularly well suited. With this we return to the validity of Eliot’s theory. For though Eliot was himself a Royalist, the crucial point is that the regicide was experienced as a reenactment of the Fall as well as a sacrilegious act of parricide or deicide not simply by Royalists—though they of course trumpeted these analogies most ardently—but, as I have noted, by the culture as a whole. Thus, Eliot’s theory of the dissociation of sensibil-

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ity, like Freud’s theory of the primal patricide, is ultimately an attempt to analyze a collective psychology using schemas derived from individual psychology, and specifically those based on the patriarchal nuclear family. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” quoting passages from Donne and Tennyson, Eliot attributes the differences between these writers to “something which had happened to the mind of England” in the intervening period.10 By hypostatizing an entity called the “mind of England,” which has been afflicted by the process of “dissociation,” Eliot explicitly casts his project as a kind of cultural psychoanalysis, though he would have rejected the association with Freud. But Eliot is under Freud’s spell in “The Metaphysical Poets,” just as he is even more clearly in his peculiar essay two years earlier dismissing Hamlet as an “artistic failure,” in which the names of Freud and Ernest Jones are conspicuous by their absence.11 If we assimilate the theories of Freud and Eliot as I have proposed, the execution of Charles I becomes comprehensible as a classic instance of the pattern in which, as Freud says in Totem and Taboo of the sense of guilt produced by the primal patricide, “the dead father became stronger than the living one had been.”12 In a sentence that applies with striking accuracy to the regicide, which took place outside Whitehall where court masques had been performed, Freud adds: “The scene of the father’s vanquishing, of his greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his greatest triumph.”13 In other words, if, as scholars such as Franco Moretti and David Scott Kastan have argued, the repeated representations of the “deconsecration of sovereignty” in plays from Gorboduc and Richard II through Perkin Warbeck contributed to a transformation in English political culture that made it possible actually to depose and execute a king in 1649, the other side of this insight into the subversive power of the theater is that the killing of Charles I took on the qualities of a tragedy that made the scene of the King’s vanquishing paradoxically also the moment of his greatest triumph.14 The belated revenge of Charles I came, of course, eleven years later with the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of his son Charles II. But the ultimate victory of Parliament came in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Whig supporters of limited monarchy drove James II from power and installed William of Orange in his place. It is thus fitting that the “battle of the books” between Locke and Filmer during the Glorious Revolution restaged and reenacted that

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between Milton in Eikonoklastes and Charles I in Eikon Basilike following the regicide. Milton, like Locke, was trying to “lay the phantom” of divine right kingship; and Locke, like Milton, was obliged in the preface to the First Treatise to defend himself against the “reproach of writing against a dead adversary,” since Filmer had been dead nearly three decades when Patriarcha first appeared in 1680.15 But Milton, unlike Locke, had to answer the King himself, and one who had just been slain in the flesh. Thus, it was necessary to kill the King two times— once in his natural body in the 1640s and again by bloodlessly deposing his royal body in the 1680s—before the psychic task of deconsecrating sovereignty could be brought to completion.

2 Having set the stage, as it were, by defending Eliot’s theory of the dissociation of sensibility as a model for understanding the collective response to the decapitation of Charles I, I propose to turn now to texts by contemporary figures, especially Marvell and Milton. As I have acknowledged, the comparisons of the King to Christ, and of his murder to the Fall, were above all Royalist commonplaces, as in Shakespeare’s Richard II, when the Queen chastises the Gardener who forecasts her husband’s overthrow for making “a second fall of cursed man” (3.4.76) or when the Bishop of Carlisle warns that the ensuing civil war will cause England to be called “The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls” (4.1.144).16 Thus, even a moderate such as Clarendon affirmed that the execution of Charles I was “the most execrable murder that was ever committed since that of our blessed Saviour,” to say nothing of the extravagant Cleveland, who pledged in an elegy on the King that his “faith, resting on th’ original / Supports itself in this, the copy’s fall,” and lamented: “This stroke hath cut the only neck of land / Which between us and this red sea did stand.”17 There is likewise the testimony about the execution given by Philip Henry, a childhood playmate of Charles II and James II who later became a Nonconformist divine, who reported hearing “a Grone by the Thousands then present, as I never heard before & I desire I may never hear again,” as well as that by the anonymous author of The Bloody Court; or The Fatall Tribunal, who makes explicit the collective nature of the trauma caused by the beheading of the King: “This Bloody Stroke being struck upon the Royal Neck . . . it seemed rather to fall upon the people than the King.”18

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But these reactions on the Royalist side, however powerful and eloquent, are predictable. They are therefore less important than those coming from more neutral observers and even from partisans of the Commonwealth cause. No poet takes us deeper into the mysteries of the seventeenth century than Andrew Marvell; and no poem is more crucial to understanding his response to the regicide than the “Horatian Ode.” To be sure, the “Ode” shows Marvell the erstwhile Royalist coming to terms with the destiny of his allegiance to the Commonwealth that he would make his choice for the next decade; but its emotional center is the image of the “Royal Actor” (l. 53) on the “Tragick Scaffold” (l. 54) and the sense of loss attendant upon the killing of the King.19 As I have argued, the imagery of theatricality carries in this context an implicit message that the moment of the King’s defeat was also his supreme triumph; and Marvell’s lines paralleling the founding of the Commonwealth with that of Rome are truly chilling: This was that memorable Hour Which first assur’d the forced Pow’r. So when they did design The Capitols first Line, A bleeding Head where they begun, Did fright the Architects to run; And yet in that the State Foresaw it’s happy Fate. (ll. 65–72)

Not only does Marvell characterize the Commonwealth as a “forced Pow’r,” but he accentuates the horror of the King’s execution by adding the epithet “bleeding” to Livy’s narrative of the discovery of the buried head that was taken to be an omen of Rome’s future greatness. Marvell’s reference to the architects’ “fright” is also not found in his Latin source.20 Thus, although Marvell ostensibly looks forward to the “happy Fate” of the Commonwealth, this note of optimism itself seems “forced” when set against the reminders of the regicide by which his poem is haunted. Two famous couplets in Marvell’s preceding description of the king on the scaffold bear closer examination: “But with his keener Eye / The Axes edge did try” (ll. 59–60); and “But bow’d his comely Head / Down as upon a Bed” (ll. 63–64). The tribute to the King’s “keener Eye” seems unmistakably to allude to a contemporary account in which Charles is reported to have told a gentleman who touched the axe with

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which he was about to be beheaded, “ ‘ Hurt not the Ax that may hurt me,’ meaning if he did blunt the edge.”21 What is more, the narcissistic image of the King’s “keener Eye” gazing at the “Axes edge” by which it is mirrored exemplifies a pattern found throughout Marvell’s poetry. As Paul Hammond remarks, “Repeatedly Marvell imagines something seeing or seeking its own reflection, being like itself, being satisfied only with its own reflection.”22 Other notable examples include Damon gazing at his scythe or at the meadows in the Mower poems and Monck beholding the death of Douglas in Last Instructions to a Painter. As Hammond further points out, Marvell’s portrait of Monck’s gazing at Douglas is not simply homosocial but homoerotic not least because “the death which Monck observes is described as a sexual encounter.”23 I quote the crucial lines from Last Instructions: Like a glad Lover, the fierce Flames he meets, And tries his first embraces in their Sheets. . . . Down on the Deck he laid himself, and dy’d, With his dear Sword reposing by his Side. And, on the flaming Plank, so rests his Head, As one that’s warm’d himself and gone to Bed. (ll. 677–78, 687–90)

Read in conjunction with the “Horatian Ode,” Marvell’s eroticized eulogy to the fallen hero of the 1667 Dutch War clearly recalls his memorial of Charles I. Douglas “tries” the flames as the king does the axe; the word down is used in connection with both men; and the rhyme of head and bed recurs as Marvell twice transmutes the agony of inflicted death into a tableau of voluntary repose. Once one has discerned the links between Marvell’s portrayals of Charles I and Douglas, further ramifications of the regicide in his poetry come into view. The subject of “The Unfortunate Lover,” born “In a Cesarian Section” (l. 16)—evoking Cromwell’s traumatic rupture of historical continuity—and exhibited by “angry Heaven” (l. 41) (another phrase associated with Cromwell in the “Horatian Ode”) as “a spectacle of Blood” (l. 42) must, in my judgment, be interpreted on one level as the slain King.24 Similarly, “Daphnis and Chloe” is another love lyric with an unmistakable political subtext. The poem, in formal terms, is a revision of Donne’s “A Valediction: forbidding mourning.” The cynical lover Daphnis, having long been rebuffed by the coy Chloe, now resolves to abandon her (for other more willing mistresses, as the surprising denouement reveals), but is mortified to discover that his threat of desertion has melted her resistance:

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As the Soul of one scarce dead, With the shrieks of Friends aghast, Looks distracted back in hast, And then streight again is fled. So did wretched Daphnis look . . . (ll. 37–41)

Daphnis’s indecision as to whether to leave or to return to Chloe is compared by Marvell to the soul’s parting from the body at the moment of death, in a dissonant echo of the first stanza of Donne’s exquisite “Valediction”: As virtuous men passe mildly away, And whisper to their soules, to goe, While some of their sad friends doe say, The breath goes now, and some say no: So let us melt, and make no noise . . . (ll. 1–5)25

The situation in Marvell’s poem is, however, the antithesis of that in Donne’s, as a celebration of constancy in love has been debased into an unsparing dissection of lust, hypocrisy, and betrayal; and this change is reflected in the way the imperceptibility of the moment of death in “virtuous men” in the original gives way to the “shrieks of Friends aghast” in the copy. Marvell’s restaging of Donne’s peaceful deathbed scene as traumatic resembles his heightening of the horror of Livy’s image of the decapitated head in the “Horatian Ode,” and in “Daphnis and Chloe,” too, the memory of the regicide intrudes where it might not have been anticipated. Daphnis calls Chloe his “Executioner” (l. 67) and is compared to one who “To his Heads-man makes the Sign, / And receives the parting stroke” (ll. 99–100). Like Marvell’s tribute to Charles’s testing of the “Axes edge” with his “keener Eye,” this description of Daphnis is incontrovertibly based on contemporary reports of the execution. The king, when he laid his neck on the block, said to the “Heads-man” as the latter adjusted his hair, lest he strike him prematurely, “Stay for the sign!”26 Concerning the Mower poems, where the Fall imagery is explicit, William Empson has written, “Damon keeps saying he is in despair for love of a woman,” but “it is the poet who is in love with Damon.”27 The same might be said of Daphnis, whose abandonment of Chloe screens a deeper homoerotic level in which he is himself the object of the poet’s desire. As is true of the other lyrics I have examined, the

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Mower poems must have been written later than 1649. Unless there had already been not only “War” but also a “Princes Funeral” (l. 6), there would be no point to “The Mower to the Glo-Worms,” in which Marvell lauds the “Country Comets” (l. 5) for “Shining unto no higher end / Than to presage the Grasses fall” (ll. 7–8). These poems likewise epitomize Marvell’s dissociated sensibility, since the phrase “Country Comets,” ostensibly spoken by the rustic Mower, in actuality emanates from the poet’s sophisticated consciousness. As Jim Swan has observed, “In his role as urbane ironist, Marvell delights in the powers of his doubleness”; but in the Mower poems, this “delight is contained within its opposite, which is grief over a separation, a displacement that can never be overcome.”28 The “displacement” that the Mower attributes to his love for Juliana is, theologically, a manifestation of the Fall; and, politically, it cannot be insulated from England’s plunge into what Marvell in Upon Appleton House terms the “Abyss” (l. 369) of civil war. Upon Appleton House is Marvell’s most sustained meditation on the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, and it resembles the “Horatian Ode” in its mixture of de facto loyalty to the new regime and overwhelming sense of emotional devastation at the horrors that the Commonwealth has brought in its wake. At the heart of the poem is a eulogy for an idyllic England retrospectively equated with the Garden of Eden: Oh Thou, that dear and happy Isle The Garden of the World ere while, Thou Paradise of four Seas, Which Heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the World, did guard With watry if not flaming Sword; What luckless Apple did we tast, To make us Mortal, and The[e] Wast? (ll. 321–28)

That Marvell’s vision of a prelapsarian England is suffused with the memories of his own childhood before the civil war can be seen in his immediately ensuing lament that the “sweet Militia” (l. 330) where “The Gardiner had the Souldiers place” (l. 337) has been irrecoverably lost: “But War all this doth overgrow / We Ord’nance Plant and Powder sow” (ll. 343–44). As Blair Worden has noted, these lines are echoed in Marvell’s first surviving letter, written in 1660 to the Corporation of Hull: “I cannot but remember, though then a child, those blessed days when the youth of your own town were trained for the militia, and did

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methought bear their arms better than any soldiers that I have ever seen there since.”29 If Marvell sees the civil war as a reenactment of the Fall, it follows that General Fairfax, the addressee of Upon Appleton House, must be considered one of its main agents. But this paradox again follows the precedent of the “Horatian Ode,” where Marvell daringly invokes the motif of the Fortunate Fall by pairing the “bleeding Head” of Charles I with the “happy Fate” he forecasts for the new state led by Cromwell. Fairfax, moreover, withdrew from the trial at which the King was condemned and, in contrast to Cromwell, was openly troubled by his execution. According to Clarendon, when her husband was summoned on the first day of the trial to serve as one of the judges, Lady Fairfax exclaimed that “he had more wit than to be there.” When the King’s impeachment was read, Clarendon continues, and it contained the phrase “all the good people of England,” Lady Fairfax cried out in a still louder voice, “No, nor the hundreth part of them.”30 And in his own poem, “On the Fatal Day,” Fairfax evinces his disturbance at the King’s execution: “Oh Lett that Day from time be blotted quitt / And Lett beleefe of’t in the next Age be waved / In deepest silence th’Act might / Soe that the King-doms—Credit concealed might be saved.”31 Fairfax quite literally desires to expunge or repress the memory of the regicide, a dialectical counterpart to the guilty fascination with this trauma registered by Marvell in his poetry. Thus, not only is Marvell’s phantasmagoric vision of the havoc wrought by the “tawny Mowers” (l. 388) an unmistakable allegory of the civil war, but it is also warranted to see in the mysterious “Rail” slain “unknowing” (l. 395) by one of the mowers yet another incarnation of Charles I. The “Edge” of the scythe is drawn “all bloody” (l. 397) from the stricken bird; and Marvell adds that, like Damon, this Mower “does his stroke detest; / Fearing the Flesh untimely mow’d / To him a Fate as black forebode” (ll. 398–400). Despite his allegiance to the Commonwealth and employment by Fairfax, therefore, Marvell remains haunted by the regicide and evinces nostalgia for the Royalist cause. These attitudes would not, of course, have been shared by the Levellers, whose mutiny had been suppressed by Fairfax in May 1649 and whose radical politics Marvell satirizes in Upon Appleton House when he describes the newly mown fields as a “naked equal Flat, / Which Levellers take pattern at” (ll. 449–50). In his December 1649 manifesto, A New-Yeers Gift, Gerrard Winstanley enthusiastically applauds the King’s execution. In contrast to Marvell’s

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obsession with the shedding of the King’s blood, Winstanley celebrates having “cast out the Head of oppression which was Kingly power,” which has delivered “this distressed bleeding dying nation out of bondage.”32 Winstanley, however, recognizes the difficulty of eradicating kingship: “for Kingly power is like a great spread tree, if you lop the head or top-bow, and let the other Branches and root stand, it will grow again and recover fresh strength.”33 By his allusion to the 1642 Root and Branch petition, which called for the abolition of episcopacy, Winstanley warns lest the evils of “Kingly power” spring up again among the more moderate elements in the Parliament and army, which had joined forces with the common people to overthrow the King. What is remarkable about Winstanley’s metaphor, however, is that it argues the inadequacy of doing no more than “lop the head” exclusively on pragmatic grounds and betrays no awareness that decapitating the sovereign might be a sacrilegious act with inevitable psychological repercussions.

3 Winstanley’s uncompromising radicalism invites a comparison with Milton. As the principal defender of the regicide, Milton’s politics resemble Winstanley’s, but psychologically he has more in common with Marvell. For it was his purpose to strip the regicide of its aura, to make killing the King seem to be no more than an ineluctable, albeit solemn, event. He reserved his greatest scorn for the Presbyterians, the members of his own party who had taken up arms against the King but then shirked from imposing the death sentence. Milton rails in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, probably published within a month of the execution, against those tergiversators who “begin to swerve, and almost shiver at the Majesty of som noble deed, as if they were newly enter’d into a great sin.”34 In seeking to define the regicide as a “noble deed,” a tyrannicide, Milton cannot escape the realization that even many Roundheads did, in Marvell’s phrase, the “stroke detest” and feared that they had committed “a great sin.” That Milton himself does not consciously share this sense of guilt only makes his testimony about the emotional climate following the regicide more compelling. A key element in Milton’s strategy in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is to invoke the doctrine of the King’s two bodies in order to argue that the deposing of the King was the true regicide, and thus his physical death was merely incidental: “Who knows not that the King

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is a name of dignity and office, not of person: Who therefore kills a King, must kill him while he is a King. Then they certainly who by deposing him have long since tak’n from him the life of a King, his office and his dignity, they in the truest sence may be said to have killd the King” (233). Milton’s attempt to sanitize the regicide by claiming that Charles was no longer a King when he went to the scaffold, and that there should thus be no stigma attached to his death, is intellectually brilliant but psychologically unsound. Indeed, even the “Heads-man,” upon being requested to wait for a signal before striking the fatal blow, responded by acknowledging Charles’s sovereignty: “Yes I will, and it please Your Majesty.”35 Not only does Milton’s denial that the regicide constituted the violation of a taboo fail to carry emotional conviction, but there is evidence that he himself shared in the visceral sense of guilt that he reprehended in his backsliding allies. That this is so can be seen in his peculiar uses of Shakespeare in the regicide tracts. As is well known, Milton in Eikonoklastes seeks to indict the king on the grounds that Shakespeare “was the Closet Companion of these his Solitudes” and likens him to Richard III in being “a deep dissembler, not of his affections only, but of Religion” (361–62). Milton’s desire to equate Charles I with Richard III is certainly understandable. But the problem here is that the King’s love of Shakespeare is not something that his subjects would have held against him, nor is there any reason to link him with Richard III other than Milton’s polemical need to paint him as a tyrant. What is more, since Shakespeare throughout his plays invariably presents the killing of a legitimate king or ruler as a sacrilegious and catastrophic act, the natural inference to be drawn from a reading of his works is by no means favorable to Milton’s case. Seen in this light, that Milton mentions Shakespeare at all comes to seem rather odd, and the insistence with which he compares Charles I to Richard III can be understood as a defensive stratagem designed to divert attention from other Shakespearean parallels that the theme of regicide would be likely to call to mind. To take this line of argument one step further, I would like to suggest that beneath his manifest struggle with the “domineering phantom” of Charles I in the regicide tracts, the future author of Paradise Lost finds himself in a latent conflict with the ghost of Shakespeare. In the preface to Eikonoklastes, Milton proposes an analogy between the malignant effect of the king’s posthumous book, Eikon Basilike, and the “will of Caesar, being read to the people,” which “wrought more in

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that Vulgar audience to the avenging of his death, then all the art he could ever use, to win their favor in his life-time” (342). Although one version of this story occurs in Suetonius, its best known source was Shakespeare’s play, a fact that Milton passes over in silence. That he does so, whereas he goes out of his way to quote a tangential passage from Richard III, is scarcely surprising since Shakespeare’s anatomy of Mark Antony’s rhetorical success in overwhelming Brutus’s defense of tyrannicide bodes ill for Milton’s battle of the books with Eikon Basilike. Just as Milton begins Eikonoklastes with a self-subverting echo of Julius Caesar, so too he seems to have the play in mind again at the close. Rashly relying on the temporal success of the Puritan revolution as proof of its divine sponsorship, Milton asserts of the regicide that “god hath testifi’d by all propitious & evident signes . . . that such a solemn, and for many Ages unexampl’d act of due punishment, was no mockery of Justice, but a most grateful and well-pleasing Sacrifice” (596). The desire for “Sacrifice” also informs Brutus’s plea, “Let us be sacrificers, Caius, but not butchers” (2.1.166). He goes on to rue the conspirators’ need to destroy Caesar in the flesh in order to achieve their objectives: We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood; O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit, And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it! (ll. 167–71)

As a defender of the regicide, Milton would not seem to share Brutus’s reluctance to “dismember Caesar.” But Brutus’s dilemma is psychologically Milton’s since the fantasy that it might be possible to slay “Caesar’s spirit” without shedding Caesar’s blood parallels Milton’s insistence that since those who deposed the King “in the truest sence may be said to have killd the King,” the act of chopping off Charles’s head amounted to a technicality. And just as the brutal reality of assassination in Shakespeare’s play undermines Brutus’s idealistic distinction between sacrifice and butchery, so too the “bloody stroke” on Charles’s neck produced a collective groan that drowned out Milton’s plea that the regicide be regarded as a “well-pleasing Sacrifice” rather than a “mockery of Justice.” If Richard III is Milton’s preferred Shakespearean antecedent for Charles I’s execution, while his reminiscences of Julius Caesar have an

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effect very different from what he intended, there is yet another Shakespeare play whose subterranean currents run through the regicide tracts. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, as part of his attack on the Presbyterians, Milton charges that they “who now so much condemn deposing, were the men themselves that deposd the King, and cannot with all their shifting and relapsing, wash off the guiltiness from their hands. For they themselves, by these their late doings have made it guiltiness, and turned their warrantable actions into rebellion” (227). Milton’s purpose is to show that the “guiltiness” produced by the regicide is due exclusively to the Presbyterians’ pusillanimity concerning their own “warrantable actions.” But the reference to futile handwashing conveys an altogether different meaning. For it is impossible to read it without thinking, first, of Pontius Pilate and, second, of Lady Macbeth, and thus to associate Charles I with Christ and Duncan. Even more starkly than his mention of Caesar’s will, Milton’s evocation of Macbeth subverts his own argument since it unwittingly depicts Charles as an anointed King whose murder was tantamount to deicide. That Milton’s mention of handwashing carries an overtone not only of Pontius Pilate but also of Lady Macbeth is confirmed by the further echoes of Macbeth in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. At the outset of the tract, Milton derides those fainthearted divines who, “after they have juggel’d and palter’d with the world” (191), betray their principles by abandoning the fight against the king. The words juggel’d and palter’d unmistakably recall Macbeth’s imprecation of the Witches: “And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d, / That palter with us in a double sense” (5.8.19–20). And in an allusion to the topical theme of equivocation in the Porter scene, Milton insists that there is “nothing that so actually makes a Subject of England as those two Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy observ’d without equivocating, or any mental reservation” (228). Drawing attention to these echoes, Martin Dzelzainis notes Milton’s “reluctance to be . . . explicit about his source” in the case of Macbeth—in contrast to Richard III—and attributes it to “a wish not to appear to underwrite any unfortunate parallel between the murderer of Duncan and those responsible for the execution of Charles I.”36 Although Dzelzainis explains why Milton buried his borrowings from Macbeth, he perhaps does not sufficiently emphasize the strangeness of their appearance in Milton’s text at all, since the effect of his comparison of the Presbyterian divines to the Witches and Lady Macbeth is precisely to enforce the “unfortunate parallel” between Charles

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and Duncan that he should at all costs have wanted to avoid. As David Norbrook has documented, Shakespeare in Macbeth sought “to revise the more radical views implicit in its sources,” including the writings of the Scottish humanist George Buchanan, in order to blacken Macbeth and promote a Royalist ideology.37 “All Shakespeare’s political plays,” Norbrook adds, “are arguably as interested in emotional and unconscious motivations for political action as in rational principles.”38 Shakespeare’s politics are thus antithetical to Milton’s. Accordingly, the repressed allusions to Macbeth in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates are symptoms of the anxiety of influence in which both Shakespeare’s royalism and his belief in the primacy of “emotional and unconscious motivations for political action” return to deconstruct the republicanism and rationalism of Milton’s own texts. Milton, that is, seeks consciously to equate Charles I with Richard III, but he unconsciously equates him with Duncan; and, in so doing, he casts himself as Macbeth. In short, he trades places with Charles I and becomes not the tyrannicide but the tyrant. The doubling of Milton and Charles I is exemplified by the following passage from Eikonoklastes: “That mind must needs be irrecoverably deprav’d, which either by chance or importunity tasting but once of one just deed, spatters at it, and abhorrs the relish ever after” (374). Contrary to what one might expect, Milton here refers not to the regicides whose doubts have “turned their warrantable actions into rebellion,” but to Charles himself, whose remorse expressed in Eikon Basilike over having yielded in 1641 to demands for Strafford’s execution Milton ridicules. But his rare use of the word “spatters” to mean “to eject particles of food from the mouth” conjures up the image of blood. This inevitably leads the reader to think of the King, whose beheading Milton regards as the Presbyterians’ “one just deed,” but of which their guilt caused them to “abhor the relish ever after.” In psychoanalytic terms, what is taking place in this passage can be described as projective identification, in which Milton puts into his account of Charles’s response to Strafford’s execution his own disavowed guilt for his role in the regicide.39 The projective identification here, in fact, is a two-part process, since Milton’s covert equation with Charles is mediated (as in the case of Brutus) by his repressed identification with the Presbyterians, whom he reviles for the guilt at killing the King and father that he cannot acknowledge in himself. The psychological dynamics are captured by Marvell’s observations in Upon Appleton House about the Mower who “does his stroke detest” after he kills the rail, “Fearing the Flesh untimely mow’d / To him a Fate as black fore-

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bode” (ll. 398–400). These same ironies play themselves out on the stage of history when Milton, blind and politically defeated after the Restoration, yet spiritually triumphant, comes symbolically to occupy the position of Charles I on the scaffold, over whom he had gloated in the regicide tracts. In Eikonoklastes, moreover, Milton accuses Charles I of both patricide and incest. Upon assuming the throne in 1625, he states, the King immediately dissolved Parliament “to protect the Duke of Buckingham against them who had accus’d him, besides other hainous crimes, of no less then poisoning the deceased King his Father” (352). Milton conflates Charles and Buckingham in the phrase “King his Father,” the implication being that they conspired together to assassinate James I. Later, Milton uses metaphors of gender to censure Charles’s abuse of royal power. According to the King, he inveighs, “the Parliament, it seems, is but a Female,” incapable of producing laws without his “procreative reason.” But in that case, Milton continues: He ought then to have so thought of a Parlament, if he count it not Male, as of his Mother, which, to civill being, created both him, and the Royalty he wore. And if it hath bin anciently interpreted the presaging signe of a future Tyrant, but to dream of copulation with his Mother, what can it be less then actual Tyranny to affirme waking, that the Parlament, which is his Mother, can neither conceive or bring forth any authoritative Act without his Masculine coition. (467)

Milton censures Charles for committing patricide and incest, the prototypical crimes of a tyrant, yet he himself has killed the King who is politically and psychologically also his father. Given the structures of projective identification at work, it follows that the charge of incest is equally one of which Milton too must be guilty in fantasy, if only because the regicide—as the ultimate act of disobedience—entails violating both parts of the primal taboo enshrined in the Oedipus complex. In Eikonoklastes, Milton denounces the tendency exhibited by most Englishmen to idolize the dead King: But now, with a besotted and a dangerous baseness of spirit, except some few, who yet retain in them the old English fortitude and love of Freedom, and have testifi’d it by thir matchless deeds, the rest, imbastardiz’d from the ancient nobleness of their Ancestors, are ready to fall flatt and give adoration to the Image and Memory of this Man, who hath offer’d at more cunning fetches to undermine our Liberties, and putt Tyranny into an Art, then any British King before him. (344)

This description of the “besotted” idolatry of those ready to “fall flatt and give adoration” to Charles I’s “Image and Memory” is echoed

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in Book 9 of Paradise Lost when Eve, “height’n’d as with Wine” (l. 793) after eating the forbidden fruit, does “low reverence” (l. 835) and worships the “Sovran” (l. 795) tree, just as the neologism “imbastardiz’d” foreshadows Satan’s dismay at having to “incarnate and imbrute” (l. 166) his essence in the shape of a serpent.40 Not only does Milton rewrite the regicide tracts in Paradise Lost, but these textual links confirm that he imagined killing the King to be a reenactment of the Fall. And what is understood theologically in terms of the Fall is psychoanalytically equivalent to the Oedipus complex. As I have argued elsewhere, the allegory of Satan, Sin, and Death shows that incest and patricide form the latent content of the Fall in Paradise Lost.41 It is thus not a coincidence that these oedipal transgressions surface in Eikonoklastes, ostensibly in the form of recriminations against King Charles, but on a deeper level as Milton’s own unconscious associations to his forbidden cultural project of regicide. Set against this historical and psychological backdrop, Milton’s decision to write Paradise Lost comes into focus as an attempt to recuperate the religious meaning of the Fall story not only from Royalist propaganda—as Paradise Regained rejects the panegyrics hailing the restoration of Charles II as a secular equivalent of a return to Eden—but also from his own unconscious sense of guilt at having, like Satan, symbolically committed incest and patricide by revolting against the King.42 In August 1667, the same month in which Milton probably published his ten-book version of Paradise Lost, Marvell wrote Last Instructions to a Painter. Fittingly, this scathing satire of political affairs during the Dutch War, which anticipates Clarendon’s forced resignation from his post as lord chancellor, culminates in a brilliant retrospective commentary on the trauma of the regicide. As we have already seen, Marvell’s homosexually charged paean to the death of Douglas reprises his eulogy of Charles I on the scaffold in the “Horatian Ode.” In the concluding section, Marvell portrays King Charles II, like Richard III, sleepless and seeing by the light of a taper infected with “blue streaks” (l. 916) indicative of the presence of ghosts, haunted by the specters of two murdered ancestors—his maternal grandfather, the French King Henry IV, assassinated in 1610, and his decapitated father, Charles I: Harry sits down, and in his open side The grisly Wound reveals, of which he dy’d. And ghastly Charles, turning his Collar low, The purple thread about his Neck does show. (ll. 919–22)

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Marvell’s evocation of Richard III as a prototype for Charles II, unable to banish the memory not of those he has himself killed but of the predecessors whose violent ends serve as a warning of his own fate should he fail to dismiss Clarendon in time, implicitly reworks Milton’s equation of Charles I with Richard III in Eikonoklastes. Fittingly, Marvell completes the pattern set forth by Milton by portraying Charles II not only as visited by the ghosts of his slain fathers but also as tempted to violate the incest taboo when he sees “a sudden Shape with Virgins face” (l. 891), a metaphorical representation of his endangered kingdom to which he is illicitly attracted, though this bound and gagged naked female is, like Milton’s Sin, a hallucinatory projection of his own mind: He wonder’d first, then pity’d, then he lov’d: And with kind hand does the coy Vision press, Whose beauty greater seem’d by her distress; But soon shrunk back, chill’d with her touch so cold, And th’ airy Picture vanisht from his hold. (ll. 900–4)

If, as Milton wrote in Eikonoklastes, it is “the presaging signe of a future Tyrant, but to dream of copulation with his Mother,” and this transgression is reenacted by a king who seeks to impose his “Masculine coition” on the nation as a whole, then the lesson Marvell draws from recent history is that the only way that Charles II can escape having the “purple thread” tightened around his own neck is if he can avoid repeating his “ghastly” father’s crime of committing incest with the kingdom. Fortunately for the son, he recoils in the nick of time and resolves on the disgrace of his insidious first minister.

4 In the letter to the Prince of Wales with which he ended Eikon Basilike, Charles I predicted the response that his execution would arouse: “inward horrour will be their first Tormentor.”43 Those who perpetrated this deed, he assured his eldest son, would soon evince “earnest desires to make some reparations for their former defects.”44 That Charles should speak of “reparations” is resonant in a psychoanalytic context because Melanie Klein uses the concept of reparation to refer to the desire of the child in the depressive position to atone for its destructive impulses directed against the mother and the fantasied contents of her body.45

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If we take seriously the Kleinian connotations of reparation, it follows that the “inward horrour” produced by the regicide stems from its unconscious association with matricide beneath its primary psychological meaning of patricide. That the king could be the mother as well as the father of his people was exploited by James I when he described himself in Basilikon Doron as the “loving nourish-father” who gave his subjects “their very nourish-milke.”46 In his iconography of regicide, Shakespeare analogously feminizes the bloody corpses of both Julius Caesar and Duncan.47 The antithesis between sacrifice and murder that, as I have shown, links Eikonoklastes to Julius Caesar also surfaces in Othello when the Moor rebuffs Desdemona’s protestations of her chastity before slaying her: “thou dost stone my heart, / And mak’st me call what I intend to do / A murther, which I thought a sacrifice” (5.2.63–65). Thus, to kill a king is for Shakespeare metaphorically also to kill a woman—a woman who is a substitute for the mother—and the “inward horror” of violating the taboo against matricide is part of the penalty visited on Milton and his fellow regicides. This feminine dimension of Charles I was highlighted by Marvell in his encomium of the King’s “comely Head” (l. 63) in the “Horatian Ode”; it subtends as well his fantasy of the dying Douglas eagerly losing his virginity in the “Sheets” of the “fierce flames” (ll. 677–78) in Last Instructions; and it likewise explains his otherwise puzzling specification of the slaughtered rail as a female through the possessive adjective “her” (l. 396) in Upon Appleton House. From all that has been said, I think it is clear that not only the openly ambivalent and anguished Marvell but also the apparently resolute and revolutionary Milton was traumatized by the execution of King Charles I. In contrast, I cited Winstanley, who seems to betray no remorse in A New-Yeers Gift over the decision to remove the country’s “Head of oppression” in a literal fashion. Even in Winstanley, however, the obsessive imagery of decapitation in such phrases as “Head of oppression” and “lop the head” suggests that the memory of the regicide troubled his exhortations concerning the need to extirpate the “Branches and root” of “Kingly power.” As a last example of responses to Charles’s execution, I shall consider Harrington’s Oceana (1656), which David Norbrook has described as “the most important text of English republicanism” and a work that “shows no sign of nostalgia for the old political order.”48 The latter statement seems true on the surface, but it cannot be sustained on closer examination. For in his allegorical narrative of English history,

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Harrington alleges that “the dissolution of the late monarchy was as natural as the death of a man.”49 He thereby not only neglects to mention the regicide—indeed, he skips over the reigns of both Charles I and James I entirely, going back to Panurgus’s (i.e., Henry VII’s) weakening of the power of the nobility to find the root causes of England’s metamorphosis from a monarchy into a commonwealth—but he takes what had been an act of murder and brazenly pretends that it was “as natural as the death of a man.” This denial of the traumatic violence of Charles’s execution can only be construed as a massive act of repression on Harrington’s part. He thus enacts the plea voiced by Fairfax in “On the Fatal Day”: “Lett that Day from time be blotted quitt,” concealing “In deepest silence” the single most unforgettable act of recent English history.50 Biographical evidence supporting this interpretation is provided by Aubrey’s testimony that Harrington “passionately loved his Majestie,” that he “was on the Scaffold with the King when he was beheaded,” and that Charles’s death gave Harrington “so great a griefe that he contracted a disease by it; that never any thing did goe so neer to him.”51 In “The Corollary” that forms the final section of Oceana, Harrington compares the Cromwellian persona of Archon to the Corinthian tyrannicide Timoleon, who was obliged to kill his brother to liberate his people. In his old age, moreover, “through some natural imperfection he fell blind,” though Archon, despite his resemblances to Timoleon in other ways, “had his senses unto the last.”52 As Norbrook comments, “Harrington’s raising the possibility that Cromwell might go blind, and then withdrawing it, does not seem to have any political relevance unless it is meant both to link Cromwell with his most prestigious defender and to offer a vague threat.”53 But the absence of manifest “political relevance” to the motif of blindness suggests that it has a latent psychological meaning. If Cromwell’s power, like Timoleon’s, was obtained through fratricide—another variation on the theme of a primal crime—Harrington implies, then he, like Milton, must fear being punished with the blindness that is symbolically equivalent to castration.

5 From our examination of Marvell’s poetry and Milton’s prose, we have seen that the execution of Charles I was experienced as a trauma not simply by Royalists but by English society as a whole. As a transgressive

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act, moreover, the regicide was assimilated to the paradigm of the Fall, thereby fusing religious and political discourses, though in both Marvell and Milton the conflicts of the English Civil War period became enmeshed with private psychological issues of sexuality and selfconsciousness. Even Harrington, whose defense of Cromwell and the Commonwealth seems on the surface to be devoid of nostalgia, in fact epitomizes a dissociated sensibility, since his account of the “dissolution” of the monarchy in Oceana is a blatant denial not only of the historical truth but also of what we know to have been his personal response to Charles’s execution. Eliot’s theory, therefore, despite his Royalist politics, to which it is not necessary to subscribe, retains its validity as an account of the collective transformation undergone by the “mind of England” during the seventeenth century. While Kermode is correct that the dissociation of sensibility contains an “implicit parallel with the Fall,” I have answered his objection that this renders the idea “useless historically” by showing that the Fall was invoked by writers of the English Civil War period to make sense of what had happened to cause their loss of innocence. Even Kermode’s argument that “a once-for-all event cannot happen every few years” is not as decisive as it might appear to be at first sight. For though Kermode is right that “however far back one goes one seems to find the symptoms of dissociation,” this does not prove that no dissociation took place in 1649, but simply that the epistemological rupture that did occur with the decapitation of Charles I is embedded in a structure of repetition that psychoanalytic theory calls deferred action.54 Indeed, the phenomenon of infinite regress to which Kermode draws attention conforms to the “always already” model integral to postmodernist thought. What Kermode says of the dissociation of sensibility anticipates Paul de Man’s analysis of the predicament of literary modernity, namely, that when writers “assert their own modernity, they are bound to discover their dependence on similar assertions made by their literary predecessors; their claim to being a new beginning turns out to be the repetition of a claim that has always already been made.”55 Thus, although Kermode has demonstrated that the dissociation of sensibility is not a “once-for-all event,” this does not refute Eliot’s theory, but rather reveals it to be a rhetorical gesture— an assertion of modernity—that, like Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, dismantles the binary opposition between reality and fantasy, history and myth.

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In addition to being embedded in a structure of deferred action, the dissociation of sensibility therefore exemplifies the concept of a primal scene, understood here not in the literal sense of the child’s observation of parental intercourse but rather, in the expanded redefinition proposed by Ned Lukacher, as “a kind of historical ‘event’ that cannot be thought outside the question of intertextuality.”56 Again, to say that an “event”—the Fall, the killing of a king—is an intertextual phenomenon is not to deny its historicity, but to insist that it retraces the ancient patterns of fantasy and myth. Finally, if the dissociation of sensibility is a paradigmatic assertion of modernity, with all the paradoxes that this entails, it constitutes by the same token a metonymy for the Renaissance, which later historians characterized as a revolution in consciousness by borrowing metaphors of rebirth, lifting a veil, and so on that had originally been used by Petrarch and other poets and thinkers of the age to define their own sense of themselves.57 And if, however far back one goes, one can find symptoms of the Renaissance, this does not mean that the Renaissance did not take place.

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A Response to Peter Rudnytsky

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david norbrook

i am grateful for this opportunity to debate some central issues in seventeenth-century culture with Peter L. Rudnytsky, whom I have known and admired for many years. I have to say, though, that I began my own graduate work many years ago with the major goal of contesting the theory of the dissociation of sensibility, and it is thus with a certain recognition of failure that I find myself addressing it once again in a new century. However, if Sir Robert Filmer can be said never to have been refuted, I can hardly expect to refute the dissociation theory.1 I claim no competence or credentials in the field of psychoanalysis. What I can perhaps do is suggest from my angle as a specialist in the literature and politics of the English Revolution some areas in which the theory of dissociation risks distorting the conscious political culture and deliberations of the period. Peter Rudnytsky has offered many illuminating readings of many central texts of the period, but I believe that they can be pursued most rewardingly without the ultimately constricting framework provided by Eliot. First of all, let me say that I have no problem whatever with the claim that sacral theories of kingship were important in seventeenthcentury England. Freud pointed out in Totem and Taboo that English kings still claimed to be able to cure scrofula by their magic touch through that century.2 I would argue, though, that such theories emerge in specific opposition to more critical or democratic views and in defense of the interests threatened by such views. The year 1649 was indeed crucial, but I would rather describe it as a political revolution than a mental Fall.

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I have two major objections to the dissociation theory. First of all, I understand history as a process of dialectic in which conflicting interests are in constant contention and in which political arguments are always in engagement with counterarguments, and I think that such a model gives a better account of historical change than models that presume a unified mind of a culture, and it is also less politically backward looking. I would argue that such models have continued to influence literary critics long after Eliot, with rather similar paradigms to the dissociation theory, though the theoretical models appealed to may now be those of Martin Heidegger, a figure as resolutely antimodern in politics as Eliot, or Michel Foucault. These models have in common an elegiac tone in dealing with the seventeenth century as enacting a kind of fall into abstract rationality. Such models carry the consistent problem of finding it very hard to account for conflict and diversity within a culture or historical moment. My second objection takes up the more specifically psychoanalytic aspects of the dissociation theory. If there is indeed a unified mind in a culture, it would appear that conflict or diversity reflect some kind of psychic disorder. A normative dimension appears in the theory: before 1649, sensibilities were unified, which is presumably a preferable thing for a sensibility to be. This immediately makes me uneasy because of its possible parallels with a very widespread analysis given by Royalists in the later seventeenth century, who blamed the Puritan Revolution on a kind of collective mental disorder, a bout of melancholy, or indeed madness. I need not labor the examples of Butler, Dryden, and Swift as writers who provide this kind of equation between republicanism and psychic aberration. Now, I am satisfied Rudnytsky isn’t himself a covert neo-Filmerian and that Freudian theory doesn’t offer the same kinds of crude opposition between the sane and the mad, but I think it is harder than he supposes to detach the dissociation theory from a particular set of political assumptions. Rudnytsky touches only obliquely on the most remarkable way the Freudian model does seem to be realized in the period: Milton the regicide went blind. Now, Royalists seized on Milton’s blindness with glee as a divine punishment; Rudnytsky suggests that Harrington may have acknowledged yet repressed the same thought, and since he attributes to Milton a truly massive repression in grounding his great epic poem on his massive guilt at the evil of subscribing to the very political and religious ideology the poem vindicates, it perhaps would not be much further of a leap to regard the blindness as psychosomatic. It could further be

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added that Harrington did indeed become mentally ill after 1660; we have the choice of trying to decide whether to attribute this to an existing disposition, or to cruelty at the hands of Royalist interrogators as John Aubrey argued, or to his republican views. In these cases it seems hard to disentangle psychic factors from different forms of political tendentiousness. The dissociation theory takes a particular phase of English political culture, the personal rule of Charles I, as a default mode from which all else is an aberration. What that analysis loses is the complex set of political struggles over different conceptions of monarchy that takes us far back into the Middle Ages. The Levellers were reading the same chronicles as Shakespeare did for his history plays and were deriving their own democratic ideals from their understanding of English political traditions; on the dissociation theory, however, the Levellers emerge as aberrant. So do the more specifically Puritan advocates of the regicide in the army who grounded their actions in the Old Testament—the product of generations of Reformation propagation of a culture of the printed biblical text. This means writing off large numbers of Englishmen as not part of English culture, thus making the theory true at the cost of circularity. To complicate matters further, the Levellers themselves actually opposed the regicide, as did a number of republicans. Their reason however was not, or at least not consciously, outrage at a sacrilegious new Fall of Man but outrage at a military coup that violated the constitutional norms and principles they so fiercely upheld; this outrage was shared across a broad range of parties from some republicans through to Presbyterians as well as constitutional Royalists like Clarendon, and I think it is quite plausible to agree that many defenders of the regicide felt some guilt at its injustice without necessarily having to accept that the guilt went back to a primordial desire. However, Rudnytsky does offer us some difficult cases in the Parliamentarians who, he believes, were deeply affected by guilt for the regicide. Marvell is surely the most plausible case, for his sympathies were indeed richly divided. Where I would demur is in the model of a fall from a default-mode royalism into a guilty republicanism. Marvell’s father had been a strong Puritan, and he was brought up in a relatively austere and far from absolutist political culture. During the 1620s and 1630s, many of a younger generation were reacting against that culture, in part as a revolt against their fathers—the classic example is Richard Crashaw’s passage from Calvinism through high church Anglicanism to eroticized Catholicism. It is this phase of aggressive reaction against an older political consensus that is represented by Filmer’s

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Patriarcha, or, The Natural Power of Kings,3 a treatise that is far from representative of earlier constitutional theory. From his student days onwards, Marvell showed signs both of attraction to such a reaction and of revulsion against it. But how far can we psychoanalyze this process? Rudnytsky draws attention to the very striking and fascinating parallels between Marvell’s description of Charles on the scaffold and of the martyred young sailor Douglas and to the shared homoerotic elements. Here he raises some interesting questions which I would like to see taken further—how does this homoeroticism relate to the norms of a patriarchal society? Was Marvell’s take on events itself psychologically unusual, and if so, how far does his case also reflect the general culture, for which Marvell’s fantasies would be considered aberrant—as aberrant perhaps as regicide? 4 Rudnytsky offers some fascinating and suggestive readings of Milton’s engagements with Shakespeare in the regicide tracts. It is widely recognized that Milton found himself on difficult polemical terrain in these texts, determined to defend the republic at all costs yet well aware that there were good republican and constitutionalist arguments against a military coup. In his attempts to smear the Presbyterians, he may, as Rudnytsky suggests, have become hoist with his own rhetorical petard, conjuring up the Royalist implications of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But this is to raise further questions. As I have argued elsewhere, Shakespeare reacts in this tragedy against Scottish sources which take a rationalistic view of politics and are heavily colored by the classical idiom of tyrannicide.5 That idiom, I believe, was widely current in the early modern period; as a staple of the school curriculum it was arguably at least as central a part of the national psyche as divine right kingship. The Roman cult of tyrannicide did often compare the murdered king to a sacrifice; we may well find this idiom offensive—Hannah Arendt offers a fascinating exposition and critique in her book On Revolution6—but I am not sure how a reading of Roman republican culture along Rudnytsky’s lines would proceed. And Milton was painting a true picture when he pointed out that the Scots had a long tradition of deposing and murdering their kings, without apparently succumbing to a perpetual collective guilt: this was the source of Milton’s fury at their self-righteousness after the event. Are we to understand that the Scots’ psyche, like the ancient Romans’, was aberrant in comparison with the English one? Both Marvell and Milton use the language of the Fall of Man, and Rudnytsky sees this as reflecting guilt about the lost monarchical order. Here I think we have an especially difficult example of default-mode

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thinking, with any variant from Caroline absolutism presented as an equivalent of the primal sin. There is a problem in taking the figure this literally even in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House—a poem which after all is named after a house that had been made out of a nunnery ruined at the Reformation land settlements, making its Eden a selfconsciously recent one. And it was a nation which had a real militia and all kinds of unfallen qualities. The analogy certainly taps a vein of feeling, but Fairfax himself would have been uneasy about taking it more literally than as a striking hyperbole. For the more Calvinistically inclined, the Fall had been a devastating loss of human knowledge as well as morality, and any suggestion that a single individual or monarch could redeem it would have been regarded as outrageous blasphemy—which is not to say that some individuals weren’t pushed into speaking in those terms in their general outrage at the events of 1649. Notably, the title page of Eikon Basilike, the King’s testament, presented him in a Christ-like attitude. However, as Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler has reminded us, this was compatible with a Foxean cult of kingship, heavily biblical in basis, which then assimilated the king to all the saints who could gain Christ’s crown.7 Let us remember that in Shakespeare’s Richard II, the language of the king as redeeming the Fall is given exclusively to the Ricardian faction; when John of Gaunt uses a comparable idiom, it’s to celebrate England with a significant qualification as a demiparadise, and to look back to England’s golden age as a time when the monarch was a feudal primus inter pares, not a presumptuous absolutist. Shakespeare synthesizes the very different views of kingship he found in Lancastrian and Yorkist sources, part of an ongoing historical dialectic, not a unified national mind.8 To say all this is not to deny that the execution of Charles I was a huge disruption of the seventeenth-century landscape, with very serious long-term effects. Mapping its unconscious dimensions is an exciting but very difficult task, and I believe that the dissociation model is so deeply entangled with Filmerian or Eliotian political assumptions as not to be the best guide through that territory.9

CHAPTER

Young Man Bunyan

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“There is no royalist road to the unconscious.” Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises

as a young man, John Bunyan served in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the period when parliamentary forces captured and beheaded Charles I. Yet in his writings he nowhere mentions what Christopher Hill calls that “unique, traumatic historical event.” Why? The first and most practical answer to the question of Bunyan’s silence about this cataclysmic event is that Bunyan did the majority of his writings after the Restoration and could not risk any statements that might have seemed politically motivated.1 The second answer to this question is that Bunyan’s attitude to the politics of his day is consistent with the biblical Christianity which he espoused very explicitly in his later sermons and which “renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” (Matt. 22:21).2 For Bunyan, the idea of redemptive violence is anathema; vengeance is the Lord’s and the calling of the saints is to watch, wait, and remain faithful to their witness.3 By such explanations, Bunyan’s silence on matters of state does not signify indifference to the suffering of the saints under tyranny and persecution; rather, it signifies Bunyan’s apostolic conviction that, like Christ, his kingdom is not of this world. As Richard Greaves’s discussion of Bunyan’s response to tyranny makes plain, armed resistance and “[t]yrannicide is flatly unacceptable.”4 I do not dispute such obviously persuasive and accurate explanations of Bunyan’s circumspection. But it is worth pointing out that the effect of such explanations has been, ironically, to silence virtually all speculation about the impact of the regicide on Bunyan’s psychological, political, theological, and literary development. Critics and biographers

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have ended up mirroring Bunyan’s reticence by resisting discussion of the possible impact of this event in Bunyan’s life and work. My avowedly psychoanalytic aim in this essay is to “listen” to Bunyan’s silence about the regicide within the context of his otherwise vivid, though spare, account of the years of his young manhood in Elstow. From such attention will emerge, I hope, a renewed appreciation of the importance of this period to his identity as preacher, and to his later literary development.5 Drawing from Erik Erikson’s groundbreaking study, Young Man Luther, I aver that the years of Bunyan’s young manhood, contained in the period of his military service and the roughly two years in Elstow following his demobilization, before he joins the Bedford Church, exemplify what Erikson calls a moratorium. A moratorium is a “span of time after [young people] have ceased being children, but before their deeds and works count toward a future identity.” These years in a young person’s life are uncertain, exciting, and fraught, above all, with ideological and religious hunger.6 Everything that Bunyan tells us about his young manhood suggests that this period was for him both intense and riddled with conflict. His silence about the regicide should not silence our consideration of what it felt like for him to have lived through the English Revolution. It should, rather, provide a departure point for our larger consideration of those critical “moratorium” years before he found his way to the sunlit door of the Bedford women. The neglect of the impact of the decapitation of Charles I in 1649 on the young Bunyan, strikingly contrasts, it must be noted, with the extensive discussion of the struggle in Bunyan’s political conscience over the Restoration of the deposed King’s son, Charles II, in 1660. Such examination of Bunyan’s political dilemma during the Restoration makes sense, of course, since Bunyan was imprisoned under Charles II for unlawful preaching. Critics are at no loss to employ psychological theories of displacement, indirection, and condensation to interpret how the outwardly compliant Bunyan might have structured his affective response to persecution under Charles II. Bunyan’s open professions of loyalty to Charles II are seen, for instance, to mask the rhetoric of resistance and revolution which emerges disguised in The Holy War where he employs, at some distance, his knowledge of military maneuvers (possibly including those used in combat). It has been similarly argued that Bunyan siphons off personal, political and religious rage in his sermons by depicting his enemies as sinners in the hands of an angry God.7

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Yet young Bunyan’s lived experience of the English Revolution, during a time of his life in which he was much less stable and settled than he was in 1660, is barely imagined by critics and biographers. In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Bunyan himself mentions his military service, with political neutrality, only once in a story of how God providentially snatched him from death while he was a soldier.8 We have only a few more scraps of information about these years, so any imaginings about them must be frankly speculative. Nevertheless, all of Bunyan’s biographers quite valuably speculate about the psychological impact of the myriad other events drawn from this same period of his youth, about which Bunyan tells us little to nothing— such as his father’s over-hasty remarriage, the death of his mother, or, more in keeping with the current subject, the possible motivations for his apparent reenlistment in 1647.9 Yet, again, little is said about Bunyan’s possible reactions to participating in a revolution. Richard L. Greaves, whose magisterial recent biography of Bunyan, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent, positively illuminates all aspects of Bunyan’s subjective life, curiously dismisses outright the psychological effects of military experience on Bunyan’s later spiritual anxiety: “Considering the gap of approximately two years between the conclusion of Bunyan’s military service and his initial spiritual awakening, it seems unlikely that some of his anxiety was rooted in his military service.” To support his point that military service bore no relation to Bunyan’s later debilitating anxiety and depression, Greaves cites historian Charles Carlton who somehow seems to know that the English Civil War produced few “indications of psychiatric wounds.” If this were true, it seems to me, it would be the only war which has not led to a significant amount of posttraumatic stress, for, as poet Marianne Moore wrote in the early 1940s, “There never was a war that was / not inward.”10 In an earlier essay on Bunyan’s relationship to the Stuart state, Greaves remarks that “the earlier demise of [the Stuart state] . . . he had probably pondered very little”; “[o]nly in the heady days of religious enthusiasm following his conversion did he begin to consider political issues.”11 Now I think that in his passages Greaves has unconsciously punned, referring to the “heady” days of the 1650s following the beheading of Charles in 1649; and he has inadvertently led us to the question of how the still-teenaged Bunyan would have responded to the news of Parliament’s trial and decapitation of the King.12 Politics was not separate from religion: if we are to believe Bunyan’s account of his

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early years, religion and “the day of judgement” were always, “in [his] mind,” even if, in an overdetermined image, he describes himself as “cut off” from all thoughts of such reminders when they intruded into his pleasures and vanities (GA, paras. 6–8). Young Bunyan, whose scrupulously introspective narrative dramatizes his fierce rebellion against God and the Scriptures, would, I think, have pondered more than a little on what it meant that the King had been captured and killed by Bunyan’s comrades shortly after he had left the service. Christopher Hill does generally recognize the developmental impact of “these unprecedented happenings” of which “Bunyan must have been apprised,” on the young man.13 “Bunyan was in the army from at least November 1644 to July 1647. Two and a half years is a long time when one is in one’s teens; the six years between demobilization and conversion—eighteen and a half to twenty-five—were even longer. And what years!”14 For Hill, the Bunyan of these years is thrilled to be part of a larger revolutionary fervor and alienated from a Royalist household. He was a self-assertive, fully adult Parliamentarian when he returned in the summer of 1647 to the house of his father and stepmother. The brother who had been christened Charles was dead . . . If there were any political strains in the Bunyan household, they would not be lessened during the first two years after John’s demobilization, when the King was a prisoner in the hands of the Army to be tried and executed in 1649.

Hill, with acuity, further wonders if Bunyan’s early marriage was precipitated, not unlike his enlistment, by a desire to escape political, as well as personal, tensions in the house of his Royalist father. Beyond that, however, Hill makes no association between the fact that Bunyan returns from war wildly “infect[ing] the town where I was born with all manner of youthful vanities” and the events of that war itself.15 There is, by contrast, considerable scholarly consensus as to Bunyan’s political beliefs at this time. Much has been written about the archival evidence for Bunyan’s actual parliamentary army service, and more recently Greaves has explored in depth the likely impact of the sermons and debates Bunyan might have heard in the army upon his later theology. But, again, scholars who credibly demonstrate that Bunyan served in the parliamentary army often end up ideologically collapsing the teenage Bunyan who enlisted and served in this military force with the older, dissenting minister. Of Bunyan’s youthful political loyalties, Anne Laurence concludes, “[i]t is easy to assume

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that someone who held the views we know him to have held in later life should have been moved by the great radical causes of his youth.”16 And going even further, W. R. Owens concludes, “[t]here can be little doubt that Bunyan was a supporter of the Cromwellian republic during the 1650s and that he must have regretted the return of Charles II.”17 But it is not clear to me that Bunyan’s youthful military service can so doubtlessly be woven into his identity as a dissenter. Nor am I convinced that this period in Bunyan’s life was as psychologically uncomplicated, as implied by Greaves’s picture of the sanguine soldier, or as ideologically secure, as implied by Laurence’s and Owens’s similar picture of the eager young dissenter. And it is doubtful that Bunyan was the hale, assertive Parliamentarian soldier that Hill portrays as loyal to that military faction “which had guaranteed [Bunyan and his like] . . . freedom to meet, worship and organize.”18 Even as Bunyan sandwiches his account of these years amidst searing if short descriptions of his childhood torments, so the years of Bunyan’s military service, as well as the roughly two years following that and beyond, were I suspect every bit as conflicted as his tormented childhood. He tells us so when he recounts, as we will examine below, vignettes of desperate daring which characterize the years of his young manhood when he returns to Elstow. The political and psychological experience of young man Bunyan is formative of, but not continuous with, the Bunyan who at the end of Grace Abounding is called to preach and then suffers trial and imprisonment for religious dissent. He marks his young adulthood as a period of peculiar profligacy, and in Grace Abounding, it is as segregated from the rest of the narrative as is his childhood. The only details we do have of Bunyan’s “natural” life are predominantly drawn from this period following his demobilization and before his meeting John Gifford and the women of Bedford. When he is called to join the Bedford congregation, he marks a shift in his identity which cannot be “read” as continuous or unified with the Bunyan of the early pages of Grace Abounding. The developmental accomplishment of his young adult years must be recognized as having actively secured that ultimate resolution as a “working-through,” which was by no means implicit in the young man who ran away to the army, or in the one who returned home “cursing and swearing and playing the madman” (GA, para. 26). The neurotic suffering contained in his early life led to psychological “work” which is foundational to his life’s work as author and preacher.

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Mental Affliction and “Moratorium” It has long been recognized that Bunyan suffered in his early years from some sort of mental affliction.19 His conversion years, as chronicled in his spiritual autobiography, are notoriously anguished. Yet frank examinations of this anguish are frequently rather peripheral to discussions of Bunyan’s life and works, and they are particularly overlooked in studies of his theology. This tendency to look the other way when faced with Bunyan’s suffering has been addressed and altered in Richard Greaves’s recent biography. Greaves demonstrates, through the application of psychiatric nosology, that Bunyan suffered in his youth from dysthymia and dysphoria, proving—I suppose once and for all—that William James was right when he called Bunyan a “sick soul.”20 The diagnosis of Bunyan’s depressive personality disorder is foundational to Greaves’s study of Bunyan. Though in complete agreement with Greaves’s diagnosis, I think his use of strict psychiatric assessments limits what he can say about the meaning of Bunyan’s depression during the period of his young adulthood. Greaves’s exclusive reliance upon and application of the psychiatric handbook of diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, to explain Bunyan’s suffering ends up leaving too many questions unanswered. Most strikingly, on the absolutely central question of how or why Bunyan’s depression lifts sufficiently to allow him to move forward and overcome his obsessional inhibitions, Greaves says only that “the crisis eventually subsided” and that he “eventually found peace.”21 What is missing from strictly psychiatric diagnoses of mental illness is any theory of the “whys and wherefores”—the meanings—of an individual’s sufferings. Psychiatric assessment allows for description but not for interpretation. Such a theoretical framework limits what one can say and even think about one’s subject. One of the earliest, most influential, and indeed, positively prescient critiques of the reductionist tendencies in modern psychiatry has been set forth by Erik Erikson in his groundbreaking study of Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. Erikson’s capacious narrative charts Luther’s conflict, crisis, and creative breakthrough, in an invaluable, if currently neglected, grammar of late adolescent psychology. It is of immense significance that the “lay-analyst” (he was not a psychiatrist) Erikson, though writing at the twilight of the marriage of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States in the

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1960s, repudiates strict, psychiatric assessments of Martin Luther’s “patienthood.” Recognizing that “psychiatry has tended to make patienthood a self-defining, self-limiting role prison” by unyielding categories and treatments, Erikson hurls his ink bottle at such categorization of the great reformer and offers, instead, a story of a life in crisis. In order to analyze young Luther, Erikson articulates an original and now classic developmental theory of the identity crisis of the late adolescent. Writes Erikson, “I did not wish merely to reduce . . . young Luther. . . [to a psychiatric diagnosis], (which, within limits, could be done rather convincingly) I wished [rather] to delineate in his life . . . one of those life crises which make conscious or unconscious, diagnosed or unofficial, patients out of people until they find a cure—and this often means a cause.”22 I believe Erikson offers illuminating theories of psychological development which unlock Bunyan’s progression from profligate to preacher to poet. My choice of Erikson’s study of psychoanalysis and history as a lens through which to examine Bunyan’s youth-in-crisis years, is, in psychoanalytic terms, overdetermined. So strong was Bunyan’s identification with Luther that he experienced Luther’s Commentary on Galatians “as if his book has been written out of my heart” (GA, 129). Luther, he felt, was the only man who could grasp his suffering. His own seventeenth-century contemporaries understood spiritual suffering only intellectually, he claims, “through the strength of their wits and parts.” They do not themselves go “down into the deep” the way Luther did (GA, para. 129). Erikson, interestingly, says the same about Soeren Kierkegaard in relation to Luther: Kierkegaard, he feels, is the only man who could “judge Luther with the compassionate objectivity of a kindred homo religiosus.” Both Luther and Kierkegaard embrace a “life style of patienthood as a sense of imposed suffering, of an intense need for a cure, and (as Kierkegaard adds) a ‘passion for expressing and describing one’s suffering’”(Erikson, 13). Luther, a “patient of exceeding import for Christendom” as Kierkegaard proclaims, paves the way for Bunyan’s import as “patient” in English literary history (cited in Erikson, 13). For Bunyan can also be recognized as living through a time in his youth when his patienthood was so besetting that he called himself a “Tom of Bedlam” (GA, para. 32) In a progression quite parallel to Luther, he found a cure in a cause. We do him a disservice, however, if we do not recognize that this cause, and this cure, was hard won. His depression lifts only when he embraces his cause as a dissenter and begins to preach; but it

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must first be acknowledged that, like Luther, he had to go through the identity crisis. He had to learn how to “mean it.”23 The aggressive and melancholic character of Bunyan’s youth presents the reader with what Erikson calls a “negative identity” fragment, a “ ‘rock-bottom’ attitude” of “perverted and precocious integrity” which struggles for a new existence and an assured future.24 The perverse yet precocious years before Bunyan’s awakening and conversion constitute, in Eriksonian terms, a moratorium: a liminal yet gestating period in a young person’s life: Youth stands between the past and the future, both in individual life and in society; it also stands between alternate ways of life. . . . Societies, knowing that young people can change rapidly even in their most intense devotions, are apt to give them a moratorium, . . . The crisis [years] in such a man’s life may be reached exactly when he half-realizes that he is fatally overcommitted to what he is not.25

Erikson’s descriptions of the major crisis of adolescence, the identity crisis when a “youth must forge for himself some . . . direction . . . out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood,” sounds, he acknowledges, “dangerously like common sense.” But he goes on to insist that identity is, “like all health . . . a matter of course only to those who possess it, and appears as a most complex achievement to those who have tasted its absence . . . Only in ill health does one realize the intricacy of the body; and only in a crisis, individual or historical, does it become obvious what a sensitive combination of interrelated factors the human personality is.”26 Bunyan’s account—sparse though it is—of his early adulthood, in the context of his conversion crisis, offers a record of the evolution of his personality shaped through both personal and historical crisis. Like Luther, his young life marked-off a second birth, aggravated by widespread cultural and ideological upheaval (Erikson, 41). Young Bunyan lived dangerously in a dangerous time; his neurotic predicament threatened to consume his considerable energies and even threatened his life. The spiritual solution to the conflicts of his youth mobilized his “capacities to see and say, to dream and plan, to design and construct, in new ways.”27 Aided by his adoption into the family of the Bedford Church and the therapeutic ministry of its pastor, John Gifford, this solution liberated his creativity, making his unique experience available not only to his congregation but also to readers in all times and places. But that was not to come until later.

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The remainder of this essay will offer, then, a perspective on Bunyan’s young manhood which recognizes the importance of his participation in the English Revolution, the intensity he himself ascribes to the period of “acting-out,” which he calls his “profligacy,” upon his return to Elstow, and the meanings of his various religious adventures and attractions which finally lead to the sunlit Bedford doorway and to Gifford (GA, paras. 37, 77).28 Filled with a frantic sensuality, Bunyan jumps from shopkeepers’ wives, to Ranters, to sports, and to beckoning bells, while his youth is in “its prime.” His appetites turn him into, he feels, a kind of madman who is fending off death with every greedy grab at desire (GA, paras. 44, 32). This almost manic profligacy is oddly counterpointed with a sensual devotion to “formal” religion and the rituals of the Church of England and its priesthood. The record of Bunyan’s young manhood, which comprises roughly the first quarter of his autobiography (GA, paras. 8–77), provides the reader with a “bedrock” of intense, largely physical enactments preliminary to the equally intense but largely spiritual encounters which comprise the remaining portions of his chronicle. None of the material I analyze from Bunyan’s autobiography is “new”—far from it; but what is perhaps new is the perspective—historical, literary, and psychological—which is brought to bear on this material, giving new significance and new meanings to these familiar scenes. What will emerge is a picture of young Bunyan, a politically and psychologically evolving personality in crisis. The mental strivings of Bunyan’s youth fathered the mental capacities of his manhood; in hindsight his brilliance can be recognized as written into the agon of his early life.

Blasphemy and the Meaning of Military Service Just shy of sixteen years old, Bunyan joins the parliamentary forces in 1644, shortly after three major and indisputably traumatic psychological events in his adolescence: the death of his mother and his sister within a few months of each other and then his father’s marriage to his second wife within a few months of this same year. Though the marriage is not registered, we do have a record of the birth of an infant, Charles, in 1645, who dies while Bunyan is already enlisted. Though no one but Christopher Hill to my knowledge suggests this, it is at least plausible that the sudden marriage of Thomas Bunyan was precipitated by the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of his second wife and

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that this might account for the absence of a marriage certificate.29 Bunyan’s joining the military at an early age was probably precipitated by, if not a quarrel with his father, at least some tension with him, reflecting not only young Bunyan’s dismay at the marriage and pregnancy, but also the grief and guilt he suffered at the loss of his mother and sister. Bunyan’s compulsion to blaspheme throughout his young years reflects, among other things, such a conflict with paternal authority. His struggles with his tinker father, whose “Cavalier” sympathies and identification with a landed heritage may reflect a resistance to authority, ecclesial or otherwise, which goes back generations.30 Bunyan’s conflict with and repudiation of his natural father may be said to form the core of his neurotic conflict. His obsessive blasphemy functions in his youth as a displacement of aggression, featured forcefully, in his childhood fantasy of being a tormentor in hell. He recounts that in my own natural life, for the time I was without God in the world, . . . I was so overcome with despair of life and heaven, that then I should often wish, either that there had been no hell, or that I had been a devil; supposing they were only tormentors; that if it must needs be, that I went thither, I might be rather a tormentor, than tormented myself. (GA, para. 7)

In his “tender” years—“about nine or ten years old”—Bunyan tells us that “I could not let go my sins” of “cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming” and other “childish vanities” (GA, para. 4). His despair over his compulsion to sin, coupled with his haunting childhood nightmares, implies that the mental suffering which afflicts him through much of his young adult years, and which comprises the bulk of his autobiographical narrative of that period, has its origins in his childhood.31 His resolute childhood fantasy of being the tormentor rather than suffering himself to be tormented exhibits the defense mechanism of “the identification with the aggressor,” which is coined by Anna Freud in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.32 By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat” (17).33 Preliminary to the development of the superego, or moral conscience, and associated with parental strictures and punishment for wrongdoing, this defense in some children can result in a harsh and critical attitude directed toward others, and it can also become turned with equal if not increased severity upon the self as an object. In the latter case, one sees the beginning of “melancholic states.”34

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That Bunyan’s blasphemy displaces aggression directed against parental authority, both internalized and real, is historically corroborated by the “theory” of blasphemy, which carried the day among Bunyan’s contemporaries: murderous rage seethes behind the curse. The curser, not suffered to unleash his aggression, resorts to the violence of language. An R. Younge in 1648 writes: “‘They [the rabble] curse us . . . because they cannot be suffered to kill us.’ ”35 And one R. Kilby remarks, “ ‘Cursers are murderers . . . for if it pleased God to suffer their curse to take effect, the party cursed is murdered by the Devil.’”36 Bunyan himself, in his “historical” tales of wickedness compiled in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, gives the chilling narrative of Ned, “who was, as it were, an half-fool, both in his words, and manner of behaviour.” Ned performed mad cursing at the provocation of his father for the entertainment of the local “boon blades” who would come to his ale-house. Ned’s curses upon his father “were in a little time fulfilled upon his Father; . . . but the Devil did indeed take him, possess him, and also . . . carried him out of this world by death.” That Bunyan believed in the father’s damnation for his tormenting of his son we should have no doubt: his sins against the son are visited upon him by Satan himself. “He could feel him [Satan] like a live thing goe up and down in his body, but when tormenting time was come (as he had often tormenting fits) then he would lye like an hard bump in the soft place of his chest, (I mean, I saw it so,) and would rent and tare him, and make him roar till he died away.” Bunyan himself may well have displaced onto this odd story of a cursing half-fool his anguished experience of himself as the “broken, scattered and rent man” who cuts himself, cursing, with stones and dwells among the tombs (GA, para. 186). The passive-to-active dynamic is critical to this passage and shows the fantasy of revenge which is locked into Bunyan’s portrayal of the “sad” and wicked mockery and ruin of young Ned by his father’s sadistic sport. I have heard Ned in his Roguery, cursing his Father, and his Father laughing thereat most heartily; still provoking of Ned to curse, that his mirth might be encreased. I saw his Father also, when he was possessed, I saw him in one of his fits, and saw his flesh (as ’twas thought) by the Devil, gathered up on an heap, about the bigness of half an Egge; to the unutterable afflict[i]on of the old man.37

Now we should bear in mind that Bunyan the blasphemer torments his audience, as we know from the familiar scene in the shop window:

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The shopkeeper’s wife, though “a very loose and ungodly wretch,” is made to tremble by his “cursing and swearing, and playing the madman” (GA, para. 26). Bunyan resorts to playing the aggressor, and finds, when the woman turns on him, that he is shamed and silenced. He himself indirectly attributes his wicked way of swearing and cursing to his father’s bad example, and we know that tinkers were reputed to be a rather tough crowd.38 “There are some indeed,” writes Bunyan further in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, “that do train up their Children to swear, curse, and lye and steal, and great is the misery of such poor Children whose hard hap it is to be ushered into the world by, and to be under the tuition too of such ungodly Parents. It had been better . . . for such Children had they not been born.”39 The contiguity between passivity and aggression dictates unmistakably that the blasphemous “madman” at the shop window has at the core a trembling child who is haunted by dreams of devils. Bunyan’s biographers have surmised, merely from Bunyan’s use of military metaphors in his allegories, that “[h]e does not seem to have disliked the army as such.”40 Yet on the basis of his struggle with his impulse to blaspheme, it seems to me that it can be countered with equal plausibility, and evidence of a different kind, that Bunyan’s military service was just as likely to have stirred up blasphemous impulses as metaphoric ones. Bunyan the young blasphemer certainly would have had to stifle his urges while in service or suffer the consequences. And he tells us plainly throughout the autobiography how excruciating these impulses were. I have been as if my mouth would have spoken that [blasphemous] word whether I would or no; and in so strong a measure was this temptation upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth from opening; and to that end also I have had thoughts at other times to leap with my head downward into some muck-hill hole or other, to keep my mouth from speaking. (GA, para. 103)

Bunyan’s nearly unbearable desire to leap headfirst into the muck hole makes a prescient association between obscenity and anality which, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, points to the unconscious conflicts underlying many obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Punishments in the parliamentary army for such transgressions cut to the chase: blasphemers were threatened to ride the wooden horse, in which their legs were spread and a placard placed on their back to proclaim their offense. And as in the profound sufferings of Quaker

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prophet James Nayler, they were also threatened to have their tongues bore through with a hot-iron.41 It is hard to imagine that blaspheming Bunyan managed to spend much time in the military without suffering or anxiously dreading some punishing ordeal. In Grace Abounding, Bunyan’s homely image for a smarting conscience—“my hinderparts was inward, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch” (para. 82)—offers an almost Ranter-like homology between the body and the mind: his conscience smarted as if it were a whipped backside.42 We do not lack for evidence of corporal punishment in Bunyan’s metaphors—images of brutal punishment directed at the ungodly abound. In these, Bunyan expresses a different, and finally, more persuasive kind of enjoyment than that of military maneuvers, while displaying a cultural as well as a personal predilection.43 Whether enjoyed or endured, however, the probable sufferings of Bunyan in the military were not all directly punitive. The two years or so that Bunyan was in service were also, in fact, filled with physical hardships of cold and hunger so extreme that the commanding officers feared that the men might mutiny if not better supplied.44 The record of his service shows him leaving the military somewhere between May 1645 and September 1646 and then reenlisting in 1647, only to have his regiment disbanded shortly thereafter.45 His reenlistment has been variously explained as motivated by financial needs, boredom, and enjoyment of the military life. To these explanations it is important to add some sense of the domestic and political reality of Bunyan’s life: in his father’s home he would be reminded of his infant half-brother’s death, as well as his mother’s and sister’s deaths; he would also be in conversation with a Royalist father and his new wife during the tumult of revolution and regicide. It is at least plausible that the still teenage Bunyan reenlisted to get away from home. And it is worth suggesting that his desperate period of “acting-out” was rooted in an impossible dilemma: the hardships of the military life were dreadful, but his life at home was filled with hardships of a different sort, leaving him with a “scurvy and seared frame of heart” (GA, para. 25). Finally, any discussion of the impact of the military on the psychological and political development of young Bunyan must ask if Bunyan saw any active service. Biographers differ in their conclusions, for instance, about whether Bunyan was or was not at the Siege of Leicester. Regardless of what one concludes about this interesting and important question, Bunyan’s prefatory poem, “To the Reader,” in The Holy War, suggests that he was aware of the traumatic impact of battle

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on an individual’s later life. Indeed, the whole trope of that allegory suggests that the human soul can suffer in a manner as extreme as any war. The point, for our purposes, is that Bunyan never minimized the impact of war on human beings. I heard the stones fly whizzing by mine ears, (What longer kept in mind, than got in fears), I heard them fall, and saw what work they made, And how old Mars did cover with his shade The face of Mansoul:46

Bunyan’s verse reminds us, in his fashion, of the lingering impact on “Mansoul” of conflict, fear, and deprivation.

Compulsive Acts and Religious Ritual When Bunyan returned from the military to Elstow, he was subjected to his greedy impulses in the same way that in his childhood he was subjected to tormenting devils: “[W]herefore I found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was to be committed, that I might taste the sweetness of it; and I made as much haste as I could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before I had my desire; for that I feared greatly” (GA, para. 24). And (as if anticipating that some may doubt his desperation or his urgency) Bunyan adds emphatically, “[i]n these things, I protest before God I lie not, neither do I feign this form of speech: These were really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires” ( 24). His intensity in these passages echoes the intensity of his preface: “I could also have stepped into a style much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: . . . I may not play in my relating . . . but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was” (GA, Preface). Like Luther, who finds “his own organ of genius and of craftsmanship,[in] . . . the voice of the vernacular,” Bunyan finds his voice in the testimony of his suffering. “[T]he inspired voice, the voice that means it, the voice that really communicates in person”47 is the voice of Bunyan’s “plain style.” He protests that “combats and conflicts” which he “did then meet with” were more frightful than any physical suffering or pleasures imaginable (GA, para. 151). This period of frantic activity, which follows his return from the military, is the external storm before Bunyan’s internal descent into the

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sea of compulsion and doubt, which will flood the rest of the autobiography. It is very important, then, that we not gloss over the complexity of this time nor try to paint Bunyan, prematurely, as more resolved or seamless in his identity as a Dissenter than he describes himself to be in this period. He is not a hale, happy soldier; nor is he a carefree blade. The incidents of his young adult profligacy show him bent on selfdestruction, courting danger and averting disaster. Here he falls into creeks and rivers; there he strikes an adder and plucks out her sting, by which “desperateness” he might well “have brought [himself] to [his] end” were it not for God’s mercies; there again, he gets ready to go into battle and gives his place to a compatriot who for some unknown reason “desired to go in [his] room,” only to get shot in the head and die (GA, paras. 12–13). Each of these instances of God’s providence provides a kind of second act to Bunyan’s “playing the madman” at the shopkeeper’s window. Bunyan believes these incidents to be signs of God’s mercies; in each close call he “should” have died. Like most believers of his day, Bunyan believed sudden deaths and disasters to be signs of God’s judgment; he could not have suffered the deaths of his mother and sister without in some way imagining that God’s verdicts were behind these occurrences. The blatant selfdestructive acts of these years perhaps express the fantasy that his family members, like his comrade, were substitutes for himself. A teenager who spent his days and nights cursing and carousing might well have turned on his mother and sister if they reproached him like the shopkeeper’s wife; and if they were indeed “victims” of his adolescent antics, their deaths would leave young Bunyan imagining that he was responsible for their premature departure. Bunyan’s flings with death court the end which would reunite him with sister and mother; his rage at his father, similarly, finds its target in suicidal impulses expressed in a desire for damnation: “[W]herefore I sinned still, and grew more and more rebellious against God, and careless of mine own salvation” (GA, para. 14). Bunyan’s is a grim roguery. The violent imagery of his many battles with the Scripture in Grace Abounding echoes the imagery of his reckless self-destruction during this profligate period (paras. 163–64). Upon his demobilization, Bunyan fled into a libertinism which thrilled him while at the same time it threatened his psychological stability. The Puritan codes of the parliamentary army which now ruled the English villages were no doubt as hard for Bunyan to follow as they were for many of his countrymen and women when Cromwell took power. No matter how devout, it was hard for individuals to do without

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the pleasures to which they were accustomed, which the Puritans now deemed sinful. It was painful, writes Claire Tomalin, to have troops invade their churches to remove offending Christmas holly and ivy, not to mention beloved icons and images.48 Bunyan’s gradual and reluctant divestment of his various pleasures (it took him a full year, he tells us, to give up dancing) parallels the letting go of these pleasures by the larger culture. Engaging in the familiar addictive cycle of self-comfort, Bunyan “solaces” himself only to stave off the guilt he feels with more reckless abandon than ever. Some of his unnamed activities purportedly threaten “those laws, which bring some to disgrace and open shame before the face of the world” (GA, para. 9). Bunyan’s notorious surrender of Sabbath sports enacts such a cycle between inner anxiety and external pleasure. But the same [Sabbath] day, as I was in the midst of a game at cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole; just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said, Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to hell? At this I was put into an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to heaven. (GA, para. 22)

Bunyan looks from ground—or earth—to heaven in a gesture which predicts the grand narrative of Bunyan’s young adult transformation.49 When Hill writes that for Bunyan “[i]t must have been a come-down to return from the army and the great world to tinkering and Sunday tipcat on the village green,”50 I believe he misses the point. The great world of the army holds nothing for this young man who is so riveted to the pleasures of the village that he must be called from heaven to “look up.” The “demobilized . . . sophisticated and dashing young man”51 of Hill’s description is, at this point in his rebellion, perversely driven to be punished: “[I] was as if I had seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if he did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for these and my other ungodly practices.” He returns to his game rather than follow heaven’s call: “I returned desperately to my sport again; and I so well remember, . . . this kind of despair did so possess my soul, that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what I should get in sin” (GA, paras. 22, 24). Bunyan’s account of his guilty game compares tellingly to another such illicit cat-game played at roughly the same period in London.

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On a fine Sunday in April [1648] . . . a group of small boys was playing at tipcat on the open green space of Moorfields. The game was a popular and harmless one, . . . but, because it was Sunday, the lord mayor sent a detachment from the trained bands to stop the sport. A crowd of apprentices decided to defend the children’s freedom to play games. Soon the apprentices were stoning the soldiers and went to disarm them. By then a crowd several thousand strong had gathered, which proceeded to march along Fleet Street and the Strand, shouting “Now for King Charles.” Cromwell was in London, and he ordered out the cavalry and charged the crowd, killing two and injuring more. . . . [B]y 8:00 a.m. . . . the City was in the hands of the rioters. The army then moved round the walls and brought in troops through Moorgate. Some of the rioters were killed, those suspected of being ringleaders were taken to prison, everyone else dispersed.52

Such an account, drawn from a London population ill-disposed to give up Sunday sports, after six days a week hard labor reveals how high the stakes were in such games. It was not all divine punishment which loomed in the back of Bunyan’s mind. Bunyan, too, found himself enamored of rituals of the “religion of the times.” In the clearest indication yet that he was by no means fully identified with the sectarian element in the parliamentary army, but rather in a confused and transitional state, we see that he not only worshiped at the parish church twice a day, “say[ing] and sing[ing], as others did” (GA, para. 16), but also found himself caught up in what a modern reader would recognize as a sadomasochistic fantasy of submission to the priests and the ornate rituals of the church services: “[H]ad I but seen a priest, though never so sordid and debauched in his life, I should find my spirit fall under him, reverence him, and knit unto him. . . . I could have laid down at their feet, and have been trampled upon by them; their name, their garb, and work, did so intoxicate and bewitch me” (GA, para. 17). Clearly not a convinced separatist at this time in his life, Bunyan would have found little contest between the army’s ostensible attractions (a place “to meet, worship and organize,” in Hill’s speculation) and the lure of sacerdotal paraphernalia.53 Ringleader Bunyan’s postmilitary hiatus, between his demobilization and his awakening under the guidance of Gifford and the Bedford congregation, covered at least two critical years in his young life. His neurotic acting out leads directly to his realization that he cannot control himself. He loses all hope in heaven based on his evident enslavement to sin, and even his religious “passion” is dominated by a sensual addictiveness. Classically designated as “conviction” for sin in the conversion

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morphology, Bunyan’s account of this period is no less persuasive for being conventional. In psychoanalytic terms, this period is characterized by a desperate fending off of his guilt by a reckless abandonment to impulses. Such neurotic acting out often follows the awakening of an unconscious aggressive or sexual wish which has been revived from childhood fantasies. Otto Fenichel explains the defense of isolation as operating according to a “countercathexis” in which the emotions originally connected with an action are severed from it.54 I suggest that Bunyan experienced the loss of his mother and sister, as well as the rejection of his father by remarriage, as oedipal longings, as well as oedipal rage at the father, during this period of his late adolescence and early manhood. Bunyan isolates the grief, rage, and helplessness he feels due to these traumas and throws himself into the pleasures which “cut off” both memory and guilt.

Politics and Personality From the evidence we have, it is not at all clear that Bunyan was a striding Parliamentarian at this time; in fact, I rather doubt that he knew what he was. Confusion and dissension in the parliamentary ranks were rampant. We distort not only historical records but also what we know about Bunyan’s family background and his attraction to established church practices when he returned from the service if we prematurely assert that Republican convictions dominated this most confused time in his life. This confusion was not limited to Bunyan. George Downing writes of the great confusion of “the army, Parliament and the puritans”55 which ultimately led to a “second” civil war. One cryes out, settle church government, punish errours and blasphemyes . . . ; another, remember your often declarations for liberty for tender consciences; one, bring home the King according to the covenant; another, it can’t stand with the preservation of the true religion and liberty, etc., and thus for want of a downright playne understanding of the foundation of this warre . . . we have been likely often to have been embroyled in a more bloody, and by our quarrellings to give occasion to any third party to devoure all . . . What the issue will be the Lord only knows, only he seems to be shaking the great ones of the earth.56

Bunyan’s place in all of this is by no means obvious, and he might well have felt more loyalty to the lost cause of the moderate but “loyal” par-

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liamentary figures like his commander, Sir Samuel Luke, who was “fight[ing] the king to defend the King” and who despised the radical separatists.57 It was after all this faction of the army (which was taken off to Ireland) in which Bunyan reenlisted before it disbanded.58 And in Grace Abounding Bunyan does make a rather haunting analogy between his youthful rebellion against God and the rebellion of those who turn against their “prince”: “‘The rebellious,’ thought I; why surely they are such as once were under subjection to their prince, even those who after they have sworn subjection to his government have taken up arms against him; and this, thought I, is my very condition, once I loved him, feared him, served him; but now I am a rebel” (para. 166). In a classic reversal, parallel to his becoming tormentor in his childhood nightmares, he does of course turn his “abuse” of the prince (Christ) into a denial of his own desire and ultimately a torment to himself: “[B]ut in this I also missed my desire; I was driven with force beyond it; I was like a man going to execution, even by that place where he would fain creep in and hide himself, but may not” (GA, para. 167). Bunyan is both slayer of the prince and the executed man at once. His use of the metaphor of insurrection, execution, and rebellion cannot but be some sign of his attempt to understand his own conflicted relation not only to God, the father and the king, but also, and perhaps most of all, to himself. My point is not by any means to make young Bunyan into a Royalist. Rather I seek to make sense out of his behavior when he returns from the military; I suggest that his psychological and spiritual conflict around the stirring ideological and cultural issues raging at this time can be discerned in the compulsive profligacy he reports in the early portions of his autobiographical narrative. It is naïve to assume that young soldiers, radically inclined or otherwise, would have no ambivalence about the turn of events in 1649 (by this time Bunyan has returned home). The King’s body is not so neatly dismembered that it does not, like Hamlet’s ghost, call out “Remember me!” Later “defectors” from the Bedford congregation will, in an apparent panic after the Restoration, accuse fellow believers of having their hands in the blood of the King.59 We let the tail wag the dog if our sense of the place of the English Revolution in modern history is read backward onto Bunyan’s lived experience as a young man in Bedford, recently returned from the hardships of war. We must not deny that he might well have felt quite stunned upon hearing that even a muchhated king could be killed before the eyes of his subjects. The reaction

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of Philip Henry—who was an Oxford undergraduate at the time of Charles’s execution and who later became, like Bunyan, a nonconformist preacher who suffered persecution under King Charles’s son— shows a quiet mournfulness at what he saw: “The blow I saw given and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a grone by the Thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.”60 For Bunyan the curser, whose own father is very likely railing at the radicals and their murderous schemes, news of the patriarch’s demise could not have been experienced indifferently. True, he was silent on the subject; but as Freud says of the patient in his “Fragment on a Case of Hysteria,” “[i]f his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips, betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”61 Bunyan’s grim profligacy in his young adult years was just such a betrayal, which disclosed not only his confusion about the killing of a king but also his confusion about his own beliefs which predicate his eventual calling to write and to preach. Norman O. Brown’s sweeping but suggestive reading of English history is peculiarly illuminating for our purposes as he connects Sir Robert Filmer’s identification between the monarch and the patriarch to the “body” of the English king and the English subject: “Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a suprahistorical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story. Freud seems to project into prehistoric times the constitutional crisis of seventeenth-century England.”62 With the killing of the patriarch, all power is leveled: “The phantom of fatherhood is banished from the earth, and elevated to the skies . . . . Procreative power itself is transferred from the earthly to the heavenly father.”63 Like Bunyan who glances from earth to heaven in his last-gasp game of cat before his conversion, the rebellious son transfers his sense of paternity from the earthly father to the heavenly. Adam Phillips remarks, upon his first looking into Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution 1640, (“which I found by chance on the floor of a secondhand bookshop when I was sixteen,”) that “[i]t seemed, despite the remoteness of its subject, also somehow simultaneous with my own life. It was, in other words, a form of history that made me an involuntary and willing participant. It fascinated me without effort; and it was about, among other things, the value of struggle.”64 Phillips at sixteen years old finds in Hill’s narrative of the English Revolution the story of his own adolescent identity quest in

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much the same spirit that Bunyan discovers Luther in his adolescence. Hill’s slim volume (its brevity allying it with the pamphlet wars) becomes a manifesto of a personal evolution, if not revolution for Phillips. As a wishy-washy royalist, fired by . . . [the Cavalier poets] adolescent fantasies of sexual terror and class aspiration, I was simultaneously confirming and defying my parents’ contradictory ideals, the psychic errands they wanted me to run for them. . . . It was, I see now, a small step from these incompatible ambitions—the split ego ideals and double-binds I inherited from my family— to a virtual passion for Hill’s buried heroes, Winstanley and the Diggers.65

Phillips’s oedipal struggle, lived at the heart of both anxious conformity and the urge to dissent, brings us full circle to our discussion of Bunyan. Bunyan’s adolescence and young adulthood partake of this same “archetypal” developmental dilemma between the psychic errands of the “father” and the call—whether we understand it as internal or external—to assume his own identity and indeed to follow his “calling.” Bunyan’s depression lifts with such a calling. John Gifford therapeutically advises him to not take truth “upon trust as from this or that or another man or men; but to cry mightily to God” (GA, para. 117). Bunyan tells us late in life that it is very hard for him to call God “father.” Given what we know about his myriad projections of the many harsh and rejecting faces and voices of God in Grace Abounding, it is not surprising that biographers have taken these sad remarks as biographical hints as to the nature of Thomas Bunyan, at least in relation to his eldest son: “Oh how great a task it is . . . for a poor soul that becomes sensible of sin and the wrath of God, to say in faith, but this one word: ‘Father!’ . . . I myself have found that when I can say but this word ‘Father,’ it doth me more good than when I call him by any other Scripture name” (para. 117). Talon asks of these passages, in direct reference to Bunyan’s adolescent crisis: Is “God coming to overwhelm the man whose child’s heart, weaned too soon from maternal love, had never known the warmth of a father’s love?”66 Henri Talon’s reflections, though perhaps sentimental, are, nevertheless, consistent with my contention that Bunyan’s young adulthood was fraught with struggles around a conflicted identification with his father. Talon says he has no “proof” for his impressions, and of course he does not. But the consistency of such an impression among nearly all of Bunyan’s biographers emerges, again, from the oppressed experience of the young man whose attitude toward the heavenly father projects fear, dread, hate, and despair.

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Such impressions do perhaps “burn through the cold storage of history” and “historical proof” into our consciousness, confirming that Bunyan, whatever factual record he left us, struggled mightily to overcome an internalized father “imago” who was as cruel and sadistic as the God of his worst vengeance fantasies.67 That he is able to overcome such a punitive internalized father is the wonder. Erikson’s celebration of young man Luther’s achievement puts us directly in mind of Bunyan. [H]ow was he going to submit without being emasculated, or rebel without emasculating the father? . . . Millions of boys face these problems and solve them in some way or another—they live, as Captain Ahab says, with half of their heart and with only one of their lungs, and the world is the worse for it. Now and again, however, an individual is called upon (called by whom, only the theologians claim to know, and by what, only bad psychologists) to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone.68

Bunyan’s universal pilgrim is born from such a calling.

CHAPTER

Bunyan’s Women, Women’s Bunyan

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the origin of this essay was the preparation by a nonspecialist in Bunyan studies to give a talk to a group of Bunyan scholars, which required a complete but sudden immersion in the last twenty years’ accumulated work on this author and, in particular, given my own area of interest, attention to work on gender issues in Bunyan’s writings since the 1970s and 1980s when I last was involved with the critical debates concerning this author.1 Perhaps because of my “outsider” perspective, certain features of Bunyan criticism, old and new, seemed odd but alluring in their implications. For example, although as a graduate student I had read William York Tindall’s memorable evocation of Bunyan’s life and times, I found, that on re-reading, I still retained a baffled curiosity about Tindall’s assertion that during Bunyan’s lifetime, “England was lighted by the queer radiance of insanity and shaken by the regrettable demonstrations of the inspired.”2 Equally provocative was a thread running through accounts from the earliest Bunyan criticism to the most recent concerning possible links between Bunyan’s women and the larger social issues raised by contemporary women preachers and writers. What caught my attention were not the expected differences among the early biographical assessments of Bunyan’s relationships with women and more recent feminist, genderstudies approaches, but, instead, the assumptions about the man and his times they seem to share. A perusal of the standard biographies and histories of Bunyan’s life and times shows that until fairly recently scholars were united in perceiving women as a marginal part of both Bunyan’s life and work. For

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brevity’s sake, I will offer the views of Christopher Hill in his classic 1988 study of Bunyan, his writings, and contexts as a summary of this position. Hill states that “women play a very small part in Bunyan’s voluminous writings.”3 Expanding on this, he observes that, unlike Milton’s Eve, Dalilah, or even the Lady in Comus, few of Bunyan’s women characters seem to “come alive,” and most exist in his account to further the plot, to be abandoned, to play music, or to offer bad advice to male characters.4 This stems perhaps, suggests Hill, from Bunyan’s relationships with flesh-and-blood women. Hill offers what is a fairly standard assessment of Bunyan the man: Bunyan seems never to have been wholly at ease with women. He replied angrily, and with considerable agitation, to accusations of promiscuity. . . . Bunyan no doubt protests too much, but he does seem to have been more at home with the male comradeship of the open road, or with the elders of the church. This would account for his “roughness” and apparent insensitivity towards Agnes Beaumont. Or perhaps he was not in general very sociable.5

Since Hill’s book, a number of excellent studies have appeared of the women preachers, petitioners, and “sisters” in religion who also peopled the landscape during Bunyan’s lifetime, giving us a richer context in which to understand the women figures in his writings. Looking at Bunyan specifically, N. H. Keeble and Elspeth Graham modified such views as Hill’s a decade ago, drawing attention to Bunyan’s use of the feminine as a trope of virtue and vice and to what Graham describes as “a special sensitivity to the urgent spiritual needs of women,” although she concludes that his “relationships with women are troublesome to him.”6 Keeble, too, sees in Bunyan’s writing a lack of interest in women as significant individuals—not naming, for example, the poor women in Bedford whose conversation so profoundly alters his life, nor indeed his first wife, whose books began this change. Keeble thus concentrates more on the image of the woman in the texts, Bunyan’s use of feminine icons to “supply images of temptation, and in this guise it exerts a baleful fascination and enjoys a malignant power.”7 More recently, Tamsin Spargo, in her investigation of the gender tensions arising from the preservation of authority in Bunyan’s position as a patriarchal speaker, suggests that the “questions of the representation of women in Bunyan’s writings are of far greater importance than generations of Bunyan critics have allowed.”8 Like Keeble, she brings a penetrating eye to analyze the “figurative usefulness” of the feminine as a force to be resisted and against which to define

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oneself in opposition; she finds the women characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman as “mirroring Scriptural and conventional categorizations” such as vice and virtue, where even “a large number of the apparently godly are, in fact, ungodly.”9 Against this critical backdrop created over the past twenty years, this essay will look at the ways in which our biographical imagination of the man Bunyan has affected the ways in which his women characters have been interpreted. In particular, it shall continue down the path smoothed by Keeble, Graham, and Spargo, but look more closely at the nature of what was to Bunyan so “troublesome” in his relationships with the opposite sex during “troublesome times”—a particular historical moment, as Tindall observed, marked by the unraveling of certain social codes of behavior—and how it perhaps has affected our readings of women characters in his writings. The starting point is the source for the premise that Bunyan the man did not deal well with or avoided the company of women, even godly ones, and, by extension, also excluded or did not deal well with them as a writer. It is interesting to a person not invested in Bunyan criticism that his biographers have been generally resistant to portraying him as a sensual man, dwelling instead on his aversion to female flesh. In his introduction to The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, for example, Bonamy Dobrée notes that as a young man Bunyan was “employed enough in his early years, partly in being a bold dog (though this does not seem to have amounted to much, blasphemy apart; he cannot hold a candle to St. Augustine for meritorious profligacy).”10 The notable exception to this occurs in a rather odd popular imaginative reconstruction of Bunyan’s life by M. P. Willcocks entitled Bunyan Calling (1943), where she imagines the young, unregenerate Bunyan participating in a rather risqué folk dance, which appears to have been an adult cross between spin the bottle and a pillow dance.11 Most critics, however, are content with citing the sections in the revised edition of Grace Abounding, sections 308 through 318, where Bunyan refutes charges made against him of promiscuity, bigamy, and adultery. The common explanation for the addition of this section is that it is in response to the Agnes Beaumont scandal and trial in 1674. In this section Bunyan tells the reader that when he became more influential as a preacher, his enemies began to spread rumors to undermine his spiritual authority: “It began therefore to be rumored up and down among the People, that I was a Witch, a Jesuit, a High-way-man, and the like,” he recounts, “[b]ut that which was reported with the

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boldest confidence was that I had my Misses, my Whores, my Bastards, yea, two Wives at once, and the like.”12 Bunyan then offers a lengthy refutation of the charges of loose living and furthermore declares decisively that he is so far from being a hedonistic lecher that, My Foes have mist their mark in this shooting at me. . . . if all the Fornicators and Adulterers in England were hang’d by the Neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their Envy, would be still alive and well. I know not whether there be such a thing as a Woman breathing under the Copes of the whole Heaven but by their Apparel, their Children, or by common Fame, except my Wife. (GA, para. 156)

Freud famously announced that the first mental act one takes after meeting an unknown person is to classify whether they are male or female and that any ambiguity affecting our perception of such leads to anxiety and discomfort.13 One might think that by surrendering one’s ability to define whether a person is male or female to external agents, processing information strictly on the basis of costume (self-presentation of gender) and reputation (social representation of gender) would be a sufficient declaration to establish one’s lack of interest in the more particular flesh under those representations. This declaration, however, is not sufficient for Bunyan. Bunyan continues with an analysis of his social relationships with the opposite sex. It was God’s providence, Bunyan decides, that made him “shie” of women after his conversion, which in turn has kept him safe from the snares of the flesh and permitted him to perform as a voice of God carrying his message. His friends and acquaintance, furthermore, can testify concerning his behavior: They know, and can also bear me witness, with whom I have been most intimately concerned, that it is a rare thing to see me carry it pleasant towards a Woman; the common Salutation of Women I abhor, ’tis odious to me in whomsoever I see it. Their Company alone I cannot away with. I seldom so much as touch a Woman’s Hand, for I think these things are not so becoming me. (GA, para. 315)

His shyness, or one might say his abhorrence of touching female flesh, extends even to gestures perceived as socially acceptable between men and women, such as a chaste kiss on the cheek: When I have seen good men Salute those Women that they have visited, or that have visited them, I have at times made my objection against it, and when they have answered that it was but a piece of Civility, I have told them it is not a comely sight; some indeed have urged the holy kiss, but then I have asked

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why they made baulks, why they did salute the most handsom, and let the ill favoured go? thus how laudable so ever such things have been in the Eyes of others, they have been unseemly in my sight. (GA, para. 315)14

It is characteristic, I think, of Bunyan’s sense of humor about how humans are able to rationalize sin that he notes that pretty women receive spiritual kisses more often than ill-favored ones. But it does seem there is more being offered here for the reader of Bunyan to think about than a simple refutation of a slanderous statement against a single individual. It is established in Grace Abounding as well as The Life and Death of Mr. Badman that Bunyan was personally acquainted with members of the Ranter sect who were often charged with encouraging lewd behavior between believers. Perhaps his protestations are an attempt to separate himself publicly from contemporary male preachers such as Lawrence Clarkson (also found as Claxton), who published in 1660 his autobiography, The Lost Sheep Found, informing the reading public about his practice of sharing the spirit through the flesh with eager women in his flock. Traveling extensively through Suffolk, Herefordshire, and London in the 1650s, Clarkson was early in his career brought before a Committee in Bury on account of “dipping” women: “We are informed you dipped six Sisters one night naked . . . it is reported that which of them you liked best, you lay with her in the water.” Clarkson’s defense to the male committee was that “Surely your experience teacheth you the contrary, that nature hath small desire to copulation in water.”15 As he progressed through various sects and rose to fame as a Ranter preacher, Clarkson does not deny his sexual encounters with women attracted to him by his preaching. He notes indeed that he was actively pursued by women wanting to have sex with him, some intending marriage, others apparently following his assertion that there is no sin except thinking makes it so, and therefore to be free of sin, one must practice it: “[U]ntil you can lie with all women as one woman, and not judge it sin, you can do nothing but sin.” Interestingly, he notes defensively that, during this period, “I was still careful for moneys for my wife, onely my body was given to other women.”16 Viewed in this context, Bunyan’s biographers’ adherence to his representation of himself as a minister for whom his main spiritual crises were of intellectual rather than fleshly or sensual origin seems like an attempt to separate Bunyan the man from the sexual misconduct of his more radical contemporaries. To my ears, however, Bunyan’s protestation that he is indifferent to a woman’s touch also falls into the same

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category as Bunyan’s assertion that he avoids writing about controversy—as Tindall observed about this declaration, however sincerely protested, it is contradicted by the experience of sitting down and reading through the nearly thirty years worth of writing which Bunyan produced.17 I would argue that while Bunyan may indeed have been “shie” of women or, more accurately, of touching them, after his conversion he nevertheless retained from his unregenerate days a very acute sense of the sexual politics of his time and place, especially the particular difficulties faced by male spiritual leaders and their female followers, and that this in turn informs the numerous examples he offers in his writings of women characters and relations between the sexes. Far from being marginal to his experiences as a pastor or a writer, I would argue, the characters which are sexually active women—or, to use a phrase frequently employed by Bunyan’s contemporaries, “lewd livers”—in Bunyan’s texts offer many things of interest to those thinking about early modern gender issues and, as such women are represented in other types of contemporary records, they also offer many things of interest to Bunyan scholars.18 Let us begin by juxtaposing three passages that raise interesting issues. The first is from Agnes Beaumont, where she describes getting a lift, so to speak, to the meeting. She begins: “At last unexpected came Mr. Bunyan . . . I was glad to see him but I was afraid he would not carry me to the meeting behind him.” As we know, her brother at length persuades the reluctant Bunyan to take her on his horse: “But to speak the truth I had not gone far behind him, but my heart was puffed up with pride, and I began to have high thoughts of myself, and proud to think I should ride behind such a man as he was; and I was pleased anybody did look after me as I rode along.”19 The next passage is from Abiezer Coppe’s 1650 publication A Second Fiery Flying Roule; in this passage he records the internal struggle with self-interest as he encounters a ragged poor man: Whereupon the strange woman who flattereth with her lips and is subtle of heart, said within me. It’s a poor wretch, give him two-pence. But my EXCELLENCY and MAIESTY (in me) scorn’d her words, confounded her language; and kickt her out of his presence. But immediately the WEL-FAVOURED HARLOT (whom I carried not upon my horse behind me) but who rose up in me, said:

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It’s a poor wretch give him 6.d and that’s enough for a Squire or Knight, to give to one poor body. Besides (saith the holy Scripturian Whore) he’s worse than an Infidell that provides not for his own Family. . . . And thus she flattereth with her lips, and her words being smoother than oile; and her lips dropping as the honey comb, I was fired to hasten my hand into my pocket.20

The third is from Bunyan’s posthumously published text The House of the Forest of Lebanon, a passage Hill notes as “curious” in its content, where the house in the forest of Lebanon is a feminized type for the “Church in the Wilderness”: “[T]he Church, even in the Wilderness, or under Persecution, is compared not only to a Woman, but to a comely and delicate Woman. And who, that shall meet such a Creature in a Wood, unless he feared God, but would seek to ravish and defile her.”21 I leave you to ponder any possible bawdy innuendo to be found in the phrase to carry a woman behind you on your horse,22 but point instead at the connections between women’s flesh touching men’s and sinful words from their flattering lips touching the soul, between spiritual whoredom and masculine lust, between spiritual and sexual seduction through sinful language as well as through fleshly contact. At the start of his career as a writer in the mid and late 1650s, Bunyan was beginning his experiences as a preacher, a role in which he frequently clashed both in person and in print with rival Quakers. It is also a period in which a decade of sensational witch trials was drawing to a close, with learned explanations appearing both in support and denial of the existence of witches based on the evidence of these trials. Between 1645 and 1656, the reader of small books and tracts could choose from eleven titles following the trials, examinations, and analyses of famous cases, some in nearby counties. In A Few Sighes from Hell, Bunyan asserts of himself as an unregenerate reader in the 1640s and 1650s that, “give me a Ballad, a Newsbook, George on horseback or Bevis of Southampton, give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables; but for the holy Scriptures I cared not.”23 His later critics have also remarked on the extent to which, as G. B. Harrison has happily put it, “The Strait Gait, and especially The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Mr. Badman, give the impression that Bunyan has been reading books which were not intended for edification.”24 However, we need not stretch the speculation too far concerning whether Bunyan was himself familiar with those particular witchcraft texts. It becomes clear that he himself apparently believed that he knew

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a victim of witchcraft, a case recounted in Strange & Terrible Newes from Cambridge Being a true Relation of the Quakers bewitching of Mary Philips. Bunyan’s biographers have given almost no attention to this episode in Bunyan’s life and writings, in part, one imagines, because Bunyan’s pamphlet in support of the victim has apparently vanished and our knowledge of it thus comes from James Blackley and George Whitehead’s angry rebuttal of the woman’s testimony and Bunyan’s support of it, and in part because the charges appear to have been so bizarre that it is hard to place them within our biographical construction of the young preacher. Brown, Talon, Harrison, and Sharrock do not mention it at all; Hill has a sentence; Ola Elizabeth Winslow in her 1961 biography does bring it up, but only in very general terms, and sensibly manages to support both sides, stating that “the implication that he believed the tale of the bewitching, as told to him by the alleged victim, has no support in anything that has come down to us over his own signature, but there would be nothing surprising about it. Such credulity was in high place and low, in print and out of it.”25 Tindall, interestingly, places it in an appendix as a demonstration of Bunyan’s antipathy for the Quakers at this time, in particular his desire, apparently, to see the Widow Morlin burnt as a witch.26 As seen in the remark from Grace Abounding, when Bunyan’s detractors wished to attack his character, in addition to labeling him a highwayman or a Catholic, they also accused him of being a witch. What did it mean to Bunyan, or to members of his congregation, for him to be accused of being a witch? The vast majority of those accused of witchcraft, as indeed the majority of the congregation of Bunyan’s church, were women. However, there were some notable male witches in these accounts, and they share features with their female counterparts; the characteristics of what constitutes witchlike behavior, the types of things to which witches confessed, and the types of evidence their accusers brought against them are remarkably consistent within the witchcraft trial pamphlets regardless of their point of origin, suggesting that there existed a body of broadly shared cultural assumptions about witches and witchcraft in circulation during the period. The case in question was reported and refuted in a series of three pamphlets apparently published in 1659. The first report is an anonymous publication, whose full title bears reciting: Strange & Terrible Newes from Cambridge Being a true Relation of the Quakers bewitching of Mary Philips out of the Bed from her Husband in the Night, and transforming her into the shape of a Bay Mare, riding her from Dinton, towards the Uni-

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versity. . . . The other surviving pamphlet in the series is the final one, a refutation by James Blackley and George Whitehead: A Lying Wonder Discovered, and the Strange and Terrible News from Cambridge proved false. Which falsenes is published in a Libel, Concerning a wicked slander cast upon a Quaker, but the Authour of said Libel was ashamed to subscribe his name to it. Also This contains an answer to John Bunions Paper touching the said imagined witchcraft, which he had given forth to your wonderment (as he saith) but it is also proved a Lye and a slander by many credible witnesses hereafter mentioned. Bunyan’s pamphlet at this point has not been recovered, but Blackley and Whitehead do give specific references to it in their rebuttal of the case. In Strange & Terrible Newes from Cambridge, we are told the story of a woman who having dabbled with Quaker meetings denounced them; apparently as a reprisal, two Quakers, one male, one female, “bewitched or inchanted [her] out of the Room where she lay” with her husband and “transformed her into the perfect shape of a Mare, and so rid from Dinton to a Town within four miles of Cambridge, where a Company of Quakers were met.”27 After the meeting, they rode her home and “upon the aforesaid Inchanting Witches alighting off, and hanging the Bridle upon the Pails, the snaffle (or Bitt) came out of her mouth, and miraculous she appeared in her created Form and Likeness, to the great astonishment of the Neighbors, who beheld this unexpected change with abundance of admiration.” The woman brought charges against the two enchanters, and on July 28, 1659, she appeared before Judge Windham at the Assizes at Cambridge; as evidence, she showed her “hands and feet, which were lamentably bruised . . . her sides being also exceedingly rent and torn, just as if they were spurgal’d, and her smock all bloudy.”28 The details of the rebuttal are worth looking at closely. To begin with, Blackley and Whitehead announce, the person supposedly transformed into a horse was named Margaret Pryor, not Mary Philips, and they note that “there are others of that name Pryor in the same Town that are not of her relation: for they fear the Lord.”29 The Quaker pamphlet then goes through the testimony she gave, refuting it and Bunyan’s comments on it. They point out that the event supposedly took place nearly two years before she reported it and that her neighbors consider her to be “a lewd, vain woman, of evil conversation” and that she had been “seen uncivilly to behave herself, often times in prophaneness and drunkennesse” (2). They look closely at her assertion that she, in her horse form, observed the Quakers feasting on “Mutton,

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Rabbet, and Lamb.” Here Bunyan’s support of her is cited, as they declare, “in all this story she was plainly discovered to be an impudent Liar”—not because it seemed unlikely that a woman could be transformed into a horse, but because she said that “they had Lamb at that time of year, in November, or that she being a Mare . . . could distinguish of these meats” (3). Bunyan is attacked for repeating her accusations and adding to them: “This is like John Bunions relation, who said that she said she could see . . . that they, as they sat the table did shine so bright as if they had been Angels; and that she heard them at the feast talk of Doctrine, which was a shame for him to have uttered, that a horse could understand what was like Angels, or understand Doctrine” (4). Bunyan’s pamphlet or paper, as they refer to it, also apparently reported that she told him she was transformed into a bay horse, “and yet she told the Judge that she was a Mare. So see her lies.” The case is resolved through the judge’s questioning of her and rests interestingly enough on matters equine rather than theological. The judge, on examining the physical evidence of her hands, feet, and sides, questions her which hurt her the most, her hands or feet—he declares her a liar when she answers her feet, pointing out that this is “not at all usual; for horses that travel are the soonest beaten and gauled on their fore feet,” not their hind ones (5). When the judge asks her how it is she wasn’t ridden ever again, she replied that she had “burnt elder bark and her own hair” to prevent them from having power over her. This provoked Windham to declare that Margaret Pryor, the accuser, was “the Sorsorer, and had used sorcery by her own confession, and said he did perceive Pryor to be a whimsical woman.” The reasons why Bunyan chose to believe her may never be known, unless a copy of his account of her conversations and accusations is unearthed. He may have seized upon her and her case as a convenient means through which to attack the Quakers in his area or perhaps because he genuinely believed that her case was a manifestation of the perilous times in which they lived, as Strange & Terrible Newes phrases it, “when Christians become Beasts; what a sad Age do we live in?” when “the Creature transformed daily from his Rational Intellects to an irrational sensuality of Dumb Creatures,” and, as Tindall imagines, perhaps he was moved by her tears.30 Because the Quaker rebuttal cites details from Bunyan’s account which were not in the original pamphlet report, it appears that Bunyan had further knowledge of the case than just the written version, and Blackley’s and Whitehall’s citations suggest that Bunyan was either present at the trial or had spoken with

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Margaret Pryor. In either situation, it is clear that Bunyan was acquainted with a person perceived not only by the Quakers but also by the magistrate to be a disorderly female who practiced “domestic” magic or sorcery to protect herself from her neighbors and whose bizarre story commanded his attention and protective support, regardless of Margaret Pryor’s reputation as a “lewd liver.” As he tells his “Courteous Reader” in the opening epistle of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Bunyan was fond of using people and events from his life to create his allegorical narratives: “yea, I think I may truly say,” he observes of the sins and sinners in Badman, that “all things that here I discourse of, I mean as to matter of fact, have been acted upon the stage of this World, even many times before mine eyes.”31 Critics have enjoyed linking Bunyan’s Bedford neighbors to figures in the text: Sharrock states that “Badman’s composite wickedness is described, then, from the world Bunyan knew,” and Winslow also suggests that “some of the discipline cases in the Bedford Church Book can also be matched . . . Bedford was too small a theatre of sin for anonymity.”32 But it is interesting to me that while it has been the practice to identify various male characters with real people—for example Mr. Wiseman with Bunyan and one William Swinton as being the informer both in the text and in the flesh, or more accurately as a thorn in the flesh of Bunyan and his congregation—this practice does not extend to the women characters, who remain firmly categorized as literary emblems by Bunyan’s commentators. So the question arises, could Margaret Pryor or elements from her case and the Quaker rebuttal be likewise “embodied” in Bunyan’s later assessment of relationships between the sexes? We have only the irate Quakers’ word for it that Pryor was a promiscuous drunkard of “evil conversation.” However, as Keeble notes in his investigation of the feminine as an emblem of vice through temptation, there certainly are a lot of lewd ladies in Bunyan’s texts. Wanton and Mrs. Bubble, are, for example, dangerous snares to both Faithful in Part One of Pilgrim’s Progress and Stand-fast in Part Two. Keeble, however, interprets Mrs. Bubble, according to the text’s marginal gloss, as a “comprehensive image of temptation,” or “all that impedes the saint’s progress in sanctity,”33 not as one of the aforesaid characters taken from Bunyan’s experiences with actual women as a minister. Thomas Luxon goes one move further and sees all of Bunyan’s women, not only the lewd ones, in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress as being emblematic of what in this world must absolutely be rejected and left

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behind for a man to achieve salvation, because women possess sexuality and thus are “to be forever one of the things of this world, that is, a nothing.”34 This insistence on the figurative or emblematic nature of Bunyan’s women characters but not of the male ones, of course, erases from view the possibility that Bunyan the minister might have had to deal with sexually active women, whether witches like Margaret Pryor or lewd livers in general. Such a paradigm does permit the critic to happily pursue the historical materiality of various male malefactors, such as William Swinton and the unnamed Ranter, as a way of gaining insight into Bunyan’s spiritual life in a material, if asexual, context. However, the insistence on the literary nature of the emblems of sexual temptation raises some further questions. Why, for example, in the discussion of the vices of young Badman’s companions does “uncleaness” occupy some fifteen pages in the 1680 first edition, compared to eight pages for drunkenness? For critics, as we think about Bunyan, sexual sins may be figurative, but Wiseman notes that “whoredom” is “one of the most reigning sins in our day” (Badman, 78); one of Badman’s companions was a “ringleader to them all in the beastly sin of Whoredom” and knew all the best whorehouses in town. Attentive observes that “it is a deadly thing to young men, when such beastly queans, shall, with words and carriage that are openly tempting, discover themselves unto them; It is hard for such to escape their Snare” (49). Wiseman offers an extended account of Proverbs 5.8, describing the woman as “a bold Beast: and indeed, the very eyes, hands, words and ways of such, are all snares and bands to youthful, lustful fellows: And with these was young Badman greatly snared” (50). An extended section on the very concrete and material dangers of associating with whores or harlots follows, including the expense of them and also the diseases associated with them, including “the Foul Disease, now called by us the Pox,” which deforms the body (51). In spite of the visible damage to the flesh of the sinners from sexual relationships, Wiseman concludes in this section that “this sin is such a snare to the Soul, that unless a miracle of Grace prevents, it unavoidably perishes in the enchanting and bewitching pleasures of it . . . the mouth (that is, the flattering Lips) of a strange woman is a deep pit, the abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein” (53). The lure of feminine flesh is so great that, as seen in the passage quoted earlier from The House of the Forest in Lebanon, un-

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less God actively intervenes, sex will occur, whether through seduction and consent or ravishment. It is worth noting the connection made here in Proverbs 22.12 between witchcraft and the flattering lips of a strange woman, which Bunyan interweaves in his account of Badman’s vices. At the end of Mr. Badman’s life, after breaking the heart of his pious first wife, he marries a second time, a woman mirroring his own values. “Making him sufficiently drunk,” Mr. Wiseman announces, “she was so cunning as to get a promise of marriage of him” once she had “caught him in her pit” (an interesting choice of metaphor), although “she had her companions as well as he had his and she would meet them too at the Tavern and the Ale-house, more commonly than he was aware of” (145). “To be plain,” says Mr. Wiseman, “she was a very Whore, and had as great resort came to her, where time and place was appointed, as any of them all” (145). In addition to her sexual appointment book being crowded with more entries than a professional’s, she was also a notable curser and swearer, the latter being characteristic of both the young Mr. Badman and the young Mr. Bunyan (146–47). Another disorderly woman in Badman is offered as an example of what happens to swearers and cursers: there is again a very strong link between the sins of the flesh and those of the tongue, and again one is struck by the concrete particularity of the description of her and her sins. Mr. Wiseman tells of one Dorothy Mately who was “noted by the people of the Town to be a great swearer, and Curser, and Lier and Thief (just like Mr. Badman)”; she steals money from a small child and denies it, swearing that if she was lying she hoped the ground would open and swallow her up, which, of course, it promptly does, along with her washing tub (33). One source of this story appears to be Srenock’s 1677 Gods Sword Drawn against Drunkards and Swearers, Blasphemeres of Gods Holy Name, Whore-Mongers, Sabbath-breakers and other lewd Livers of all sorts. This is a type of documentary collection of episodes offering specific names, locations, and dates of the just punishment of sinners caught in the act. In Srenock’s version of the incident, supposedly occurring in 1675, the woman is described as “very much addicted to Drunkenness, Swearing and uncleanness.”35 This notable female curser and swearer is also the example which provokes Srenock to declare “How doth this Sin of Whoredom raign amongst us, that many boast of this their shames, and are so hardened in their Wickedness that they go on to the utter destruction of soul and Estate.

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Let me tell thee, Oh Whoremonger, and all filthy Harlots!” he concludes, “God will surely punish for this filthy Sin!”36 In addition to the incorporation of “lewd livers” drawn from Bunyan’s acquaintances and reading, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman is also notable for its pronouncements about feminine fashions among the godly. Bunyan may not have himself been able to distinguish men from women except by their clothing, but his Mr. Wiseman suggests the way women dress makes this less difficult: he denounces dresses cut so that they reveal the woman’s “naked shoulders, and paps hanging out like a cow’s bag” (125). At another point, Mr. Wiseman states that even Church members are not immune to fashion: “I once talked to a maid by way of reproof for her fond and gaudy garment. But she told me, the tailor would make it so; when alas! Poor proud girl, she gave the order to the tailor so to make it” (123). He also makes the point of saying, “I have seen many my self, and those Church-members too, so deckt and bedaubed with their Fangles and Toyes, and that when they have been at the solemn appointment of God, in the way of his Worship, that I have wondered with what face such painted persons could sit in the place where they were without swounding” (122). While women in inappropriate attire may be refined into representations of the temptations of the flesh in general, it strongly appears in this portion of the text that domestic examples drawn from personal experience are the source of the anxiety, not metaphorical females representing vice. Mr. Attentive also adds an odd twist to this discussion of spiritual pride being manifest through pride in seductive flesh when he contributes the information that “it is whispered that some good ministers have countenanced their people in their light and wanton apparel” (Badman, 123). Wiseman agrees that ministers are not immune to the appeal of such attire being worn by their women folk. However, it is particularly spiritually dangerous. Speaking of women in his congregation, Wiseman concludes that, “I believe also that Satan has drawn more into the sin of uncleanness by the spangling show of fine cloths, than he could possibly drawn unto it without them. I wonder what it was that of old was called the attire of a harlot; certainly it could not be more bewitching and tempting than are the garments of many professors this day” (125). Sounding very much like a seasoned pastor, he concludes glumly that “for the proud dames in England that profess, they have Moses and the prophets, and if they will not hear them, how then can we hope that they should receive good by such a dull-sounding ram’s horn as I am?”

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In these detailed descriptions of the link between women’s dress and the ways it exposes tempting feminine flesh (the image of the bare breasted woman also figures prominently, so to speak, in the advice to children about apparel in Divine Emblems, and in later editions is illustrated with a woodcut of an exposed lady), there is also present a strong link between sins of the flesh and sins of the tongue, between the unclean mind and the committing of uncleanness with the body. For Bunyan, as well as Srenock, the sins of the tongue appear to exist on a continuum with the sins of the flesh. In Christian Behavior, the link between sexual temptation of the flesh and sinful language are made clear. “Adultery, or uncleanness, is akin to these sins,” Bunyan explains, “it shows itself in three ways: a wanton eye, immodest talk, and light and wanton apparel.” “The lusts of uncleanness are devilishly taking; they will both take the heart with the eyes and tongue,” warns Bunyan: the attire of an harlot is too frequently in our day the attire of professors. . . . If those that give way to a wanton eye, wanton words, and immodest apparel, be not whores &c, in their hearts, I know not what to say . . . doth immodest apparel, with stretched-out necks, naked breasts, a made speech, and mincing gaits &c, argue mortification of lusts? If any say, that these things may argue pride as well as carnal lusts. Well, but why are they proud? Is it not to trick up the body? And why do they with pride trick up the body, if it be not to provoke both themselves and others to lusts: God knoweth their hearts without their outsides; and we know their hearts by their outsides.37

This continuum between sins of speech and sins of the flesh is reinforced in A Few Sighes from Hell, in a long passage lamenting the power of the flesh and, in particular, “how often is the tongue made the conveyer of that hellish poison that is in the heart, both to the dishonour of God, the hurt of its neighbours, and the utter ruin of its own soul!”38 The “tricked up body” of the godly woman, the flattering lips of the harlot, the pit into which young men fall, the sins of the tongue drawing men into other sins, all argue for a minister who is keenly aware of the powers of seduction, especially for and among the professing godly. From Grace Abounding, we know that Bunyan, unlike Augustine, viewed his principle sins as a young man to be those of the unclean mind and tongue—cursing, lying, swearing, and blaspheming—these rather than the temptations of the flesh. However, the sins of the tongue are shared by the unregenerate Bunyan and the harlot—his cursing, her seducing, their lying. Bunyan does acknowledge, sounding very

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much like the sections describing the early days of Mr. Badman spent in bad company in taverns and brothels, that “until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, into all manner of vice and ungodliness” (Badman, 9). Had not “a miracle of precious grace prevented, I had not only perished by the stroke of eternal justice,” he admits, “but had also laid myself open, even to the stroke of those laws, which bring some to disgrace and open shame before the face of the world.” It is notable that in his defense of himself against the charges of lewd conduct it is “from my first conversion until now” that God made him “shie” of women. Mr. Attentive’s understanding remark that sexual temptations are a “deadly thing” for young men and that lewd behavior of women makes it hard for them to avoid them reminds us that Bunyan, like Mr. Wiseman, was a pastor to a flock both in the world and in prison, where no doubt he would have had the occasion to meet lewd livers of both sexes, as well as those who had been tempted and had succumbed. In this context, Bunyan’s seemingly “churlish” response to Agnes Beaumont’s request and hers to him as she rode behind him to church thus takes on a slightly different charge: Agnes Beaumont’s pleasure in riding to the meeting behind Bunyan on his horse, and her selfdescribed pride in being seen with him in this fashion, also calls for our reflection of how holding onto Mr. Bunyan in public leads to the perception of her as his lover, which is charged in her trial, a mingling of what Mr. Wiseman calls “pride of the heart” combined with “pride of the body.” Concerning Bunyan’s supposedly “angry” response to her, perhaps it was not that he was unsocial or disliked women, but that he knew that he liked them very much indeed and knew that even the godly and the minister are not immune to touch. As with the description of godly or professing women’s alluring clothing, and as with Coppe’s figurative use of the woman who rides behind the godly man and the spiritual whore within who tempts good actions for sinful purposes, Bunyan’s emphasis on the enchanting powers of touching female flesh, a type of somatic witchcraft combining the lure of lips and tongue with the pleasures of the flesh, seems based equally between the scriptures and the female members of his congregation and those with whom he had daily dealings. If we accept the possibility that all of Bunyan’s women characters are not simply emblematic representations of vice and temptation drawn from the scriptures, the issue of Bunyan’s relationship with women in his life is reopened in a different fashion. Unless Bunyan’s

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pamphlet is found, we will never know much more about the nature of the exchange between him and Margaret Pryor. I would suggest, however, that she is a likely basis for the accusations of sexual license made against him in his early days as a preacher as he cites them in the revised version of Grace Abounding. Regardless of her actual character, lewd or not, she was clearly a female associated with witchcraft, the transformation of godly flesh into, as the pamphlet in support states, “an irrational sensuality of Dumb Creatures.”39 Perhaps she did not sit behind Bunyan with her arms around him, either physically or spiritually, but, as the Magistrate notes, she is a disturbing woman on many levels. The Margaret Pryor episode suggests that Bunyan would have been from the beginning of his profession as a minister acutely sensitive to the sexual dynamics between male religious leaders and female followers. If we smooth over, omit, or emblematize the Margaret Pryor episode in Bunyan’s life and writings and insist that Bunyan only can treat women in his writings as figurative types, erasing along with him his involvement with any actual flesh and blood women, we thus deny the importance to Bunyan’s writings of the corporeal form and the lived experience of more than half of the population. Ultimately, I think we oversimplify both Bunyan’s life and his writings by doing so. The argument here is not whether or not Bunyan was an adulterer. His apparently sympathetic involvement in Margaret Pryor’s case and the pleasure that Agnes Beaumont has in response to him suggests that, for women, Bunyan may have been a man who raised more than purely spiritual thoughts. I am suggesting that critics and biographers have, through the emphasis laid on the figural nature of women in Bunyan’s writings, relegated transgressive women to the realm of the abstract and emblematic and thus of no real temptation to Bunyan the minister and man. And, by indirectly denying that something might be an issue through not mentioning it or placing it safely in the realm of literary abstraction, we run the risk of oversimplifying not only Bunyan’s life but also the historical situation in which he was placed, indeed of turning Bunyan into the emblem of the hearty mechanick preacher with no time or thoughts for women. An emblematized version of Bunyan distracts us from considering the very real historical gender issues at stake during Bunyan’s life. For Bunyan and the women of his congregation and in villages where he preached—including the lewd livers, as Margaret Pryor may have been, and the godly young women, such as Agnes Beaumont certainly

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was—there was no longer any absolute institutional framework within which to manage the sexual tensions between a male spiritual leader and women hearers. There was certainly no requirement of celibacy to draw the line clearly; in fact, as we know, numerous of Bunyan’s contemporaries such as Clarkson actually incorporated sexual activity as a part of their ministry and were approached by godly women to do so. If we protect Bunyan through omission and abstraction from any association with female lewd livers other than those he encountered on the printed page, whether witches, whores, or godly seductresses, we minimize one of the complex social dynamics that Bunyan, man and minister, had to negotiate, one exerting increasing pressure because of the unstable nature of the institutions governing sexual conduct associated with radical religious groups. By ignoring women on horseback or in horseflesh as part of his life and lived experience, we run the risk in general of reducing or displacing the anxieties and tensions found in his writing, and lose sight of just how complex relations between the sexes might be, during those times when being spiritual often meant, as Tindall suggested, being embarrassing in public.

CHAPTER

One Soul Versus One Flesh: Friendship, Marriage, and the Puritan Self

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modern and postmodern psychoanalytic theories insist on at least one point that was already familiar to early modern humanists: human beings know themselves as selves only in relation to an other. What we call a self emerges or precipitates or grows in relation to a second self. In the classical world, especially the classical world viewed through the lenses of Renaissance humanism, the most important second self was a friend. So central was friendship doctrine to classical ethics and politics that Christianity, as it assumed ideological dominance in the Western world, took care to adapt classical friendship theory to its own doctrines, as in the cases of Aelred of Rivaulx and Thomas Aquinas.1 Aelred Christianized Cicero’s De amicitia, and Thomas, of course, adapted Aristotle’s elaborate account of friendship from the Nicomachean Ethics. These adaptations gave rise to new versions of the second self: friend, neighbor, co-religionist, even God. During the early modern period in Europe, marriage gradually replaced friendship as the default or primary human relationship. Humanists suggested the shift, but Protestant reformers and Puritans insisted upon it and accomplished it as a kind of supersession; marriage displaced friendship as the quintessentially human relationship. As William Haller put the matter nearly fifty years ago, “with the Reformation and the cutting off of religious celibacy, marriage came to be thought of as the one way of life prescribed by the scriptures for every normal person, and the condition of the unmarried to be represented as something to be avoided, pitied, or held in contempt.”2

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Today, our culture regards marriage as the principal relationship in which and by which a human self registers as mature. Following the model of Adam and Eve in Genesis, the default self is male and the principal second self against which and in association with which he defines himself is a wife, not a friend.3 Since marriage has gained precedence over friendship, friendship has dwindled into a juvenile (or feminine, as with gossips and coffee klatches) developmental relation that is expected to give way in adult males to association with a wife, sometimes referred to as one’s “better half,” or, lacking the blessing of state or church, one’s “significant other.” This shift has its roots in Protestant and Puritan ways of reading the Bible. Read literally, Genesis 2 and 3 imply that the originary human relationship is heterosocial and that woman was created by God specifically to remedy the first man’s loneliness (Genesis, 2:18).4 One of the more pedestrian and hate-filled modern versions of this privileging of heteronormativity over homonormativity demonizes the homosocial and assumes that God blesses only heterosocial relations: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” At the turn of the fifth century, though, the opposite bias often prevailed. Bishop and Saint Augustine expressed a classical bias toward homosocial friendship when he claimed that Eve must have been intended principally as a begetter of children and only secondarily as Adam’s companion. Had the job been principally that of companion and conversation partner, God would certainly have made a male friend for Adam rather than a wife: “How much more agreeably could two male friends, rather than a man and a woman, enjoy companionship and conversation in a life shared together.”5 Augustine assumes here a principal feature of friendship now unfamiliar to us, but once a commonplace of friendship doctrine—true friends mated for life and lived together. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a primary source for a doctrine that survived at least until the fall of Rome and was revived in the Renaissance: “Those who welcome each other but do not live together would seem to have goodwill rather than friendship. For nothing is as proper to friends as living together” (1157b18–20).6 And while married people live together in order to breed children and organize a household, “the community of man and woman appears aristocratic,” says the philosopher, and so lacks the equality and similarity that are the chief hallmarks of virtuous friendship (1160b34–35). Virtuous friends love each other the way each partner loves himself: “And he will do this when they live together and

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share conversation and thought. For in the case of human beings what seems to count as living together is this sharing of conversation and thought, not sharing the same pasture, as in the case of grazing animals” (1170b11–14). Thus, the process of deprivileging friendship and enthroning marriage as the principal human relationship, even in Christendom, took a long time. It meant rethinking human relations as predominantly heterosocial rather than homosocial, hierarchized across gender difference rather than equalizing. Because classical culture had prized friendship for so long and elaborated on it at such length, heterosexual marriage, even as it replaced friendship as the quintessentially human relation, borrowed or inherited many of its most admired features. When one’s principal other, one’s second self, is a woman rather than a man (the “self” was, in this period, almost invariably assumed to be male), recognizably modern versions of naturalness, humanity, society, and family emerge, and the residual sense of self as defined primarily in relation to a friend, to another man, subsides. Where it refused to subside, it was often demonized and suppressed.7 Some of classical friendship’s most admired features did not translate easily from a homonormative to a heteronormative context. Two of those features, equality and similarity, were crucial to classical friendship theory. It would take pages and pages to cite all the instances, from Aristotle to the Renaissance, that articulate these two principles. Charles Smith, in a slender volume on Edmund Spenser’s theory of friendship, offers a handy collation of classical and Renaissance teachings on friendship. Headings II and III in this collation are: “Friendship is Based on Equality” (31) and “Friendship is Based on Similarity” (33).8 Here, I will only observe that friendship theory from Aristotle on tended to regard friendships as more virtuous the closer they came to resembling what we would now call narcissism. Narcissism itself could not be friendship, because it threatened to erase the otherness across which friendship is a bridge, but true friends were expected to be as equal and similar as two could be without merging fully into identity: “The decent person, then, . . . is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another himself. . . . [A]n extreme degree of friendship resembles one’s friendship to oneself” (1166a30–1166b1). We might think of narcissism, then, as friendship’s asymptotic limit. Heterosexual Christian marriage, on the other hand, begins and ends with difference and inequality.9 Since William and Malleville Haller turned our attention to what they called the “Puritan Art of Love,” most discussions of Puritan

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marriage have allowed Milton a very large place at the table. This makes some sense; Milton devoted several years and enormous intellectual energy to his divorce tracts. I agree with Haller that “marriage . . . stands in the focus of all interest and meaning in Paradise Lost.”10 I have recently argued that marriage, rearticulated in the terms of classical friendship doctrine, dominates all of Milton’s major poems.11 But what of that other most influential Puritan of the seventeenth century, John Bunyan? Bunyan might usefully be regarded as sort of a pure Puritan, one lacking the humanist erudition and appreciation for classical culture so evident in Milton. How did Bunyan think of marriage? Haller’s research on what he calls the Protestant shift from “amor courtois to amor bourgeois” discovered that Reformation “preachers seem to have felt less need for telling their hearers that men were superior to women in the order of nature than for insisting how nearly women might be expected through love and marriage to approach their husband’s level and how desirable it was they should do so.” “A wife, they said, was to be regarded not simply as a bedfellow or a servant but as a spiritual equal and companion” (84). Puritans, Haller insisted, moved marriage from the borders of religious experience to the center: “It is the consummation of God’s plan of creation on earth. It is the projection of the divine order, of the order of nature and of the soul, into human society” (97). My reading of John Bunyan’s prose and poetry suggests that if Bunyan heard such preachers, he ignored much of what they said about marriage, especially the portions Haller thinks most important. During his imprisonment, Bunyan wrote a handbook of Christian behavior, a book devoted first and foremost to advising men about managing a family and household in a manner befitting a right believer. Christian Behaviour (1663) assumes that family and household management is the primary venue of correct Christian behavior; that is to say, it assumes that behaving properly as a Christian entails being a married man. Women, of course, could also count as Christians, but this handbook is addressed to men, to “the Master of the Family.”12 When the book does “speak a word or two to those that are under him,” it begins by specifying “The Duty of Wives”: First, That she look upon him as her head and lord. The head of the Woman is the Man. And so Sarah called Abraham Lord; I Cor. 11.3. I Pet. 3.6. Secondly, She should therefore be subject to him as is fit in the Lord. The Apostle saith, That the Wife should submit her self to her Husband, as to the Lord, I Pet. 2.1. Col. 3.18. Ephes. 5.22. (MW, 3:32)

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Proper wifely subjection is both the first and second duty of a Christian wife. Bunyan goes on to specify other duties—refrain from wandering and gossiping, keep at home, master her tongue, never “so much as once in all her life-time . . . offer to over-top her husband” (33), dress modestly, and manage the home in her master’s absence; but these all derive from (or simply repeat) the first two. Nowhere in this treatise, or anywhere else in his published writings, does Bunyan encourage a wife to become a fitter companion by endeavoring to approach her husband’s level, to regard herself as his spiritual equal and companion; in fact, he does quite the opposite. Much of what Haller regarded as the best features of the “Puritan Art of Love” have no place in Bunyan’s advice to Christian men and women. Interestingly enough, there is also nothing at all in Bunyan’s advice about married sex. Sex is referred to often enough in the context of Mr. Badman’s adulteries, but Bunyan simply never refers to healthy married sex, even, as is often the case in Milton’s divorce tracts, to remind us how unimportant and secondary sex is.13 Edmund Leites, in his book, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (1986), is keen to correct the commonplace modern misperception of Puritans as “against pleasure,” but perhaps he goes too far in the other direction: “To call someone a Puritan today is to suggest that he is against pleasure, especially sexual pleasure; that he has a repressive attitude toward the body and its functions; that he uses self-discipline to master unacceptable impulses; and that he not only represses his own instinctive life, but that of others as well.”14 John Milton was not, I confess, against pleasure, even sexual pleasure, per se, but he did recommend that diet and exercise be applied to suppress sexual desires sooner than marriage be understood as primarily a remedy for lust.15 He went to great lengths, even in his depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise, to avoid leaving anyone with the impression that sexual pleasure and procreation are in any sense constitutive of marriage.16 Therefore it is a bit difficult to recognize Milton as one of the Puritans Leites describes, but it is even harder to fit Bunyan into such a mold: Puritanism has at its very heart an ethic which is world-affirming. In their philosophy of marriage—one of the most important domains of life for Puritanism—preachers and theologians call for spontaneous enjoyment, sexual pleasure, and mutual delight. They affirm the intrinsic worth of the delight and comfort which spouses can give to one another. In their view, these pleasures need not be justified by some further spiritual use (although they do think marriage has spiritual purposes); the joys of marriage are goods in themselves,

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answering the natural human need for companionship and love. Puritanism cannot, therefore, be seen as a thoroughly ascetic religion. (Leites, 76)

Leites moves too smoothly from discussion of “sexual pleasure,” and “the delight and comfort” of “these pleasures” to talk about the need for “companionship and love.” Even a humanist like Milton required that we pay attention to sharp distinctions between the sorts of pleasures experienced by both humans and animals (that is, those that are merely incidental to marriage) and pleasures specific to human consort and therefore constitutive of marriage. Leites blurs these distinctions in a thoroughly modern way. I myself prefer Leites’s blurring of the lines between carnal, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures. Many Ranters—and perhaps Quakers—would have too, but Milton would not have. John Bunyan, as far as we can tell from his writing, never thought positively about sexual pleasure in all his postconversion life. It would be difficult indeed to regard Bunyan’s sermons, allegories, and poetry as rooted in a generally “world-affirming ethic.” Though we have no reason to doubt that his wife was very dear to him, as was Christian’s to him in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan quite frankly admitted that in general he cared very little for the company of women. Responding to charges of sexual promiscuity and adultery, Bunyan wrote in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: And in this I admire the Wisdom of God, that He made me shie of women from my first Convertion until now. Those know, and can also bear me witness, with whom I have been most intimately concerned, that it is a rare thing to see me carry it pleasant towards a Woman; the common salutation of a woman I abhor, ‘tis odious to me in whosoever I see it. Their Company alone, I cannot away with. I seldom so much as touch a Womans Hand, for I think these things are not so becoming me.17

Conversion, for Bunyan, entails a turning away from the things of the world and the things of the flesh, and he certainly considered women, wives and children, among those things of the world and the flesh. Just what attitude a twice-born Christian should then take toward things of the flesh is a matter of some ambivalence in Bunyan’s writings, at least insofar as wives are concerned. Though his teaching in Christian Behaviour emphasizes a wife’s subjection to her husband, he also warns: “But yet, do not think that by the subjection I have here mentioned, that I do intend women should be their husbands slaves. Women are their husbands yoak-fellows, their flesh and their bones; and he is not a man that hateth his own flesh, or that is bitter against it,

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Ephes. 5.29” (MW, 3:34). It was usual in the manuals on marriage and family management of the day to remind husbands that superiority and God-given rule should not be used as a cover or excuse for abusing one’s wife. She is not to be a slave; a husband is a master but not a slave-driver. But given the way Bunyan talks about a proper Christian’s attitude toward things of the flesh and of the world, this injunction to care for one’s wife the way one should care for his own flesh and bone is not necessarily as humane as it may sound. When in the throes of fear about his soul’s damnation, Bunyan confesses he cannot understand why some apparent Christians (“professors”) can spend so much attention on the “little things,” the “carnal things” of this world: [t]here were two things would make me wonder; the one was, when I saw old people hunting after the things of this life, as if they should live here alwayes; the other was, when I found Professors much distressed and cast down, when they met with outward losses, as of Husband, Wife, Child, &c. Lord, thought I, what a doe is here about such little things as these? What seeking after carnal things by some, and what grief in others for the loss of them! (GA, para. 85)

In Seasonable Counsel (1684), Bunyan encourages professors to risk all— life, health, family—for one’s profession of faith, because Christ is worth more than such things and because he can restore them all if he wishes: Is thy life at stake—is that like to go for thy profession, for thy harmless profession of the gospel? Why, God the Creator is Lord of life, and to God the Lord belong the issues from death. So then, he can, if he will, hold thy breath in thy nostrils, in spite of all the world; or if he shall suffer them to take away this for his glory, he can give thee another ten times as good, for thy comfort. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal (John, 12.25). 4. Is thy body to be disfigured, dismembered, starved, hanged, or burned for the faith and profession of the gospel? Why, a Creator can either prevent it, or, suffering it, can restore it the very same to thee again, with great and manifold advantage. He that made thee to be now what thou art: can make thee to be what thou never yet wast.18

Bunyan’s most persistent refrain, however, is not that Christ can restore to us the carnal things of this world, but that they are essentially worthless in the long run. The soul, and only the soul, is essential to eternal life in the next world. “The soul,” he stipulates, “is to be taken for that most excellent part of man, that dwelleth in the body; that immortal, spiritual substance, that is, and will be capable of life, and

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motion, of sense and reason; yea, that will abide a rational being, when the body is returned to the dust as it was” (Seasonable Counsel in MW, 10:12). If life in the body in this world is as worthless as Bunyan insists, compared to faith in Christ and the promises of eternal life in the next world, then loving one’s wife as one loves his own flesh and bone does not bode all that well for wives. Soul and body in this world find themselves often in conflict, teaches Bunyan; this world’s body is a drag on the soul’s heavenward progress. The implicit analogy of soul and body as husband and wife ranks the wives and children as things of this world: In this World there cannot be that harmony and oneness of body and soul as there will be in Heaven. Here the Body sometimes sins against the Soul, and the Soul again vexes and perplexes the body with dreadful apprehensions of the Wrath and Judgment of God. While we be in this world, the Body oft hangs this way, and the Soul quite the contrary; but there, in Heaven, they shall have that perfect union as never to jar more; but now the glory of the Body shall so suit with the glory of the Soul, and both so perfectly suit with the heavenly state, that it passeth Words and Thoughts.19

Soul and Body will fit better in heaven because the body will no longer be a body of dust, but a “spiritual body”: For our body; it shall be raised in power, in incorruption, a spiritual Body and glorious, 1 Cor. 15.42, 44. The glory of which is set forth by several things. 1. It is compared to the brightness of the Firmament, and to the shining of the Stars, for ever and ever, Dan. 12.3. 1 Cor. 15. 40, 41. 2. It is compared to the shining of the Sun: Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father; who hath ears to hear, let him hear, Matt. 13.43. 3. Their state is then to be equally glorious with Angels, but they which shall be counted worthy to obtain that World, and the Resurrection from the Dead, neither Marry, nor are given in Marriage; neither can they die any more, for they are equal to the Angels, Luke 20.35,36. 4. It is said, that then this our vile body shall be like the glorious body of Jesus Christ, Philip. 3.20,21. 1 John 3.2,3. 5. And now, when body and soul are thus united, who can imagine what glory they both possess? They will now be both in capacity, without jarring, to serve the Lord with shouting Thanksgivings, and with a Crown of everlasting Joy upon their Head. (MW, 8:180–81)

One of the primary features of the glorious spiritual body believers will enjoy in heaven is that those worthy to obtain such bodies do not

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marry. The body of the resurrection is an unmarried body. In Bunyan’s The Resurrection of the Dead (1665), the connection between marriage, death, corruption, and illness is all but explicit: There shall be in our Resurrection no Corruption, either of Body, or of Soul; no weakness, nor sickness, nor anything tending that way; as he saith, He will present us “to himself a Glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing,” Ephes. 5.25, 26, 27. Therefore, when he saith it is raised in Incorruption, it is as if he had said, It is impossible that they should ever sin more, be sick more, sorrow more, or die more. They which shall be counted worthy of that World, and the Resurrection from the Dead, neither marry, nor are given in Marriage, (though ’twas thus with them in this World) neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the Angels, and are the Children of God, being the Children of the Resurrection, Luk. 20. 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36. (MW, 3:221 )

Milton labored hard to redefine marriage as a modified classical friendship, a union of souls, but for Bunyan, marriage remains an insistently bodily matter, confined to this world of corruption. In the next world, the glorious bodies and souls of Christians belong utterly to Christ. Bunyan’s own sense of conversion reaches a climax when he feels completely at one with Christ: “The Lord did also lead me into the mystery of Union with this Son of God, that I was joyned to him, that I was flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone” (GA, para. 233). On this side of heaven a man’s wife is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone (Genesis, 2:23), and he is to care for her much as he cares for his own flesh; but the Christian man is destined for a higher conversation in heaven, where he will regard himself as the flesh of Christ’s gloriously spiritual, incorruptible flesh and bone of Christ’s spiritual bone—that is to say, Christ’s spiritual spouse. Bunyan does not say so explicitly, and neither does Milton, but to enter fully into the marriage supper of the lamb, they both imply, one must be separated from the wife of one’s corruptible flesh. Bunyan does not portray or experience such a separation easily. When imprisoned for the sake of his faith, he felt “the parting with my Wife and poor Children hath oft been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones” (GA, para. 327). But this feeling he resists: he attributes it to being a man “compassed with infirmities” and thus “somewhat too fond of these great mercies” of this life in this world (GA, para. 327). He also felt it was hard to bring suffering upon his wife and children, even for the sake of the gospel, but likening himself to Samson at Dagon’s temple, and therefore his family to Philistine unbelievers, he concluded he must do it: “O I saw in this condition I was

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a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his Wife and Children; yet thought I, I must do it, I must do it” (GA, para. 328). And this, we should remember, Bunyan says of his own wife, the wife who brought him the godly books that first prompted him to seek his savior. Christian stopped his ears to the cries of wife and children and shouted to himself “Life, Life, Eternal Life” as he fled his home in this world (Pilgrim’s Progress, 10), but Bunyan’s wife was the daughter of a Godly man, was she not?20 Actually, Bunyan never speaks of his wife in any of his writings as a spiritual companion, or a “fit partner,” as Milton put it, in conversation. The most remarkable “mercy” of his change to “a married state” was “to light upon a Wife whose Father was counted Godly” and who brought with her Arthur Dent’s The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (GA, para. 15). Bunyan resorts to euphemisms when he talks of his marriage. He did not marry a specific woman so much as “changed my condition to a married state” and happened to “light upon a Wife” whose name has been allowed to perish from memory. Though he read these pious books with her and endured her “often telling me of what a godly man her Father was,” neither the books she brought with her nor her own conversation brought him any closer to new birth. Rather they encouraged him down the bypath of superstition (para. 16–18). One of Bunyan’s last deep bouts of depression, spiritual desolation, and illness ended, he recounts, when he “suddenly felt this word to sound in my heart, I must go to Jesus.” He turned to his wife and asked if she ever had heard such a scripture: “She said she could not tell” (para. 262). After musing silently to himself, another scripture, one he recognized instantly, bolted in upon him, and then “with joy I told my Wife, O now I know, I know!” (para. 263). Bunyan counted this as one of his most refreshing revelations. Though he was home with his wife, he found that he “longed for the company of some of Gods people, that I might have imparted to them what God had showed me: Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce lie in my Bed for joy, and peace, and triumph, thorow Christ” (para. 263). Thus, by his own description, Bunyan’s wife hardly qualifies as the “spiritual equal and companion” Haller identified as the Puritan standard, or the fit partner in godly conversation Milton considered proper. She served Bunyan well as an advocate at court, but invariably she is portrayed as serving his purposes. We never read anywhere that Mr. and Mrs. John Bunyan shared scripture reading and spiritual enlightenment.

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Indeed, as far as I can make out, Bunyan knows next to nothing of the humanist project of treating marriage as a friendship, employing the terminology and principles of classical friendship doctrine to bring new dignity to Christian heterosexual marriage. This humanist project lies at the core of Milton’s theories of marriage, and his depictions of Adam and Eve, but it plays no role in Bunyan’s sense of Christian marriage. One feature of marriage doctrine common to both Milton and Bunyan, however, is marriage as a figure for the relationship between Christ and his Church. But their elaborations upon this doctrine lead to quite different conclusions. Milton’s epic narrator celebrates “wedded Love” as primarily a “mysterious Law” (Paradise Lost, 4.750–51).21 The mystery to which Milton refers Paul articulated in Ephesians 5. This is also the source of the doctrine of wifely subjection that Bunyan puts first and second on his list of wifely duties. The scripture is difficult to interpret for it speaks literally and figuratively almost simultaneously. Literally, it prescribes wifely subordination, but it authorizes this prescription by way of a similitude: 23. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. 24. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Ephesians, 5:23–24)

The passage teaches men to treat their wives as they would treat their own bodies, and this teaching is likewise authorized by a similitude between Christ and his Church: 25. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; 26. That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, 27. That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. 28. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 29. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: 30. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. (Ephesians, 5:25–30)

This Pauline doctrine comes close at only one point to the classical teaching on friendship: “He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” A friend, according to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne, is a second

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self, another so like one’s self in virtue, station, age, education, and equality, that being friends is like loving another self and sharing one soul in two bodies. Paul’s teaching on marriage tacks close to this, but veers away on crucial points. It never turns its back on the Genesis definition of marriage as two persons made “one flesh.” Therefore, the husband is figured as an inward self, a soul, and his wife as his flesh: “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth it and cherisheth it.” Moreover, the analogy of Christ’s relation to his Church insists on inequality in a manner utterly inconsistent with classical friendship doctrine. Finally, this Pauline “mystery” of marriage installs in Christian marriage an impossible triangle with the husband as the switching point between an earthly relation and a heavenly relation. As a husband to a wife, a Christian enjoys a position of both mastery and husbandry towards her. As a lover, he is a spiritual soul who cares for his wife as if she were his own flesh. As the beloved of Christ, however, he is the spouse of Christ, Christ’s own Church. In this relation his soul is the object of Christ’s care, as his body comes to be replaced with a glorious body, Christ’s own body, the body Christ then treats with husbandly care. These two relationships can be made to appear compatible, just barely, by assigning to one a literal and to the other a figurative status, but that distinction will not survive very long in Bunyan’s chiliastic mode of discourse. The marriage supper of the lamb always trumps, or, better, supersedes, earthly marriage. Bunyan longs always to have his “conversation in heaven.” In Grace Abounding he felt convinced that he had become Christ’s spouse: “The Lord did also lead me into the mystery of Union with this Son of God, that I was joyned to him, that I was flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone” (GA, para. 233). And in Christian Behaviour, a book about living a godly life this side of heaven, Bunyan speaks more about marriage as a mysterious allegory for a heavenly relation than he does about marriage in this world. In his sermons he also uses marriage as a figure for explaining how redemption works. Satan, sin, and death lose their claims on a redeemed man just as a creditor loses his claims on a woman debtor who marries: There is a Woman, a Widow, that oweth a Sum of Money, and she is threatned to be sued for the Debt; now what doth she but marrieth; so, when the Action is commenced against her as a widow, the Law finds her a married Woman; what now can be done? Nothing to her; she is not who she was; she is delivered from

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that State by her Marriage; if anything be done, it must be done to her Husband. But, if Satan will sue Christ for my Debt, he oweth him nothing: And as for what the law can claim of me while I was under it, Christ has delivered me by Redemption from that Curse, being made a Curse for me, Gal. 3.13.22

To make the simile work properly, Bunyan must start with a widow, not a maid, for only a widow would have standing enough as a person to be liable for such action. A widow is enough like a man for the simile to work. In relations to his wife, a husband is male, but in relation to God, he is female; he is resubordinated, much like a widow when she remarries. Indeed, it is more than a simile, it is a relatively strong argument by analogy. Bunyan insists that Christians are Christ’s spouse: They are his Spouse, and he hath made them so. They are his Love, his Dove, his Darling, and he accounts them so. . . . As they are called his Spouse, so they are called his Flesh, and Members of his Body. . . . They are his Flesh and Bones, his Members: He cannot spare them. (MW, 11:134 –35)

Perhaps Bunyan’s favorite image, repeated and explored in almost everything he wrote, is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, derived from Revelation 19:6–9. He loved to imagine that day when he would be called, along with a chosen few, an unexpected few, to become not merely a guest, but Christ’s holy bride forever: We also see yet more of his love by this, that he will have us where himself is, that we may behold and be partakers of his glory (John, 17:24). And in this degree of his love, there are many loves. 1. Then he will come for us, as a Bridegroom for his Bride. 2. Then shall a publick marriage be solemnized, and eternized betwixt him and his Church. 3. Then she shall be wrapped up in his Mantles and Robes of Glory. 4. Then they shall be separated, and separated from other sinners, and all things that offend shall be taken away from among them. 5. Then shall they be exalted to Thrones, and power of judgment; and shall also sit in Judgment on sinful men and fallen Angels, acquiescing, by vertue of authority, with their King and head, upon them. 6. Then or from thence forth for ever, there shall be no more death, sorrow, hidings of his face, or eclipsing of their glory for ever.23

Bunyan also included this imagined moment in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The shining ones tell Christian and Hopeful of the “Paradice of God” to which they go, of the white robes, of the crowns and seats of judgment (The Pilgrims Progress, 159–60). Finally they lead Christian and

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Hopeful to the gate and introduce them to the company of the heavenly host come forth to greet them: These are the men that have loved our Lord, when they were in the World, and that have left all for his holy name, and he hath sent us to fetch them, and we have brought them thus far on their desired Journey; that they may go in and look their redeemer in the face with joy. Then the heavenly Host gave a great shout, saying, Blessed are they that are called to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. (Pilgrim’s Progress, 160)

Earlier in his journey, Christian had been called to a similar supper at the House Beautiful, but before being called to that table, he submitted to examinations by Prudence, Piety, and Charity. Charity’s concern is his status as a married man: “Then said Charity to Christian, Have you a family? are you a married man?” (Pilgrim’s Progress, 50). Why didn’t they come along with you? she asks. Did you tell them of the danger? Did you pray for them and plead with them? To all this Christian answers yes and explains further: “My Wife was afraid of losing this World; and my Children were given to the foolish delights of youth” and he also admits that his life before conversion was beset by so many “failings” that he probably served as less than a perfect example to them (51–52). Charity closes the interrogation by pronouncing him free of any guilt or further obligation in regard to his family, citing Abel and Cain as precedent: “Indeed Cain hated his Brother, because his own works were evil, and his Brothers righteous; and if thy Wife and Children have been offended with thee for this, they thereby shew themselves to be implacable to good; and thou hast delivered thy soul from their blood” (Pilgrim’s Progress, 52). In effect, Charity pronounces his wife and family no longer Christian’s relations, no longer bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.24 It is a divorce in all but name. When he meets his wife again in heaven, they will no longer be married; instead, they will both be spouses of Jesus Christ. Immediately after Charity’s pronouncement, the “supper was ready” and Christian is invited to sit at the allegorical table “furnished with fat things, and with Wine that was well refined; and all their talk at the Table was about the Lord of the Hill” (52). Once spiritually divorced from his family, and pronounced by Charity herself to be free of their blood, Christian may take his place at this World’s enactment of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb—the communion of the gathered church. He must, it seems, be separated from his unbelieving wife before he is invited even to the typological marriage supper where he plays the role of a preparing bride.25

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Notably this episode is one of those rare moments in The Pilgrim’s Progress where, intentionally or not, Bunyan allows a radical confusion of the narrator and Christian. The paragraph that introduces the supper at House Beautiful begins, “Now I saw in my Dream,” a phrase that calls renewed attention to the narrator as a speaking presence. The paragraph ends, however, with an account of the conversation at the supper table and how it focused on the Lord of the Hill: “As namely, about what he had done, and wherefore he did what he did, and why he had builded that House: and by what they said, I perceived that he had been a great Warriour, and had fought with and slain him that had the power of death, but not without great danger to himself, which made me love him the more” (52). The “me” who loves the Lord more and more each time he comes to this table, and who is preparing to become Christ’s bride, his flesh and bone in this world and part of his glorious spiritual body in the next, is both Christian and Bunyan himself. Classical humanism took John Milton partway down the path of humanizing a wife, even though classical friendship doctrine tended to be strictly misogynist. But Milton also followed Pauline metaphysics down the path of allegorizing the flesh.26 Bunyan’s teaching on marriage bears no traces of that humanist project of rethinking marriage as friendship. Once allegorized, the flesh, and to some degree woman along with it, finds itself reassigned to a metaphysical category of the unreal, or at best quasi-real; flesh itself becomes the signifier rather than a thing signified, the conversation on earth which must pass away, but can symbolize, albeit inadequately, the heavenly conversation that will not perish because it is more real. As Gordon Teskey has pointed out, this allegory of two worlds, the real versus the truly real, this world versus the next, supplies a rich, moist place perfect for growing violence.27 To understand myself as truly spiritual, with access to heavenly conversation, the other self must stand for the flesh I no longer am, and it must live in the world I have transcended. Thus, the unbelieving wife, the woman, the Jew, the black person, the Muslim, the homosexual—any or all may be made to stand for the not self, the pre-self, the lesser self, the unsaved self, or the false self, instead of the second self embraced across difference. When Bunyan considers even the sinless Adam in Paradise, insofar as he needed a wife as a helper, he sees a man who has betrayed himself as “not heavenly,” “not Spiritual,” but “a meer Natural Man”: “Adam’s state, even in Innocency, seems to crave for help; wherefore it is manifest that state is short of that we attain by the Resurrection from

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the Dead; yea, for as much as his need required earthly help, ’tis apparent his Condition was not heavenly. . . . Adam in his first estate was not Spiritual.”28 Unlike Milton, Bunyan does not long for a return to the Garden of Paradise, for that was the abode of the “meer Natural Man” who lived not by grace but by “a Covenant of Works” even before the Fall. Bunyan’s “Natural Man” sounds very much like the legendary carnal Jew who, according to puritan Christianity, mistakenly stands by a “Covenant of Works,” complacently and stubbornly “ignorant of Jesus Christ.” The “meer Naturalists,” who think redemption means nothing more than a return to Paradise and innocence, says Bunyan, also: Think themselves well, without being made Spiritual: yea let me add, they think it safe standing by a Covenant of Works; they think themselves happy, though not concerned in a Covenant of Grace; they think they know enough, though ignorant of a Mediator, and count they have no need of the Intercession of Christ. Adam stood by a Covenant of Works; Adam’s Kingdom was an Earthly Paradise; Adam’s Excellency was, that he had no need of a Saviour. (MW, 12:125)

We see how easily allegory enables such equations: to need a helper, a woman, a wife, anyone other than the risen Jesus Christ, is to be hopelessly earthly. The old Adam, even before he sinned, was always already guilty of needing a woman, ignoring his savior, of being natural, unspiritual, earthly, carnal, and devoted to a Covenant of Works. I will close with an example of metaphysical allegoresis that explicitly reads marriage as a figure of stubborn attachment to flesh, blood, the world, and the law. Bunyan’s emblem poem “Of Moses and his Wife,” emblem 32 in A Book for Boys and Girls, offers an image of what marriage must be whenever it falls short of symbolizing Christ and his Church. If marriage fails to announce itself as an emblem of that “Mystery,” then it automatically becomes an emblem for the self’s stubborn attachment to the flesh. This Moses was a fair and comely man; His wife a swarthy Ethiopian: Nor did his Milk-white Bosom change her Skin; She came out thence as black as she went in. Now Moses was a type of Moses Law, His Wife likewise of one that never saw Another way unto eternal Life; There’s Myst’ry then in Moses and his Wife. The Law is very Holy, Just and good,

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And to it is espous’d all Flesh and Blood: But this its Goodness it cannot bestow, On any that are wedded thereunto. Therefore as Moses wife came swarthy in, And went out from him without change of Skin: So he that doth the Law for Life adore, Shall yet by it be left a Black-a-more.29

Both Moses and his wife serve as types here, allegories of something else, but we should note that only Moses, not his wife, is allowed also to have a nontypological, nonsymbolic being. Quite apart from and anterior to being a type of the Law, he is also a “fair and comely man.” We might think for a moment that being “fair” makes Moses a type of male beauty, but it is equally possible, and more probable, that whiteness is not meant to be taken symbolically here, at least not in the first instance. White, male, fair and comely is in this poem simply the default condition of being human. Moses’s wife, on the other hand, has no being apart from being black, and blackness already signifies an undesirable state as soon as it is mentioned. For the poem tells us, even before it moves explicitly to allegoresis, that Moses’s Cushite wife (perhaps Ethiopian, more likely the Midianite Zipporah) did not turn white when Moses embraced her: “She came out” from his embrace “as black as she went in.” These words betray the speaker’s, and probably most readers’, assumption that turning white would have been desirable, and that if anything could accomplish such desirable magic, being taken to Moses’s “Milkwhite Bosom” might. But the inability of an Ethiop to change her skin was every bit as proverbial as the indelibility of the leopard’s spots.30 Moses’s wife enters this story already a figure, a type—already less than really real. The next three lines bring explicit allegoresis to bear on Moses and his wife. He is a type of the Law, God’s Covenant with Israel. The poem refuses to condemn the Law, so even as a type, Moses is allowed a positive spin his black wife cannot have. She, says the speaker, is a type “of one that never saw, / Another way unto eternal life,” in other words a Jew. She typifies the blind, ignorant, even stubborn attachment to the carnal world—“all Flesh and Blood”—and the worldly literalness of the “Covenant of Works.” Because this typology casts her as much the same type as Adam, the “meer Natural Man,” we might be tempted to say she’s regendered here, but that’s not fully so, since to be “Natural,” or overly fleshly, or a Jew, is also to be less than truly

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manly. The equations here are painfully familiar: Black = Canaanite = Jew = Woman = Flesh = World. All are always already types, signifying what a “fair and comely man” is not. Such figures are never permitted a being of their own apart from signifying something else. He who adores the Law as if it were Life, we are told, always was a “Blackamore” and always will remain so. There is no space here for a Blackamoor simply to be, and any fair white male who remains a Jew or a nonbeliever or a Natural Man will also lose his right to true being and join the ranks of those who exist only to signify a condition of unreality. In this poem, Moses’s marriage mysteriously signifies Man’s stubborn attachment, his betrothal, to the world of flesh and blood and even law. Marriage to a black woman, a Cushite, a Canaanite, a Palestinian Arab cannot, I suppose, stand for Christ’s marriage to his Church. Instead it stands for the Law’s inability to be such a husband. Only Christ is the husband who can transform the black woman, the Jew, or the Canaanite into a fully real person. He can even transform flesh into spirit and this world into the next. As Paul taught Christians around the world, the price one must pay for universalism is sameness in Christ: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians, 3:28). Paul’s seemingly radical universalism is the universalism American Christianity still widely embraces today. The only way to escape being a type of damnation—Jew, woman, black, Muslim, flesh-lover—is to become a Christian, and what’s more, to convince others you’ve truly changed your skin. In its most extreme form, and Bunyan sometimes exhibits this, puritan Christianity returns to an almost medievallooking antimarriage and misogynist discourse in which only the risen Christ can properly play the role of one’s second self, a man’s primary other. Perhaps it’s more orthodox to see the self in that case as Christ’s other, Christ’s spouse. Either way, oddly enough, a homosocial and homoerotic relation (under denial, to be sure) reemerges as the foundation of self-recognition. This anxious tension between “one soul” friendship and “one flesh” marriage prompted different treatments from different writers and thinkers. Milton blended a progressive humanist approach with allegorical hermeneutics. Bunyan, however, pursues an almost neoscholastic and intensely dogmatic allegorical hermeneutics that refuses to recognize any paradox, anxiety, or even tension. Allegory strives to make the tension disappear. In such instances, of course, what Slavoj

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ˇ zek calls the “hard kernel” that lies under denial at the unacknowlZiˇ edged center of dogmatic ideology surfaces with an energy equal to all efforts to repress it. Bunyan’s poem is no exception (nor is The Pilgrim’s Progress). In this poem, the only relationship that counts as such is the soul’s relationship with the risen Christ. Marriage, at its best, is merely a type of friendship one experiences as Christ’s other self. Thus, what emerges in the end is a kind of puritan neo-Platonism that regards the homoerotic, all but narcissistic, relation of oneness with the risen Christ as the reality which all other relations—kinship, friendship, marriage— merely shadow forth typologically. And, as if in a Pauline version of Socrates’ enlightened pederasty, the spiritual children of that union, the members of the church, are more to be desired, because they have been produced by a higher love than mere children of the flesh.31

CHAPTER

Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John Bunyan

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“when at the first I took my Pen in hand.” At the risk of falling suddenly into cliché, are we to read Bunyan’s pen, as he presents it in the first line of the “Apology” to The Pilgrim’s Progress, as a psychosexual symbol, a phallic instrument of Bunyan’s literary creative power? Given the images that Bunyan’s pen goes on to generate in this “Apology,” one could be forgiven for thinking so. For when Bunyan recounts how he “Fell suddenly into an Allegory,” he also tumbles into some unavoidably procreative metaphors. The ideas came so quickly (after setting down “twenty things” Bunyan had at once “twenty more” in his “Crown,” we are told), before “they again began to multiply” and “breed so fast,” that a literary form of population control was soon required: the similitudes had to be segregated into a separate literary work (“put by your selves”), in case they would “prove ad infinitum, and eat out” the “little Book” which he had at first set about writing. In breeding so rapidly, moreover, Bunyan’s book becomes finally, and quite visibly, pregnant with allegorical significance: “it came at last to be,” Bunyan tells us, “For length and breadth the bigness which you see.”1 In the context of these images alone, “When at the first I took my Pen in hand” could indeed be read as cementing something of a phallic association between male sexual potency and the masculine act of literary composition, one which would appear to assert, as one commentator puts it, “the phallic generative power of the creative imagination,” the conduit of which is that powerfully symbolic organ—the pen.2 Multiplying, breeding, becoming “big” from the “delight” of setting “Pen to Paper”—such language must raise eyebrows as well as ques-

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tions among Bunyan’s readers. But, of course, none of this is really all that shocking. Not only are literary scholars supremely au fait with psychosexual interpretations of symbols such as the pen, but there are, moreover, two basic, and quite legitimate, ways of explaining what such language is doing in this “Apology.” On one level, Bunyan reveals himself to be just one of many authors for whom the metaphor of sexual reproduction is practically standard when it comes to the business of writing. Indeed, it seems to have been little more than a literary convention for Renaissance writers to describe how they self-sufficiently conceived and gave birth to their books, poems, or plays. In writing his “Apology” to The Pilgrim’s Progress, then, Bunyan is in good company, for the same language of literary generation is used, for example, by Sir Philip Sidney (in the letter to his sister prefacing The Arcadia), and by Ben Jonson (in the “Apologetic Dialogue” to Poetaster).3 Sidney and Jonson, along with Bunyan, adopt a language that associates the male creative imagination with the fertile female body or womb, which becomes pregnant in the process of issuing textual offspring—books.4 Such imagery is not limited to male writers either, as early modern women writers would also legitimize their activities as authors through the “natural” metaphors of motherhood. The anonymous author of Eliza’s Babes (1652), for example, presents her poems, as the title suggests, as “babes” which have been “brought forth” by God.5 But, the literary pedigree of such metaphors aside, we should not be surprised at Bunyan’s use of such imagery in any case, for the language of pregnancy and childbirth is central to the entire concept of salvation for Bunyan. As any reader of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners will recall, conversion for Bunyan (as for other Calvinists) is framed by the language of “a new birth,” which the poor women of Bedford are discussing, while “sitting at a door in the Sun,” when the young and theologically wayward Bunyan providentially happens upon them.6 It is this “talk” that initiates Bunyan’s gradual spiritual transformation, and which results more immediately in an intense “Vision” or dream, one that seems to be a wish-fulfilling literalization of the doctrinal desire to be “born again.” In this “Vision” the poor people of Bedford are “set on the Sunny side of some high Mountain,” while Bunyan strives to join them by squeezing his “head,” “shoulders” and “whole body” through “a narrow gap” in a wall which stands between him and the congregation (GA, paras. 54, 55).7 But the language of spiritual birthing is significant for Bunyan beyond the personal experience of his own conversion. The image of

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“travailing” (laboring, as if in birth) is evidently one of Bunyan’s favorite tropes for the action of the ideal evangelist who must go through the pain of spiritual childbirth in the daily work of “bringing forth” converts and delivering them into faith. “I have really been in pain,” Bunyan claims in describing his early experiences as a minister in Grace Abounding, “and have as it were traveled to bring forth Children to God” when preaching from the pulpit (GA, para., 290). This image reappears in The Pilgrim’s Progress too: the picture of “a very grave Person” shown to Christian in Interpreter’s house (and which may represent Christ, Paul, Evangelist, Mr. Gifford, or Bunyan himself) is of a man who, we discover, “can beget Children, Travel in birth with Children, and Nurse them himself when they are born” (PP, 29). Such language is neither unusual nor idiosyncratic, though, for it draws its authority from Galatians 4:19 and 1 Corinthians 4:15, in which Paul likewise writes of travailing “in birth again until Christ be formed in you” and of “begetting” converts “through the gospel.”8 This imagery is, in other words, of a very high evangelical paternity indeed. That Bunyan should use the same Pauline imagery of spiritual pregnancy in order to illustrate how he came to write his salvatory allegory is, then, not in the least surprising. After all, what else is Bunyan’s allegory intent upon travailing to “bring forth” but the most important spiritual “child” of all—”Truth” in its “Swadling-clouts” (PP, 2–3, 5)? As Bunyan’s wordplay on travail and travel suggests, moreover, the language of pregnancy is finally and absolutely pertinent to a narrative which figures the new birth as a journey and which aims similarly to make a “Travailer” out of its reader (6). Indeed, in the seventeenth century pregnancy and childbirth were often likened (as one commentator puts it) to embarking on “a hazardous journey,” precisely because such things were “fraught with obstacles and dangers from beginning to end.”9 In making his allegorical protagonist (as well as his reader) a traveler on a dangerous pilgrimage, and a travailer laboring to birth his soul in faith, Bunyan’s pregnant metaphors for the Christian life and the birth of gospel “Truth,” in a text “big” with such matters, are not accidental; they ensure, rather, that Bunyan’s allegorical brainchild, for all its resemblance to fable, fiction, and romance, can be accepted from the outset, in doctrinal and pastoral terms, as entirely and unquestionably legitimate. But there is more to this “Apology” than meets the eye. The creative process Bunyan describes in his “Apology” is, strictly, not so much one

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of natural reproduction as it is of self-generation: fathering the text here is a conspicuously solitary affair, and our attention is repeatedly drawn to the solo nature of Bunyan’s creative act. Bunyan begins by taking his phallic pen firmly in his hand, and he completes the allegory, he confesses, only when he has grasped his “Method” even more securely by the “end.” What follows is, of course, a potentially problematic admission: “Still as I pull’d, it came,” Bunyan claims, “and so I penn’d / It down” (PP, 2). “Still as I pull’d, it came”: what are we to do with this line, set as it is amid a flurry of other generative metaphors? Is this just another birthing metaphor, or does it imply something more obviously sexual? If we are reading it against the phallic symbolism of Bunyan’s pen, might this line really suggest what it just might be suggesting? Well, it just might, if we were to agree, for instance, with the critic John Irwin that the relationship the male writer has with his selfgenerated “feminine-masculine” literary work is, in the end, more “autoerotic” than anything else, signaling “a kind of creative onanism . . . in which through the use of the phallic pen on the ‘pure space’ of the virgin page . . . the self is continually spent and wasted.”10 But can we really give credence to such a reading of Bunyan’s “Apology”? Could the specter of “creative onanism” really be said to be hovering around John Bunyan’s sudden fall into allegory? The answer, presumably, is an emphatic “no.” Despite Bunyan’s admission that he had to “spend” himself in “vacant seasons” to produce his “Scribble,” such an analysis simply cannot be made to stand—and for good reason too. First, this is John Bunyan we are discussing: as a writer firmly in the “Puritan” tradition, any such interpretation must be indicative of little more than a mistaken reading, an overinterpretation. Besides this, though, the line “Still as I pull’d, it came” offers no rude reference to any autoerotic act of masculine penmanship for the basic reason that, as Roger Sharrock has noted, the line refers to nothing more than the process of pulling “flax” from a “distaff,” so that it can be spun into “a continuous thread” by a spinner who “takes hold of an end and draws it towards her” (PP, 312).11 We can all, then, breathe a sigh of some nonsexual relief: the process of writing being like the action of a spinner pulling flax returns us securely to the more familiar sense of Bunyan’s style, one which frequently adopts such homely and industrious images as this.12 But we cannot rest comfortably upon this explanation for too long. For, as Gordon Williams elucidates, what does the “distaff” itself turn out to be other than a well-worn and commonplace seventeenth-century bawdy

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term (dating back, in print, to at least 1530) for the male sexual member, one which gains comic value from that fact that, in practice, the distaff would have been “clenched between the spinner’s [i.e., a woman’s] legs” (a detail which Sharrock’s otherwise erudite explanatory note unsurprisingly fails to report).13 Such knowledge leaves us in something of a quandary. It seems (all of a sudden) that, from the opening reference to Bunyan taking his pen in hand to the final pulling on the distaff, the “Apology” to The Pilgrim’s Progress might well harbor more puns on sexual generation and male sexual parts than we might either have expected or be able comfortably to accept. Can we really believe that such wordplay lies in Bunyan’s writings, even on some deep, unconscious level? Or are we just overreading Bunyan, as is always the danger when we start to seek, and inevitably find, sexual puns in literary works, even those as chaste as John Bunyan’s? To expose Bunyan to this kind of reading is, to borrow one commentator’s analogy, to open a “Pandora’s box” of issues concerning the limits of valid literary interpretation, and whether puns are, finally, “deliberate or unconscious,” and whether it matters.14 It is precisely the purpose of this essay, however, to explore these issues by examining Bunyan’s writings and the language he uses in relation to the wider context of seventeenth-century “bawdy” discourse and in particular by exploring how Bunyan’s “bawdy” sits within and against his own doctrinal and pastoral purposes as a Nonconformist preacher. In doing so, I wish to pose some simple questions here. Is it possible for Bunyan to have indulged in sexual wordplay on a conscious level? If so, then why would he have done so? What purpose might such wordplay serve within the didactic frame of his doctrinal teaching on sin and salvation as a whole? What we must explain, and what this essay aims to uncover, is how we can read Bunyan’s somewhat unexpected use of “bawdy” terms in relation to an otherwise strict control both of his own language (even when he is at his punning best) and the chaste, salvatory message it typically contains. In many ways, the most obvious response to the idea of a “bawdy” Bunyan would be that it is simply not possible. While Bunyan clearly has an interest in puns and in the kind of wordplay which informs the allegorical art of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the idea that he might be interested in sexual punning goes against our basic understanding of Bunyan in a number of ways. Despite the fact that he was writing in the

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Restoration, that great age of literary debauchery and sexual license, we would not expect to find the kind of coarse and bawdy humor we associate with other literary works of the period (Restoration comedy or the poetry of Rochester, for example) in the writings of a Calvinist such as Bunyan. As a Nonconformist, it is precisely against the decadence of his own age that Bunyan’s moral, verbal, and literary tastes can be said to have dissented.15 It is, then, because of (rather than in spite of) a Restoration culture of debauchery that we would anticipate a telling absence of anything bawdy in Bunyan’s works. More significantly, however, anyone acquainted with Bunyan’s writings will be aware of how he all too often shies away from matters of sex and sexuality, and for this reason, perhaps more than any other, we would quite rightly expect to find him trying to avoid any dalliance with the kind of “wanton” discourse that is associated with frivolous sexual puns. In Grace Abounding, for instance, we get no explicit references from this supposed “chief of sinners” to any of the sexual transgressions of youth that can be found in the autobiographical writings of other Puritans, such as Richard Norwood, George Trosse, and, most notably, Laurence Clarkson, among other “Ranters.”16 While Bunyan’s friend “Harry” “turned a most devilish Ranter” in advocating a doctrine based on “uncleanness” as much as atheism, the closest we get to any such confession from Bunyan is that he suffered “temptations . . . suitable to my flesh” while in his “prime” as “a young man” (though God mercifully preserved him against any “Ranting Errors”) (GA, paras. 43, 44). When “sexual appetite” does emerge in this account, moreover, it produces, as Roger Pooley astutely notes, “a disturbing effect on the surface of the writing.”17 Bunyan’s reaction to accusations of illicit sexual activities with “Misses” and “Whores,” first published in the fifth edition of Grace Abounding (1680), is memorable in this respect. While Bunyan righteously binds such sexual “slanders” to himself “as an ornament” of his “Christian Profession” (which is always “to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled”), nevertheless he is clearly discomfited by such rumors, and his attempt to quash them is finally so strained that he appears, as Christopher Hill has noticed, to be protesting too much.18 “I know not whether there be such a thing as a woman breathing under the Copes of whole Heaven,” he cries, “except my Wife,” and, besides, God has “made me shie of women from my first Convertion until now,” he claims. Indeed, “it is a rare thing to see me carry it pleasant towards a Woman,” he states categorically and for the record, and “I seldom so much as touch a Womans Hand, for I think

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these things are not so becoming me.” The common “Civilitie” of kissing one another as a form of salutation (for which the English once had an international reputation, apparently) makes Bunyan distinctly queasy: “the holy kiss” is “unseemly in my sight,” he confesses (GA, paras. 309–17).19 This is not, then, a good basis upon which to demonstrate any interest in sexual wordplay. Despite the fact that Bunyan was active enough to have fathered six children by two wives, nevertheless he conveys in his writings an almost pathological revulsion towards sex, along with an equally powerful fascination with it. On one level, this is something we might expect from a Baptist pastor who would always want to warn his congregation of the spiritual dangers of lust and illicit desire. In Christian Behaviour (1663), for example, Bunyan explicates in some doctrinal detail how adultery and uncleanness are the “great Obstructions to a truly Gospel-Conversation.”20 The “Sin of Uncleanness,” he asserts, is nothing less than the “master Sin,” for it is “ready to offer itself at all occasions” and is committed “so soon as a man hath but looked upon a woman.” More than any other, “Uncleanness” is, for Bunyan, the one sin that is innately “natural” to humanity, and as such is easily discernible in (and inflamed by) “wanton and immodest talk” and, more visibly, by “light and wanton Apparel.”21 Bunyan articulates (and in much more detail) the same distaste towards whoring and uncleanness (as well as immodest clothing) in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1682), a text in which Attentive and Wiseman discuss at great length the filthy habits both of the book’s antihero and of his many incontinent “fellows”: “uncleanness,” it seems, is nothing less than the “Masterpiece” of Badman’s infamous “Roguery.”22 Wiseman’s edifying conversation ranges widely, therefore, through graphic descriptions of the deleterious effects of “the Pox” (i.e., syphilis) upon the human body (including blindness and the “rotting off” of bodily parts), and how to recognize the unmistakably enticing behavior of a whore, to the finally horrid fate of adulterers (two of whom were once “struck with fire from Heaven” during the very act) (48–56). Badman’s own demise, we should recall, savors distastefully of a deadly moral corruption embodied, quite literally, in the form of a stinking corpse riddled with sexual disease: Badman died, Mr. Wiseman informs us soberly, “with a spice of the foul disease upon him” and “a tang of the Pox in his bowels” (148). When it comes to matters of sex and sexuality, then, Bunyan is unequivocal about their relation to sin. In this way, Bunyan displays all

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the asceticism and anxiety that we would expect any good Calvinist to evince in condemning whoring and uncleanness as signs of unregeneracy, whether in an individual such as Mr. Badman or in an entire nation overburdened by debauchery, as Bunyan evidently saw England in the early 1680s.23 But, at the same time, what we do not find in Bunyan is any positive presentation of sexual relations within marriage, as we might otherwise expect from the pastoral works of someone writing in the “Puritan” tradition. There is, in fact, nothing of the celebration of sexual intercourse permissible betwixt a married couple of the kind that has been hailed on behalf of Puritans and Puritanism, so loudly and for so long, by historians and commentators such as William Haller, Edmund Morgan, and, more recently, Edmund Leites.24 Such scholars have established a legacy of regarding Puritanism as being, almost by definition, nonascetic (if not surprisingly indulgent) in its attitude towards marital sex, partly due to the active promotion, by Puritans such as William Gouge, of “due benevolence” in the bedroom as a conjugal duty of all godly couples. Gouge himself evidently practiced what he preached: his wife died giving birth to their fourteenth child.25 Although the validity of this sexualized view of Puritans and their enthusiasm for “due benevolence” has been questioned and modified in recent years (indeed, it seems that Bunyan’s anxieties over sex may have been more like the norm for most Calvinists), nevertheless we do have a body of Puritan writers who, in their conduct books and tracts, advocated enjoying sexual fulfillment within marriage.26 William Gouge, Thomas Gataker, Daniel Rogers, and Richard Baxter are among a number of Puritans who championed licit sexuality as a duty and as a good among godly married folk.27 Perhaps most importantly, though, sex within the bounds of “conjugal love” was also promoted as an activity that reaffirmed the Protestant difference from (and superiority over) the alleged “Popish” belief that all sexual activity, even in marriage, was sinful. As Rogers puts it, the fact that Catholics “affirme no marriage or carnall knowledge at all, to be allowed to Christians” offers a “remedy” which is, in effect, “much worse then the disease,” particularly as this “stopping of the streame hath,” he notes, “in all ages doubled the rage of all kinde of uncleannesse.” Hence, for many Protestants, the Catholic “defiance of marriage” is nothing less than “the doctrine of Divels.”28 Taking celibacy as exemplary of the Roman Catholic doctrine of sexual renunciation and mortification of the flesh, nuns, monks, and friars were notoriously slandered by Protestants,

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from Bale to Burton and beyond, for indulging in all kinds of perversions and deviant sexual acts which resulted from the unnatural attempt to lead a sexless life. As Robert Burton states, “those superstitious and rash vows of Popish monasteries” are “odious and abominable” not just because they “bind and enforce men and women to vow virginity to lead a single life against the laws of Nature, opposite to religion, policy, and humanity,” but because such “enforced temperance” led to “frequent abortions and murdering of infants in their nunneries,” “notorious fornications” with “spintrias [male prostitutes]” and “tribadas [lesbians],” “rapes, incests, adulteries, mastuprations [masturbations], sodomies,” and the “buggeries of monks and friars.”29 Bunyan, however, does not follow this Protestant tradition. We find in his works, even in a conduct book such as Christian Behaviour, none of the benign advice on sexual relations or on conjugal “benevolence” that we find, for instance, in Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, nor any celebration of “Wedded Love,” as hailed most famously in Milton’s Paradise Lost.30 In Christian Behaviour, Bunyan is silent about sexual relations between husband and wife: he is much more interested in the well-ordered household, it seems, than in the well-worn marital bed.31 Only in A Holy Life (1684), in which Bunyan returns to the chastening themes of Christian Behaviour once more, do we find anything on the matter of matrimonial sex, and even this comes as something of a discouragement for sexually active couples. Here, Bunyan issues a stern warning to “Husband and Wife” alike to beware of what he refers to as “house-iniquity,” and especially of what Paul describes (and proscribes) as “chambrings and wantonness” (Rom. 13:13). “Chambring,” of course, signals the overindulgence in marital sex (or “conjugal madnesses,” as Daniel Defoe would later put it, in Conjugal Lewdness, [1727]), and it provokes in Bunyan a distinctly Pauline condemnation of how such behavior causes men and women to “dishonour their own bodies between themselves, working that which is unseemly” (Rom. 1:24, 27). This is a sin of such “genneral extent,” moreover, that it is “entertained by all, insomuch that sometimes, from the head to the foot all are horribly guilty.”32 Given that even sex within marriage could be a dangerous affair, it is no wonder that we also find Bunyan taking an extremely untraditional stance, for a Protestant, in actually expressing admiration for the celibacy of Roman Catholic “Fryers and Nunns.” In A Case of Conscience Resolved (1683), Bunyan writes most respectfully of such Christian celibates, remarking how they “and their Religious Order” were “of good

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intent at first,” as were “also compulsive vowes of chastity, single life, and the like.” In fact, Bunyan disapproves of such unnaturally sexless lifestyles not because they lead to perversions (as other Protestants would have it) but because, as with the notion of holding separate meetings for women in the Bedford congregation, the doctrine of celibacy was founded merely in “humain invention” rather than on the authority of Scripture. As such, what the sexless, though commendably chaste, lives of “Fryers and Nunns” sadly lacked, for Bunyan, was the all-important “Sanctity of the Holy Spirit” and, of course, the sanction of the holy “Word” itself. As Bunyan puts it more succinctly, the problem with the celibacy of Catholic nuns and friars is simply that “their bottom wanted divine Authority” (and Bunyan always was one to encourage his reader thus: “look to the Word for thy bottom”).33 Such assertions signal a great deal about Bunyan’s prohibitive and distinctly Pauline attitudes towards sex: it is better to be celibate than to marry, and better to marry, it seems, than to burn. But statements such as we find in A Case of Conscience Resolved also leave us with something of an interpretive dilemma. For it is precisely when Bunyan is being most unequivocal about sexual matters that the very language he uses begins to betray him: his words suddenly start to buckle and slip from his otherwise firmly pastoral grip. In reassuring us, for instance, that, in the case of celibate nuns and friars, their “bottom” wanted authority, we might wonder whether Bunyan is not being so generous towards Catholics after all: could he be making a potentially damning, though much more typically Protestant, reference to the sodomitical practices for which such perversely popish holy orders were renowned, according to Protestant polemics?34 Or is this comment entirely innocent of this frame of reference? Similarly, when Bunyan condemns “Uncleanness” in Christian Behaviour, his language nevertheless harnesses some, if not entirely “dirty,” then at least “unclean” puns. “Uncleanness” itself is described by Bunyan, for instance, as “a very taking sin”: it is “taking,” presumably, because it engulfs the sinner, and because it can lead him or her to become “addicted” to it, as is evinced by at least one of Mr. Badman’s foul companions.35 But it is also a “taking sin” more literally, as uncleanness involves the bawdy act of “taking” (someone, or one another) sexually, a term relevant to men and women in the seventeenth century and, of course, beyond.36 Equally, when Bunyan warns of how “an unseemly thing” it is “to see a woman . . . offer to over-top her husband,” and how “she ought in

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every thing to be in subjection to him,” should we read this as pertaining to a sense of domestic order only, or does it drive more specifically (as the appearance of the term “unseemly,” here, might suggest) at husbands and wives sticking to orthodox sexual positions?37 In such instances, we may give Bunyan the benefit of the doubt. Such examples of sexual wordplay may, after all, simply be accidental: they may be Freudian slips, even, signaling the return of that which Bunyan seeks most to repress. But, quite evidently, this is not always the case with Bunyan. Elsewhere in his works, there are passages in which the sexual wordplay seems to be far from coincidental and much too obvious for it not to be deliberate. In A Holy Life, for example, Bunyan discourses at length, at one point, on the need to “depart” from “the enticings of iniquity,” a term which seems to suggest the “enticing nature” of sexual sin in particular, with all “[i]ts Pleasures, Profits, Honours, Delights, and sweetnesses” (Holy Life, 276). However, to escape the “enticings of iniquity” is not easy, Bunyan states, because it requires “a kind of a warfare with it,” one which is especially male-centered too: “for iniquity will hang in thy flesh what it can,” Bunyan proclaims, “and will not be easily kept under, therefore no marvel if thou find it wearisome work, and that the thing that thou wouldest be rid of, is so unwilling to let thee depart from it” (277). That Bunyan is discussing a type of iniquity that hangs in the flesh, and presumably in the kind of flesh that also hangs, and “will not be easily kept under,” makes fairly unambiguous the kind of temptation to which Bunyan is referring here. The fact that the “weighty” work of departing from such sin “makes thee to go groaning on,” as Bunyan puts it, seems quite appropriate, then. But in case we are still unconvinced by any of this, Bunyan cements his covert commentary on the danger of fleshly enticements by referring the reader, finally, to what seems to be one of his favorite Biblical paradigms for the sexually tempted male—that of Joseph being assailed by Potiphar’s wife (Genesis, 39: 7–23). “Remember that God sees thee, and has his eyes open upon thee,” Bunyan goes on to warn in A Holy Life, “even then when sin and temptation is lying at thee to give it some entertainment.” This, he states, “was that that made Joseph depart from it, when solicited to imbrace it by a very powerful argument” (277). If you are a man, Bunyan implies in recalling Joseph’s trials and tribulations in the book of Genesis, sexual sin and the temptation of desires that “hang in thy flesh,” will constantly be “lying at thee.” The grammatical oddness of the latter phrase alone signals a succinct fu-

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sion of the dangers such “enticings” present to the unsuspecting male: in “lying at thee,” sexual temptation “lies,” passively waiting to snare the godly man, while simultaneously targeting him proactively (it lies “at thee”). All of this carries, moreover, the suggestion of the kind of temptation precisely on offer: the sinful and illicit act of “lying with” someone. The fact that Bunyan uses such language in A Holy Life, and bolsters his point at this juncture by recalling Joseph’s resistance of Potiphar’s wife, is not surprising, though. The discerning reader may recognize this discourse as having appeared elsewhere in Bunyan’s works, puns and all. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, when Christian and Faithful meet for the first time, they famously exchange stories about their pilgrimage experiences so far, at which point Faithful tells a surprising sexual tale. Although he had “escaped [i.e., managed to avoid] the Slough [of Despond]” that Christian “fell into,” Faithful had faced instead the assaults of that infamous temptress, Madam “Wanton,” whose “flattering tongue” offered him “all manner of content,” we are informed. Faithful’s account thus prompts his fellow traveler to recall, quite naturally, the trouble Joseph had experienced with Potiphar’s wife in Genesis: “Twas well you escaped her Net,” says Christian of this harlot, Madam Wanton, for “Joseph was hard put to it by her, and he escaped her as you did” (PP, 68–69). What is odd about this conversation is not the subject matter of sexual temptation (about which, as we have seen, Bunyan could write volubly), but the manner of the exchange as a whole. For while Faithful recounts having resisted temptation and happily escaped it, Bunyan, it seems, can hardly do the same when it comes to the enticements of ribald humor, as is signaled by the conversation’s conspicuous punning. Being “hard put to it” by a temptress offering all manner of sexual delight requires, of course, little explanation as far as puns go. But, surprisingly, Faithful takes this line as a cue to extend the wordplay further: indeed, “she lay at me hard to turn aside with her,” he reports, “promising me all manner of content” (i.e., sexual satisfaction).38 What then follows is something of a locker-room exchange between the two pilgrims: “Nay, she did not promise you the content of a good conscience,” says Christian knowingly, to which Faithful collusively replies: “You know what I mean, all carnal and fleshly content” (PP 68). While Faithful goes on to narrate how he dealt with this sexual encounter through complete denial (he shut his eyes “because I would not be bewitched with her looks,” and did so until she went away), the whole encounter is, despite the comedic outcome of its happy ending,

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framed by a far less jovial and a much more unpleasant verbal jocularity, beyond the gags about being “hard put to it” by Madam Wanton’s “fleshly content.” “Thank God you escaped her,” concludes Christian soberly, for “The abhorred of the Lord” are not so lucky: unlike Faithful, Christian warns, they shall indeed “fall into her Ditch” (69). Bunyan does not cite this particular verse from scripture accidentally. The “pit” and the “ditch” of Proverbs 22:14 and 23:27, to which Christian is alluding, carry the full weight of dark innuendo, signaling the engulfing and fatal nature of sexual sin, on the one hand, and the particular source of that temptation on the other: the female sexual anatomy— the whore’s “ditch.”39 What comes as a surprise to note, though, is that Bunyan is quite au fait with this rather unpleasant, if not coarse, terminology. In The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Bunyan evinces a grim satisfaction in deploying the full range of words such as “ditch” and its synonyms (pit, trap, snare) to encapsulate the dangerously seductive nature of the female body and the corrupting effects of “beastly queans,” “jades,” and “puncks” on young men. In doing so, Bunyan adopts a style throughout Badman (and elsewhere) which, when it comes to the dangers of sexual temptation, effectively marries the bawdy parlance of the seventeenth-century tavern to the authority of scriptural quotation. “A Whore is a deep ditch,” Wiseman warns the young Attentive, quoting once again Proverbs 23:27, “and a strange woman is a narrow pit” (Badman, 53–54). In these terms, the didacticism that underpins the conversation between Faithful and Christian about Madam Wanton in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the temptation she represents, becomes clearer once we appreciate its distinctly grim wordplay. Although Faithful managed to bypass the Slough in which Christian was sadly “left to tumble” at the beginning of his journey, Faithful’s account signals how he had to resist a different kind of “tumbling” in a “Ditch” altogether more dangerous than that in which Christian was found despondently mired. Nor did Faithful have the help of any “good and substantiall steps” (the “Promises of forgiveness”) leading to salvation, as can be found in the Slough of Despond (PP, 15–16). Rather, the steps of Madam Wanton’s “Ditch” are, we discover, more darkly, those of the whore of Proverbs 5:5: “Her steps,” Faithful reminds us, “take hold of Hell” (PP, 69). Faithful’s resistance of Wanton does indeed qualify him to be compared with Joseph of Genesis: he is truly Bunyan’s ideal of male, godly chastity exemplified. What is most surprising about all of this, though,

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is the medium through which Bunyan makes his point about sexual steadfastness in The Pilgrim’s Progress: that of the bawdy pun, the innuendo, which both frames and takes center stage in this dialogue between the two pilgrims. But while the punning cements both the comedy and the seriousness of Faithful’s lucky escape, such language also returns us, quite clearly, to a more familiar, though difficult, aspect of Bunyan’s writings: that which Neil Keeble refers to as their “antifeminist prejudice,” and which Aileen Ross regards as plain “misogyny.”40 The conversation about Madam Wanton and her “deep ditch,” for instance, seems merely to confirm, as Keeble puts it, that “When in need of a comprehensive image of temptation, it is to a woman Bunyan turns,” Bunyan repeatedly “characterising women as temptresses of men, and, particularly, as temptresses to sexual indulgence.”41 One can cite numerous examples to illustrate further this “prejudice” in Bunyan’s writings, the most striking, perhaps, being the attempted seduction (in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II) of Mr. Stand-fast by “this vain World,” which comes to him in the voluptuous form of “Madam Buble,” whose “Inticements” comprise “her Body, her Purse, and her Bed” (PP, 300–3). In figuring worldly vanity as a “Witch” who uses “Sorceries” to enchant anyone who “doth lay their Head down in her Lap,” Bunyan reiterates in the figure of Madam Buble a well-worn analogy between women and sin, embodied in the figure of Eve from the moment of the Fall.42 No wonder, then, that in A Holy Life, Bunyan reminds his reader of why departing from “iniquity” is finally so difficult: because it “has its beauty-spots, and its advantages attending on it,” Bunyan notes logically, “iniquity” can be “compared to a Woman; for it allureth greatly” (Holy Life, 347). When Bunyan puns on the Scriptural association of the whore as a deep ditch and a narrow pit, therefore, he is confirming a long-held association between female sexuality and abhorrent, destructive sinfulness. After all, Proverbs 23:27 condemns the promiscuous woman for being innately linked to death: the “deep ditch” of the whore’s body is also, and unambiguously, the “narrow pit” of the grave. Despite Gaius’s praiseworthy speech “on the behalf of women” as “sharers” in “the grace of life” in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II (PP, 261) or Bunyan’s complimentary exclamation that “Women!” are “an Ornament in the Church of God on Earth, as the Angels are in the Church in Heaven,” Bunyan’s writings nevertheless evince a widespread seventeenth-century mistrust of women as “the disorderly sex,” characterized by, more than anything else, a dangerously voracious sexuality.43

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For Bunyan, women are “fantastical and unstable Spirits” who, being “weaker built” than men, are prone to “all mis-orders in matters of God,” and, owing to their sexual carnality, are a “snare . . . often used in the hand of the Devil, to intangle withal the Church of God.”44 Given, then, that “that Sex is bad enough this way,” as Wiseman sagely puts it when concluding his discourse on whoring in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, it is hardly surprising that Bunyan saves some of his most condemnatory sexual wordplay for “the weaker Vessel.”45 For even when virtuous female characters appear in Bunyan’s writings, those who are not professional “queans” or harlots like Madam Wanton or Badman’s second wife, their destructive sexual energies are always hovering around their allegorical edges, waiting for any opportunity to announce themselves and, in so doing, to pronounce women as both hopelessly weak and sexually insatiable. More often than not, however, such feminine sexual corruption is presented by Bunyan within the framework of bawdy punning. The classic instance of this lies, of course, in the attempted rape of Christiana and Mercy by two “Ill-favoured ones” in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II, a passage which has been much commented upon for the precise reason that, as Margaret Thickstun and Margaret Soenser Breen have pointed out, Bunyan makes his female pilgrims appear guilty of bringing this sexual attack upon themselves. Christiana’s “failure to secure a male guide,” Thickstun posits, in itself becomes “an indication that she secretly desired the assault.”46 The women are, moreover, incapable of resisting such an attempt upon their chastity successfully (unlike their male counterparts, Joseph in Genesis, or Faithful and Stand-fast). In part, this is because they are denied any such positive role model of female chastity, but it is also because, quite simply, they are women, and as women they are prone (through no fault of their own) to sexual appetite, whether they realize it themselves or not. As such, it is Christiana’s and Mercy’s own “venomous sexuality” (as Breen argues) which is finally being put on trial here; their weakness as women lies in a basic inability to resist sexual engagement, the desire for which they nurture secretly and continually, but which they cannot regulate autonomously—that is, without the aid of a chaste male guide such as Mr. Great-heart.47 Even the very best sort of “that Sex” is indeed “bad enough this way,” it would seem. But while Bunyan has the aptly named “Reliever” release his pilgrimettes from their moment of supreme sexual tension, and explain to them just how and why they were blameworthy in their near rape,

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the unconscious collusion of the women in their own assault is signaled by Bunyan long before their rescuer appears. For the culpability of Bunyan’s female pilgrims is, in fact, suggested foremost by the wordplay that underpins this whole episode. The assault made by the “Ill-favoured ones” is not just physical, we should remember, but verbal too, and how the women respond to the bawdiness of their attackers’ language is crucial in this respect. At first, the two men attempt to “imbrace” Christiana and Mercy and “lay hands upon them.” Christiana, “waxing very wroth, spurned at them with her feet,” we are informed, while Mercy “did what she could to shift them” (PP, 194). Such resistance is, of course, commendable and, by eventually “crying out” (“Murder, Murder,” they “Shrieked”), the two women successfully “put themselves under those Laws” (of Deuteronomy 22: 25–27, as the marginal hand tells us) “that are provided for the Protection of Women” (and which ensure that, having cried out, they cannot be punished for being raped). However, when it comes to refuting the illflavored discourse of these scoundrels, Christiana and Mercy are rather less successful in their show of resistance. All of a sudden, in fact, they are in grave danger of appearing to confirm, rather than to confute, their own sexual availability, and even of seeming willing to “grant” the “one small request” these men desire. “We make no assault upon you for Money,” the “Ill-favoured” ones state but, adding with some relish, to “make Women of you forever”; indeed, “ ‘tis an other thing we would have,” they add rakishly. Christiana, “imagining what they should mean,” duly responds—but in something of an unfortunate (if not a deeply problematic) way, a way that could be understood as inviting the very act which she would otherwise resist. “Ay . . . you would have us Body and Soul,” she proclaims, “but we will die rather on the spot, then suffer our selves to be brought into such Snares as shall hazard our well being hereafter” (PP, 194–95: my emphasis). The problem here is obvious. Christiana’s honorable resistance is ambushed, all of a sudden, by the appearance of an ill-timed sexual innuendo: “we will die rather on the spot” could easily be read as desiring rather than defying the ugly men’s sexual intentions, for to “die” (as we know all too well from our undergraduate reading of Shakespeare) can mean to experience orgasm.48 As such, the “Snares” the women could be brought into as a result of this assault are, it seems, entirely their own, and made doubly so through an unfortunate Freudian slip. Their “well being hereafter,” moreover, might refer not just to the destiny of their corrupted souls after the attack, but to the

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more physical and immediate “hereafter” of possible pregnancy, a consequence which, in itself, would only confirm their sexual culpability once and for all. For, according to seventeenth-century theories of generation, women were popularly thought to conceive only if having experienced pleasure (i.e., orgasm) during sex, and pleasurable intercourse—that is, any intercourse resulting in pregnancy—thus could not be considered rape.49 That Christiana and Mercy carry with them the burdens of their ever-corrupt sexuality, as Thickstun and others have suggested, is, then, signaled most clearly by the women’s unintentional admission, in words, of secret sexual desires: when alone, it would seem, they can escape and control their own sexual natures no more than they can govern their own tongues, no matter how hard they try. They require, therefore, a guide such as Great-heart to police and restrain them, to protect them from themselves, as much as from any “Ill-favoured” rogues. In these terms, the attempted rape of Christiana and Mercy merely restates the cautionary point that Bunyan makes about the sexual nature of women at the very beginning of this “feminised” allegory. For what does Christiana’s and Mercy’s vulnerability at the hands of the “Ill-favoured” men confirm other than that fatal combination of physical weakness with sexual voraciousness allegedly common to all seventeenth-century women and which is exemplified by the unrestrained and unregenerate housewives of the City of Destruction? Once Christiana has fled to join her husband in the Celestial City, we should recall, Bunyan’s narrative lingers momentarily upon her former neighbors who, unable to persuade Christiana against the unwomanly act of following in her husband’s footsteps, quickly turn their conversation to more interesting, and more lascivious, affairs. “I was Yesterday at Madam Wantons,” says the aptly named “Mrs. Lightmind,” “where we were as merry as Maids. For who do you think should be there, but I, and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth and some others. So there we had Musick and dancing,” she informs us, “and what else was meet to fill up the pleasure” (PP, 184–85). The wordplay at this point is too obvious to require explication— but it signals something profound in Bunyan’s view of uncontained female sexuality. That which is “meet to fill up the pleasure” is, it seems, something that no woman can do without—and it is this very point which provides the all-important subtext to Christiana’s and Mercy’s later assault. In mistakenly attempting to go it alone on the path to the

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Celestial City, Bunyan’s pilgrimesses are in danger of rape because their sexual nature as women dictates it. Indeed, without someone such as Mr. Great-heart to lead the way, Christiana could all too easily become identified as something quite different from a Nonconformist saint journeying towards salvation. Rather, she could easily be taken for a harlot, one such as the whore of Proverbs 7: 6–18 (cited at length by Bunyan when describing “Strumpets” in Badman): that is, as a “loud and stubborn” woman whose feet, rather like Christiana’s on her pilgrimage, “abide not in her house” (Badman, 49–50). All of this points to something of an unavoidable conclusion: that there is indeed sexual wordplay in the writings of John Bunyan, and plenty of it. One might be tempted, at this point, to speculate further about the significance of such puns, too. Might their presence signal something fundamentally unresolved in Bunyan himself, between his regenerate desires and his ongoing struggles with the flesh and its myriad delights? Was Bunyan fighting perennially and personally against just such “inticements”? After all, he can condemn the “beastly sin” of uncleanness as a “snare to the Soul” only by simultaneously acknowledging, in the voice of a man wise in such matters, the enduring power of its “enchanting and bewitching pleasures” (Badman, 53). As a result, we find throughout Bunyan’s writings, as Vincent Newey has noted, “no bland dismissal of ‘the flesh’ but a knowledge of what it is to be tempted and to resist.”50 Nowhere does this tension between temptation and resistance, and the experience of both, become more evident than in Bunyan’s bawdy puns. But the fact that so much of this wordplay is located in and around female sexuality as exemplary of uncontrollable sinfulness, the kind of sinfulness that waits continually to try the chastity of fine young godly men such as Faithful and Stand-fast, indicates something more serious about how Bunyan’s bawdy is operating. What we can be sure about is that Bunyan’s punning is not bawdy in any typical sense, or, more particularly, in the way Restoration comedies and popular ballads are “bawdy.” Although Bunyan is capable of employing a broad range of sexual puns, from the “ditch” and “snare” of the whore to Faithful’s being “hard put to it,” there is little to suggest that they exist merely to titillate, shock, entertain, or amuse. Quite evidently, Bunyan’s “bawdy” does not work like this. He is at pains to make sure that this remains the case, moreover, because nowhere is the corrupting effect of sex more evident, he seems to realize, than in its power to transform the

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“sinful” into something that appears to be nothing more than playful and innocuous fun. Mansoul lapses for a second time in The Holy War, we should remember, only through the wiliness of the “Lords of Looseness” who succeed in infiltrating and seducing the town into debauchery by disguising the sexually depraved “Lord Lasciviousness” as “Harmless-Mirth” (whose sons, “Jolley” and “Griggish,” are later put to death for “ticking and toying” and being generally “too familiar” with the daughters of Lord Willbewill).51 When it comes to sex and sexual puns, there simply is no such thing as “harmless mirth” or “jolly” and “griggish” behavior for Bunyan: behind them lurks always something much more unseemly, lascivious, and spiritually destructive. Bunyan’s puns are, then, no laughing matter: they draw attention repeatedly not to the delightful but to the fatal nature of sexual transgression and of the terrible temptations sex must always present to the godly. As such, this wordplay seems to be securely pastoral in purpose and indeed framed by the traditional aims of a “Christian pastoral” endeavor in general. For it seeks, as Michel Foucault has suggested, “to produce specific effects on desire, by the mere fact of transforming it—fully and deliberately—into discourse: effects of mastery and detachment, to be sure, but also an effect of spiritual reconversion, of turning back to God.”52 Bunyan’s sexual puns could be said to operate according to this simple precept, then: they aim not to invite desire but to relocate it within a discourse of sinfulness and salvation, the end of which, ultimately, is to turn the reader away from sexual transgression and “back to God.” In this sense, Bunyan’s bawdy could actually be viewed as turning the concept of “bawdy” language upon itself, by making it work in converting ways. Indeed, Bunyan’s wordplay is “bawdy” turned inside out: it becomes the Lamb in a wolf’s clothing. Although we might wish to legitimize Bunyan’s puns within such a Christian pastoral framework, what remains yet to be negotiated (indeed, what remains more difficult to accommodate) is the insistence in Bunyan’s bawdy upon the dangerous energies of female sexuality. Why, we might ask, does Bunyan locate his sexual wordplay most often in and around the female body? To answer this question, we would do well to reconsider the sexual politics of Restoration nonconformity, and the ways in which scholars such as Tamsin Spargo and Patricia Crawford have explored it in recent years. Bunyan’s displays of revulsion towards women and sex, and his punning around them, may not reflect any deep misogyny in Bunyan’s psyche as much as a profound sensitivity to sexual matters at a time when Nonconformists

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were frequently vilified as “libertines,” often in grossly sexual terms, within a hostile environment of persecution and slander.53 Such a context might explain Bunyan’s strenuous denials of sexual rumors in Grace Abounding, and it might also suggest why he favors metaphors of reproduction (whether in begetting believers or his own books) which side-step female generative powers altogether and the dangerous and unruly sexual dangers associated with them. It is precisely because slanderous tales of sectarian libertinism, especially concerning churches with predominantly female members, could do irreparable damage to the reputation and standing of a dissenting congregation that Bunyan’s writings about sex, his puns and metaphors, reinforce a crucial point about visible saintliness: for Nonconformists, holiness must be written on the body, and especially upon bodies that contain unruly sexual energies and which, for Bunyan, remain ever voluptuous, ever vulnerable. In these terms, Bunyan’s bawdy puns must remain, both spiritually and politically, pregnant with significance.

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Bunyan and the Antinomians

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how radical was Bunyan, and why do we want to know? There is the precise meaning of radical to decide on, of course, but there is also the academic habit of wanting, however subliminally, our authors to be on our side, or the side we fondly imagine we might have been on in the seventeenth century. The consequences can be seen in the relative emphases on Bunyan’s perceived political radicalism by Christopher Hill and Richard Greaves, both of them historians with an abiding interest in, and, it would be fair to add, admiration for, the radicals of the seventeenth century. Greaves is the more cautious, and I think the more accurate, delineator of Bunyan’s politics, particularly in the late 1680s. It is Hill, however, who most emphasizes the “radicalism” of Bunyan’s life and work. At the beginning of his book on Bunyan, Hill does enter the important caveat “I am not suggesting that Bunyan’s interests were primarily political; far from it . . . But many in authority in his society, especially the gentry, thought religious dissent was in itself seditious.”1 Hill knows only too well that Bunyan was not the most radical voice of the midseventeenth century. No one can doubt that he was a Nonconformist, spent twelve years in jail for refusing to obey a law against unlicensed preaching, and in his youth had served in the Parliament’s army. In the eyes of some of his contemporaries, that in itself made him a subversive. However, there remains a doubt that in labeling Bunyan “radical,” we are just doing what other critics do when they call Shakespeare “subversive,” importing a historically alien term for present political purposes. Even

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if that were conceded, I do not entirely agree with Conal Condren’s claim that “radical,” in this period, really (as well as etymologically) means to go back to the roots and thus conserve more than innovate.2 As he notes, there is an obvious contemporary authority for the concept as a challenge to the established authorities in the title and content of the “Roots and Branches” petition of 1640, which called for “the government of archbishops and bishops, deans and archdeacons etc., with their court and ministrations in them . . . with all its dependencies, roots and branches, . . . [to] be abolished.”3 Not much preservation is there, even if it involves a sense of a return to the church government of the New Testament period. However, the term radical when applied to the mid-seventeenth century does not imply the same set of political ideas as it might in the 1790s, let alone nowadays. As Condren rightly argues, “the distribution of our labels can inadvertently signal the lurking power of old arguments” (165), nineteenthcentury ones as well as seventeenth-century ones. Part of the difficulty of establishing the right terms is due to the complexity of chronological shift; and, in turn, part of the chronological shift is due to the changing role of religion. Theological differences do not always have political or social consequences, but they sometimes do; and when orthodoxy and uniformity are, in themselves, thought of as essential to political stability, then any kind of dissent has some sort of political dimension, however unwished for. When Bunyan was taken before the quarter sessions in Bedford, he was indicted as follows, according to his own account: “He hath (since such a time) devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the king, &c.”4 The dismissive contempt of the “&c” is a prelude to Bunyan’s exposure of the ignorance and malice of most of his accusers (with one notable exception) in the rest of the story, and no doubt fuels the satire in the trial of Faithful in Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. This account, however, was not published in Bunyan’s lifetime. As with the anonymity of Bunyan’s I will pray with the Spirit, an anti-Prayer Book tract of 1662–23, we must factor in the difficulties of expressing dissenting views during Bunyan’s prison years. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published first in 1666, but under Bunyan’s own name, is much more circumspect about the circumstances of his trial than the “Brief Account” which is published when danger is past.

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However, there is a question to be asked about where Bunyan was even before 1660 in the proliferation of radical religious ideas and practices happening all around him. The political consequences of religious dissent are seen most clearly in antinomianism, in all sorts of ways a radical set of ideas—theologically, morally, and politically. I focus on antinomianism in this piece because it exposes a discernible link between religious and political radicalism in the time leading up to Bunyan’s first writings. Antinomianism has a primarily theological origin, but is seen by its opponents as opening up moral, social, and eventually political dangers. Because of Bunyan’s encounter with antinomianism early in his Christian life, in the mid-1650s at the latest and possibly earlier, during his parliamentary army service in Newport Pagnell, it provides one of the most revealing tests of the extent to which Bunyan was willing to go in the direction of what can be justifiably described as radicalism. My argument is that Bunyan developed an antinomian theology of grace in the late 1650s and early 1660s for personal and pastoral reasons. At the same time, he wanted to distance himself from the moral antinomianism that he disliked in the Ranters, perhaps because he recognized its attractions. As a consequence, he emphasized the importance of holiness and Christian behavior in parallel with his teaching of grace; however, he still took a broadly antinomian approach to the claims of the law into his encounters with the judicial system after his arrest in 1660. The absolute distinction between law and free grace remained a crucial part of his theological and imaginative world until the end. Defining antinomian can be tricky, because it is another of those seventeenth-century terms which, in actual usage, veers from the descriptive to the accusatory. Antinomian is certainly taken as an accusation, even by those to whom the description might seem accurate. So the editor of Tobias Crispe, for many the prime expositor of antinomianism in the 1640s, denies that he was antinomist, because he acknowledges the term is associated with libertinism.5 The etymology gives us “against the law,” and that is the start of the problem.6 In Christianity, that means the Law of Moses, in particular the Ten Commandments, not the law of the land. But, for its opponents—and this, like many a seventeenth-century term, is defined and applied primarily by its opponents—opposition to, or transcendence of, the Mosaic Law could easily lead to a carelessness towards any moral law, particularly sexual morality, and then a disregard for the legally constituted authorities. So we can see how the history of antinomianism can uncover the his-

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tory of a moral panic and an anxiety about the breakdown of political authority as much as a finely tuned theological controversy. That last political step is not always taken. One of the earliest critics of Crispe, Stephen Geree, argues that antinomianism is dangerous because it appeals to the licentious on the one hand or to the melancholic (especially women) on the other: First, by the easinesse and pleasantnesse of it, it takes those that be openly profane and licentious. Secondly, by its seeming so much to magnifie the grace of God and Christ, it takes and taints those, that be in some sort brought out of love for the world, and have begun to denie themselves, out of a sense of their own sinfulnesse, especially if subject to sadnesse and feares or melancholy despaire, &c. as the weaker sex for the most part is, upon whom it workes most.7

Geree goes on to argue that antinomian preachers leave their vulnerable listeners in a fools’ paradise, imagining they are cured when they are not; whereas “the veriest Atheist and Epicure in the world, the most carnall Christian that ever lived, would heartily hug this Gospell.” Geree is representative of those in what we might call mainstream Puritanism; another, more prominent critic is Richard Baxter, though theologically he moved away from the Calvinism that defines much Puritan thinking. In 1690, in the Preface to A Breviate of the Doctrine of Justification, Baxter recalls that it was in 1645 and 1646 that the army and sectarian Antinomians (chief of whom were Dell and Saltmarsh; he mentions Bunyan’s writing on the Covenant as well) made him reconsider the doctrines of Law and Covenant, Redemption and Justification, because they “ignorantly subverted the Gospel of Christ.” The “gross Libertine Antinomian Errours” seem, to him, largely a function of “zealous ignorance.” Baxter is not the only one to run antinomian and libertine together.8 For William Walwyn the label is no problem, even in a work defending his reputation against the slanders of Walwyns Wiles, because the theological and experiential truth of it was so liberating: “I, through God’s goodnesse, had long before been established in that part of doctrine (called then, Antinomian) of free justification by Christ alone; and so my heart was at much more ease and freedom, then others, who were entangled with those yokes of bondage, unto which Sermons mixt of Law and Gospel, do subject distressed Consciences.”9 Walwyn’s willingness to acknowledge his antinomianism is, of course, significant for the political argument, because Walwyn, as a Leveller, is a political radical of an active and visible kind. For him, “those yokes of bondage” go

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beyond the preaching of Calvinistic Puritans who burdened the consciences of their hearers. Later in the same tract Walwyn argues that the experience of “free grace” produces intellectual liberation: The truth is, for many yeers my books, and teachers were masters in a great measure of me; I durst scarce undertake to judge of the things I either Read, or heard: but having digested that unum necessarium, that pearle in the field, free justification by Christ alone; I became master of what I heard, or read, in divinity: and this doctrine working by love; I became also, much more master of my affections, and of what ever I read in humane authors.10

It may be that part of the hostility to antinomianism is that it reduced the dependency of the congregation on their minister. If it was a sign of grace to continue to go to sermons, becoming “master of what I heard,” as Walwyn puts it, makes the relation between preacher and hearer much more equal. For Walwyn, of course, liberty had a political dimension, though he always argued for the due process of law. Because this translated into support for juries, for example, against prerogative powers, this might be construed as radical or rebellious. We often notice that the attacks on Antinomians which, like the earlier attacks on the Familists, stress their sexual laxity, do at the same time underplay the social egalitarianism that often goes with the doctrine. For Laurence Clarkson (or Claxton), who went through a whole series of religious loyalties from Anglican to Muggletonian, including Ranter, there might have been some truth in an allegation of sexual excess. In his retrospective The Lost Sheep Found, Clarkson freely admits that he exploited his itinerant preaching, especially in his Ranter phase, to gain sexual favors. He had earlier abandoned the Independents for the Antinomians, which he describes as a “sect,” not just a doctrine: But I must return to the time under Doctor Crispe’s Doctrine, in which I did endeavor to become one of those that God saw no sin, and in some measure I began to be comforted therewith, but how, or which way to continue in the same I could not tell; having as yet but little understanding in the Scripture I was silent, onely still enquiring after the highest pitch of light then held forth in London, in which time Mr. Randel appeared, with Mr. Simpson, with such a doctrine as Doctor Crispe, onely higher and clearer, which then was called Antinomians, or against the Law, so that I left all Church-fellowship, and burning of Brick in Egypt, and travelled with them up and down the borders, part Egypt, and part Wilderness. 11

“Higher and clearer”—Clarkson is as frank about his spiritual aspirations as he is about his sexual adventures, which is what makes his such an engaging testimony. “Burning of brick in Egypt,” with its ref-

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erences to the Israelites’ captivity in Exodus, is an interesting piece of typology, though. They were liberated by Moses, who then gave them the Ten Commandments as they journeyed through the Wilderness. It is a metaphor which Bunyan draws on, according to John Knott, as one of the foundation ideas for The Pilgrim’s Progress.12 It also has a political reference; in his Readie and Easy Way, published in the same year as Clarkson, Milton uses the Egyptian captivity to signify a return to monarchy. The reaction to another Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, again shows the troubled relationship between sexual libertinism and spiritual freedom in the far reaches of Commonwealth religious behavior. In his Second Fiery Flying Roule, Coppe attacks the “Precisians,” while asserting that “I can if it be my will, kisse and hug Ladies, and love my neighbours wife as my selfe, without sinne.” He brazenly proclaims that he has “sate down, and eat and drank around on the ground with Gypseys, and clip’t, hug’d and kiss’d them, putting my hand into their bosomes, loving the she-Gipsies dearly.”13 Yet, for all of Coppe’s brief but extraordinary mixture of the prophetic, the apocalyptic, and the ecstatic, the sexual libertinism is not, finally, a major concern. The language of the Song of Songs is, as usual in Christian readings, spiritualized; Coppe’s brief flirtation with the gypsies is justified by reference to David as much as to the Gospel. Coppe appears more interested in spiritual union with Christ than sex. Far more insistent is Coppe’s call to primitive Christian communism, of taking seriously Jesus’s command to treat the beggar as if he were God himself. “I bow down before Eternall majesty, who is universall love, bow down to equality, or free community, that no more of your blood be spilt.”14 It is thus essential that we recognize how it may well be that the fear of the Ranters in the seventeenth century remained more the fear of radical preaching about property than a lasting fear of sexual libertinism. Bunyan’s own encounters with the Ranters, as described in the early pages of Grace Abounding, happened at a time when he was unsure about his own position, and there seem to have been two sides to them, a doctrinal and a behavioral, both appealing to him in different ways.15 After distancing himself from a former companion who had turned “a most devilish Ranter,” denying the existence of God, Bunyan records meeting another group while away on business: I happened to light into several peoples company; who though strict in Religion formerly, yet was also swept away by these Ranters. These would also talk with me of their ways, and condemn me as legal and dark, pretending that

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they onely had attained to perfection that could do what they would and not sin. O these temptations were suitable to my flesh I being but a young man and my nature in its prime, but God who had as I hope designed me for better things, kept me in the fear of his name, and did not suffer me to accept of any such cursed principles. (GA, para. 45)

Bunyan acknowledges the temptation of “natural” desires but puts it to one side with apparent ease; in the same way, sexual temptation is a minor irritant in The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, the accusations that he is “legal, and dark,” a position which pushes the Protestant principle of justification by faith to an extreme, sends him immediately into a rereading of Paul. In such an atmosphere, one person’s antinomianism can become another person’s familism, or libertinism.16 Richard Baxter’s horror of antinomianism leads him to see John Owen, of all people, as tending too close to that end; Baxter also took Fowler’s side against Bunyan in the early 1670’s controversy over justification by faith. He was particularly annoyed by the posthumous influence of Tobias Crispe, who lived a godly life himself but preached “licentious doctrine” which, Baxter argued, would lead to licentious living—and it is certainly true that Laurence Clarkson acknowledges the influence of Crispe as part of his route to Ranter ideas and practice in The Lost Sheep Found. Bunyan’s encounter with the Ranters in the 1650s might have shocked him, but he did not respond by changing his soteriology in the way that Baxter did.17 In his earliest attacks on the Quakers, he tends to link Ranters and Quakers together, rather crudely, as his opponent Edward Burrough pointed out.18 Yet the purpose of his first book, Some Gospel-Truths Opened (1656), was not to single out the Quakers alone, but to assert the central truth of the incarnation, “the man Christ Jesus,” against a wide range of modern heresies, including antinomianism. His pastor John Burton summarizes the argument in his introduction: there is one Mediatour between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; and this discovers the damnable errors of those commonly called Socinians, who on the one hand deny him that was born of the Virgin Mary to be true God as well as true man: and this is also quite contrary to those commonly called Familists, Ranters, Quakers or others, who on the one hand either deny Christ to be a reall man without them, blasphemously fancying him to be only God manifest in their flesh; or else make his humane nature with the fulnesse of the Godhead in it, to be but a type of God to be manifest in the saints. (MW, 1:7 )19

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Bunyan counters the charge that “the Doctrine of the Gospell is a licentious doctrine” in the same way as Crispe, or Dell, or Saltmarsh do. “The nature, and sway, that the love of Christ hath in the hearts of his” (200) would not permit such behavior. The New Covenant, rather, solves the problem of motive in holiness. The idea recurs much later in A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification (1672) against Edward Fowler: “this worketh in us no looseness, nor favour to sin, but so much the more an abhorrence of it.” At this stage, Bunyan is confronting the polar opposite of Ranterism, that alliance between Anglican moralism and political obedience so characteristic of the Restoration; as David Walker and Stuart Sim argue, A Defence is “an anti-authoritarian argument . . . antithetical to almost all the tenets of Anglicanism.”20 The targets, and the historical context, have changed, but Bunyan’s theology has not.21 In each of the above texts, Bunyan foregrounds love and obedience to the person of Christ, averting the excesses of antinomianism with the call to devotion. The principal theological emphasis of antinomianism is tied up with the Christian attitude to the Old Testament Law, an issue in the firstcentury church as much as that of the seventeenth century, which in many ways revisited and revived early church controversies and heresies. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he says at one point “if ye be led by the Spirit ye are not under the Law” (5.18, KJV). An emphasis on that verse is at the heart of antinomianism. However, it means, if not ignoring, then at least downplaying the significance of the Law as summarized a few verses earlier, when Paul argues that “the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (5.14). Antinomianism is an extreme emphasis on verse 18. It asserts that the Christian is free of the Old Testament Law as a result of Christ’s sacrifice and consequent fulfillment of it. The argument about this in the New Testament church is largely involved with Judaism, and in particular whether Christians who are not Jews should be circumcised and keep to the Jewish dietary laws. In Galatians and Romans, Paul never envisages this extending to the moral law, in the sense that Christians need not obey the Ten Commandments. But once the urgency of defining Christianity against Judaism abates, the relation of keeping the moral law to recognizing the centrality of God’s grace takes on a different emphasis. And here the figure of St. Augustine of Hippo comes in; for him, the attraction of Paul’s analysis of grace is in its release from inward struggle, wanting to do good but

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being unable to, and in the inherited perversity of original sin, which corrupts the desire to do good.22 In the seventeenth century, as David Como’s study convincingly argues, antinomianism is best seen as “a set of tendencies” rather than a sect, or a doctrine, or even a heresy. He sees it as a reaction against mainstream Puritanism which uses the same images and motifs to deliver a markedly different emphasis. The stress is on assurance and joy rather than “tortured self-expression,” on love rather than law. Its strength is that it taps into “dissatisfaction with the strenuous, unforgiving nature of mainstream puritan piety.” It takes the key Puritan (and Reformation) emphasis on free grace and justification by faith, but without the system set up by Puritan ministers in their preaching and writing “in which human labor, diligence and effort were absolutely essential to the life of piety.”23 Antinomianism is very close in thought and language to mainstream Puritan piety, while markedly liberating in its emphasis and practice. Definitions, or the description of tendencies, might still, however, underplay the sheer variety of mid-seventeenth-century antinomianism. E. P. Thompson, in Witness against the Beast, his study of the eighteenthcentury radical, nonconformist origins of Blake, titles his chapter “Antinomianisms,” plural. He then does something characteristic of his generation and persuasion of historians, and characterizes antinomianism as “left wing.” Thompson is too good a historian not to know that this is little more than an analogy, but, if you are comparing one revolution with another—the English Civil War with the Russian Revolution, or the French—then it has some force. And Thompson does make it clear that antinomianism, and a certain style of religious and political radicalism, go together.24 Undoubtedly, those in authority, political and/or theological, didn’t like it, and saw it as a threat. To that extent antinomianism is, precisely, subversive. No one should disconnect theology and politics in the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth, and expect to stay historically accurate. Equally, theology is not only political, and for Bunyan, the Law isn’t simply the vindictiveness of a Justice Keelynge or the moralism of an Edward Fowler. It is a central part of his understanding of God, and a key staging post on his spiritual pilgrimage: So Christian turned out of his way to go to Mr Legality’s house for help: but behold, when he was got now hard by the Hill, it seemed so high, and also that side of it that was next the wayside, did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to venture further, lest the Hill should fall on his head: wherefore there

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he stood still, and wotted not what to do. Also his burden, now, seemed heavier to him, than while he was on his way. There came also flashes of fire out of the Hill, that made Christian afraid he should be burned: here therefore he sweat, and did quake for fear. (PP, 20–21)

The reader of Grace Abounding could adduce a number of moments from Bunyan’s experience conflated and reimagined here. The point is that Bunyan’s sense of the importance of Christian’s release from the burden of the Law is central to his pastoral theology and (if it’s a word) his psychotheology. What characterizes the Antinomians of the earlier seventeenth century is often, as Dewey D. Wallace puts it, “a passionate protest against legalistic piety,” a rediscovery of Luther’s protest against legalism which had, despite its rejection by its founding fathers, found its way back into Reformed theology.25 For Bunyan, too, theology and passion are intertwined. The proper role of fear in the Christian’s understanding is a continuing, central theme for him, and of vital importance in understanding the imaginative impact of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan urges the distinction between Godly fear and slavish fear. Christian and Hopeful shake with slavish fear (as the marginal note tells us) because the Shepherds have just shown them the need for strength in the last stages of their pilgrimage. It is slavish because, as Hopeful recognizes later, it is fear of men, not of the “terrors and wrath of God” (150, 153). This is not, first of all, a political distinction; but it has immense potential in the political realm. If there is freedom from God’s law, what is the status of other laws? Or, more precisely, once your conscience has recognized that you are free from the penalty for breaking the law of the Old Testament, in what ways might that free you to be independent and selective in your approach to the laws of your own country? Nor is there any need to be afraid of human authority; compared to God’s authority, it is of no consequence. The question is not just a seventeenth-century one. It seems to be at the heart of Reformation soteriology from the beginning, and deeply implicated in the earliest political consequences of Protestantism, too. Luther probably coined the term, in response to his disagreement with his convert and associate John Agricola, who in turn was hurt that Luther appeared to have changed his mind, or at least his emphasis, on the role of law in conversion. In particular, Luther’s early stress on the imputed righteousness of Christ is tempered, particularly after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, by a renewed insistence that the law should be preached. It was an immediate political dimension, then, but also a

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pastoral one: he was afraid that they would “foster smugness in their hearers.”26 In his 1539 text “Against the Antinomians,” Luther compares before and after: “In those days we were terrorised . . . But now our softly singing Antinomians paying no attention to the change in times, make men secure who are of themselves already so secure that they fall away from grace . . . If you see the afflicted and contrite, preach Christ, preach grace as much as you can. But not to the secure, the slothful, the harlots, adulterers and blasphemers.”27 The early Luther, of course, was Bunyan’s Luther, the author of the Commentary on Galatians, who was, for Bunyan, “most fit for a wounded conscience” (GA, 130). No danger of smugness there, in the dark days of his spiritual struggle. But is there a later Bunyan, as there is a later Luther? More of that soon, but he does make an interesting distinction in his very late piece, Of the Law and a Christian, published posthumously in Doe’s folio of 1692. He makes a typological distinction between the way that Moses was given the Law the first time, “with Thundrings and Lightnings, with Blackness and darkness, with Flame and Smoak, and a tearing sound of the Trumpet,” and the second time, “with a proclamation of his name to be merciful, gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity transgressions and sins &c” (MW, 7:411 ). In this, the second time, the law was discovered “in a clift in the rock,” which could be for Bunyan Christ the Rock. As a result, Bunyan can deliver the resounding, “Antinomian” message “the Christian hath now nothing to do with the Law, as it thundereth and burneth on Sinai, or as it bindeth the conscience” while still affirming that the Law remains “Holy, Just and Good” (413) within the same paragraph. Antinomianism thus becomes a “legitimate” emphasis within the central Reformation doctrine of justification. As David Como and Peter Lake put it, “Antinomianism is perhaps best described as a rooted propensity to exalt the transformative power of God’s free grace and to play down, even to deny, the role and use of the moral law in the lives of justified Christians”28—a particular emphasis, a logical extension, or an extrapolation from Lutheran, indeed Pauline, doctrine, we might say. Indeed, as a twentieth-century Calvinist preacher, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, used to argue, unless you ask the question “shall we continue to sin, that grace may abound?” (Romans, 6:1), you have not felt the force of Paul’s doctrine of grace. Within the Covenant theology that was Bunyan’s variation on Reformation doctrine, there is nothing still to be done that would make any difference to the ultimate, eternal

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salvation of the individual.29 In this, he is in line with mainstream Reformed theology and with some of the Antinomians. Tobias Crispe, in one of the posthumous collections that are all, confusingly, called Christ Alone Exalted, argues: “man hath no tie put upon him to performe anything whatsoever in the Covenant, as a condition that must bee observed on his part.” Even faith is not a “work,” but “a manifestation of that justification which Christ puts upon a person by himself alone.”30 Bunyan’s emphasis is only slightly different: he stresses that the key covenant was made “before man was in being . . . that glorious plot and contrivance that was concluded on before time between the Father and the Son.”31 While the Antinomian and the mainstream Lutheran/Calvinist position are in agreement about this, it is in the development of the Christian life that things start to diverge. The first question is what happens when, having once experienced the righteousness of Christ (as opposed to legal righteousness), the new believer sins. But there is a more wide-ranging question, which goes something like this: if you have experienced the enormous relief from the burden of the Law, the enormous relief that is conveyed to the reader of Grace Abounding, or the first book of The Pilgrim’s Progress, can the Law still appear terrible? Does that encounter with the provisional nature of what seemed absolute change your attitude to other kinds, or levels, of authority? They overlap, but they would include judicial authority, ecclesiastical authority, the norms of sexual behavior, kings and politicians, and even some of the rules of the market. Yes is the obvious answer; but how far, and with what consequences, is more difficult to be sure about. Take the example of William Dell, intruded Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in the 1650s, though perhaps better known to Bunyan scholars as the Rector of Yielden in Bedfordshire who, in 1659, invited John Bunyan to preach in his church on Christmas Day, much to his parishioners’ disgust, or so they claimed after the Restoration. In the 1640s he had, along with John Saltmarsh, been one of the most influential preachers to the parliamentary army, Chaplain to Fairfax and, according to Richard Baxter in particular, an architect of antinomianism. Dell quotes Luther approvingly, and regards himself as the spiritual heir of Hus and Wycliffe as well; yet Samuel Rutherford sarcastically invited his readers to “Come and learn at Mr Del, to keepe the heart right, and violate all the ten commandments.”32 Dell’s “heart religion,” then, was regarded by his opponents as encouraging indifference to sin. Certainly

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Dell emphasizes, as did Saltmarsh, that the Christian enters a new spiritual realm after conversion. So does the true church. Spiritual life renders some practices redundant. So the 1652 Doctrine of Baptisms argues that water baptism is irrelevant to the spiritual baptism of Christ (and was thus very popular with Quakers). In 1653 he argued “there needs nothing to the ministry of the New Testament but only God’s pouring out his Spirit,” a charismatic approach that would lead naturally to his offering Bunyan his pulpit, just as he had encouraged “mechanic preachers” in the army. The approach had consequences for university theological training, too; in a reply to his fellow Independent, Sydrach Simpson of Pembroke, he suggested that universities should stop awarding divinity degrees—the syllabus led its candidates astray, the concept of degrees was unacceptably hierarchical in the church, and their existence misled people into taking them as signs of holiness. “Universities cannot be the fountaines of the true Ministery of the Gospel, seeing all the Education in it, Philosophical, Moral and Theologicall cannot change men’s natures, or deliver them from their corruptions.”33 Dell is Pentecostal, not with any of the modern, or firstcentury apparatus of glossolalia and healing, but theologically. That is also the emphasis that John Saltmarsh develops. In Sparkles of Glory (1647) he celebrates “the liberty of some that are spiritual in outward things of worship and discipline without sin.” The liberty from “outward things” for Dell and Saltmarsh includes the established methods of church government. Both wrote against tithes, and Saltmarsh personally dismantled the system in his own parish. Both wanted to sever the ties of church and state, however the state was governed, though Saltmarsh acknowledged the power of magistrates in “civill administration.” The consequences of antinomian thinking for them are to disentangle some of the widely held assumptions about the institutions of religion, whether educational, political, or financial. To borrow a concept from middle-period Foucault, they created a new technology of spirituality. In The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded, Bunyan also freely, and unashamedly, uses the phrase “free grace,” which was the title of Saltmarsh’s most influential book, and a kind of motto of the antinomian tendency: “Was it not free grace in God to save such a wretch as Manasseh was . . . Was it not free grace for Christ to give Peter a loving look after he had cursed, and swore, and denied him? Was it not free grace that met Paul when he was a going to Damascus to persecute, which converted him, and made him a vessel of mercy?” (MW, 2:129 )

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Bunyan’s debt to Dell, and perhaps Saltmarsh, is not a moral antinomianism so much as a formal antinomianism.34 The theology and psychology of forgiveness and liberation led to a disregard of educational qualification for the ministry; the authority of the Spirit sidesteps any but a local ecclesiastical framework; and, when the Prayer Book was reintroduced, that too was regarded as worse than redundant in the Christian life. “It is a sad sign, that that, which is one of the most eminent parts of the pretended Worship of God, is Antichristian; when it hath nothing but Tradition of men, and the strength of Persecution to uphold, or plead for it,” he wrote at the end of I will Pray with the Spirit (MW, 2:285). One of the crucial questions for this kind of soteriology is what happens when the believer sins. According to critics of the Antinomians, they would ignore it or pretend it did not count as sin. For Bunyan in 1659, the question was even more serious. Does it constitute the unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost that so troubled him during his conversion experience? It cannot be a question of will, “for then David had sinned it, when he lay with Bathsheba” (202). No, it has to be “a final, knowing, wilful, malicious trampling under foot the blood of Christ” (203). He goes on to warn Ranters and Quakers, who “are the nearest that sin by profession.” Characteristically, Bunyan is less worried about the consequences of the abuse of the doctrine of free grace for moral, political, or ecclesiastical order than he is about the eternal consequences. For a recent Roman Catholic theologian, the pervasive character of contemporary Protestantism is antinomian.35 Clearly it was not, in this earlier period. However, all Reformed theology has antinomian potential, and that is politically, theologically, and emotionally radical. Antinomianism is, then, not a single position, but a spectrum, and the attacks on it sometimes come from those who recognize antinomian tendencies within their own position, as well as those who regard it as antithetical. So, mapping Bunyan left of Baxter; right of Clarkson; and not far from Dell, Crispe, and Saltmarsh, is to recognize what is antinomian about his view of salvation, and to realize that he is not, by any standard, libertine or familist. So, is there a later, less radically antinomian Bunyan? In 1688, the year of Bunyan’s death, the year in which James II, the last of the Stuarts, was to be deposed, Bunyan’s long poem A Discourse of the Building of the House of God, an often allegorical account of the church, appeared. About half-way through, in section eight, Bunyan ventures

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into questions of government. In this section he redefines the classic Stuart doctrine of Divine Right: Not that I would the least of Duty slight, Because the least command of Divine Right Requires that I my self subject thereto, Wilful Resisters do themselves undo. But let’s keep order, let the first be first; Repent, Believe, and Love; and then, I trust I have that Right which is Divine, to all That is enjoyned, be they great or small. (MW, 6,:294 )

In the context of Protestant resistance to James, Bunyan is not keen on “wilful resistance,” but he does seem to have a more contractlike theory of right, that civil obedience should result in individual right. The passage is as much about church government as civil government, but a few lines further on Bunyan revisits the whole question of law and freedom. In doing so, he picks up something of the New Testament insistence that laws were made for people, and not vice versa, an emphasis often found in the Antinomians because it gave Christ’s authority for breaking the law.36 Like anyone who has recognized the appeal of antinomian belief, and experienced a release from the burden of “the Law,” Bunyan recognized the provisional nature of legality. He acted, and obeyed, and bravely disobeyed, accordingly.

CHAPTER

John Bunyan and the Politics of Remembrance

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bunyan’s death, in his sixtieth year, followed a charitable act of resolving a family dispute in Reading in August 1688. Caught in a rainstorm while returning to London, Bunyan fell ill and died of a fever at the house of his London friend, a grocer at Holborn Bridge, John Strudwick. Because he had died in London, removal of his remains to the Bedford orchard where Protestant Dissenters had laid their dead since 1681 was impossible. He was put to rest in the tomb of his London friend, in Bunhill Fields.1 Curiously, there is no entry in the register there of Bunyan’s burial, no written record of his funeral, and apparently no marker of his grave even as late as 1717, when Edmund Curll published the Bunhill Fields tomb inscriptions. It was only in 1737, when John Strudwick’s son-in-law, Robert Bragge, was buried in the same vault, that for the first time the names of the dead inside were transcribed upon the tablet outside. E. C. Papworth’s famous effigy of Bunyan, restored by public subscription, dates from 1862.2 Bunhill cemetery in east London today is filled with rain-washed tombstones, most of them illegible. Just down the lane from Bunhill Row, where Milton composed Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regain’d, that Dissenting burial site was in Bunyan’s day becoming a powerful rallying point and symbol for high-ranking Nonconformists, including Presbyterians, Baptists, and Independents. Opened as a burial pit for use in the Great Plague, Bunhill was enclosed by a brick wall and gates in 1665–66. Since there had been no consecration of the ground, Nonconformists were here able to bury their dead without the official Prayer Book. The cemetery of Puritan England, Bunhill

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now boasts monuments to John Bunyan, as well as many leading Nonconformists, including Jane Lead (1704), the founder of the mystical theosophist society, the Philadelphians; Daniel Defoe (1731); Susannah Wesley (1742), mother of John and Charles and seventeen others; Isaac Watts (1748); and William Blake (1827). “In Bunhill Burial Ground crumbling to Dust / There lies two Generations of the Just,” crowed a poem in 1745.3 In Bunhill, as they were not able to be in their own lives above ground, Dissenters of different leanings were gathered together. Burial sites are places of gathering for the living and for the dead. Bunhill, a unified space, formed an emblem for the collective legacy of Dissent and also was a symbol for a longed-for gathering in heaven. From as early as 1683, with burial of the leading Independent minister John Owen, Bunhill was the place for Dissenter leaders to be laid. Owen’s funeral was a major public event, attended by the carriages of sixty-seven nobles and gentlemen.4 His tomb is a plain stone erection, without ornament or figure; it boasts only words: its stone inscription retelling the story of his intellectual achievements and spiritual warfare as “Herculean labors.”5 A Latin epitaph inscribed into Owen’s tomb praised his superior mind and moderating temper, but closed with a protest against Uniformity: “He left the world on a day dreadful to the Church by the cruelties of men, but blissful to himself by the plaudits of his God. August 24, 1683, aged 67.” August 24 was, of course, the day prescribed for the ejection of those ministers who refused to comply with the Act of Uniformity in 1662. The tomb for all time not only records the extraordinary abilities of this leader, but also gives narrative shape to them as classically heroic; in addition, it serves as a focal point for a later community’s memory. In contrast to Bunyan’s near invisibility in the graveyard is Francis “Elephant” Smith, who died in 1691. Smith, the bookseller and publisher of Bunyan as well as Whig opposition writers, was fashioned as a martyr in his tombstone inscription: who in his Youth was settled in a separate Congregation, where he sustained, between the Years of 1659 & 1688, great Persecution by Imprisonments, Exile, and large Fines laid on Ministers and meeting houses, and for printing and promoting Petitions for calling of a Parliament, and several Things against Popery, and after near 40 Imprisonments, he was fined 500 l. for printing and selling the speech of a Noble Peer, and three times Suffered Corporeal Punishment. For the said Fine, he was 5 Years Prisoner in the Kings Bench: His hard Duress there, utterly impaired his Health. He dyed House-Keeper in the Custom-House, December th 22nd 1691.6

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If a worry of the persecuted was that their cause would be forgotten, that their suffering would be in vain, the concrete inscriptions of the many Dissenters at Bunhill bore ineradicable witness to the value and legitimacy of their cause. The inscriptions, quite literally, offered the last word; they also proposed narrative alternatives to those of the reigning Anglican establishment. Protests against persecution, these funerary monuments are articulate testimony against political oppression. The Bunhill tombstone inscription for the Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell, for instance, who died in 1671 while still a prisoner in the Fleet prison after spending almost the whole of the 1660s in imprisonments in Southsea and Cardiff Castles in Wales, gave a brief life: “Vavasor Powell, a successful Teacher of the past, A sincere Witness of the present, and an useful Example to the future Age, lies here interr’d, who in the Defection of so many, obtained mercy to be found Faithful; for which being called to several Prisons, he was there tried, and would not accept Deliverance, expecting a better Resurrection.” The mortuary words render a counternarrative to official silencing. Powell’s epitaph, by Bagshaw, protested: In vain oppressors do themselves perplex To find out Arts how they the Saints may vex: Death spoils their Plots, and sets the Oppressed free; Thus VAVASOR obtained true Liberty. Christ himself released, and now he’s joyned among The martyred Souls, with whom he cries, How Long. [Rev. 6.10.]7

Echoing the call of the despairing for release from persecution, this is a protest against those who would silence the voices of the excluded and an invitation to divine vengeance. There are several different ways remembrance and politics are entwined in the later seventeenth century, and Bunyan is a good case through which to investigate these. By an appeal to remembrance of notable figures as in the Bunhill inscriptions, Dissenters framed their responses to historical calamity and reclaimed personal as well as social esteem. In Bunyan’s own writing, further, remembrance is an important and multifaceted action—as self-construction, as communal glue, and, finally, as contract with God. Remembrance also serves wider political aims of constructing community around tradition and symbol. This essay has two parts. In the first, I open up the theme of memory in Bunyan to show the importance of remembrance in Bunyan’s theology and politics. This lays the ground for my central question: what made

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the commemoration of his death disappear? In the second part, I seek some answers by turning to the political context in James II’s England in which Bunyan was laid to rest.

1. Memory in Bunyan Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners may be the ur-text showing that personal remembrance is crucial to the business of selfscrutiny for the Puritan saint. Remembrance of God and remembrance by God were Bunyan’s greatest anxieties, and the actions he took to acquire proofs of remembrance—or to ward off doubts about the lack of proof—constituted a daily task. Memory is thus the key trope of Bunyan’s text, a means of “communing with your own heart,” as he puts it, with memory tied both to self-knowledge and to faith in God. As Bunyan’s preface commends, My dear children, call to mind the former days, the years of ancient times; remember also your songs in the night, and commune with your own heart (Ps. 77:5–12). Yea, look diligently, and leave no corner therein unsearched, for there is treasure hid, even the treasure of your first and second experience of the grace of God toward you. Remember, I say, the Word that first laid hold upon you; remember you terrors of conscience, and fear of death and hell: remember also you tears and prayers to God; yea, how you sighed under every hedge for mercy . . . Have you forgot the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your soul? Remember also the Word.8

This will to remember is the impulse behind the writing of Grace Abounding, but it is a fragile will. Bunyan seems always on the verge of forgetting: But I had no sooner begun to recall to mind my former experience of the goodness of God to my soul, but there came flocking to my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions . . . At the apprehension of these things, my sickness was doubled upon me, for now was I sick in my inward man, my soul was clogged with guilt, now also was my former experience of God’s goodness to me quite taken out of my mind, and hid as if it had never been, nor seen. (GA, para. 65)

Richard Greaves has taken this inward sickness as a sign of Bunyan’s mild depression, and he highlights the ways that Bunyan’s memories were all too present, his “painful recollection” of all the times he had “slighted the gospel.”9

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In Grace Abounding, Satan, “labouring to hide from me my former experience of God’s goodness,” (GA, para. 66) is chiefly responsible for Bunyan’s forgetting. And in Pilgrim’s Progress, forgetting is conducive to the sin of despair. As the pilgrim Christian visits the Interpreter’s house, he is made to look upon a man who sits in the dark, eyes cast down, and sighing “as if he would break his heart.” This man unburdens his confession: “I was once a fair and flourishing professor, both in mine own eyes, and also in the eyes of others; I once was, as I thought, fair for the Celestial City, and had then even joy at the thoughts that I should get thither.” The Pilgrim is puzzled; his is that very same hope; his is that very same journey. “Well, but what art thou now?” is his question, one near to his own heart, and one which is also directed to Bunyan’s readers, those suffering saints who also sit in the darkness that is England’s shame. The man answers, “I am now a man of despair, and am shut up in it, as in this iron cage. I cannot get out; O now I cannot.”10 Bunyan’s Man in the Iron Cage lives in the dark because, though he has remembered all too well his own sins, he has nevertheless forgotten God’s promise of salvation. He has hardened his heart and will not repent. This portrait of a Man in a Cage haunts Bunyan and other Puritans whose susceptibility to melancholy was by then famous. Pilgrim’s Progress would help Bunyan’s readers to avoid just that outcome, cause and catalyst for his readers to remember. But for Bunyan and for others suffering persecution after the Restoration, the turn of events could seem very much like judgment against them by the very God for whom radical action had been undertaken in the first place. In Bunyan’s story, the Man in the Iron Cage has abandoned God first. If human remembrance preserved the spirit, God’s remembrance, however, could be politically pointed. In his unfinished Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis, a work published posthumously in the 1692 Works, Bunyan explained the Biblical phrase, “And God remembered Noah.” Defining “remembered,” Bunyan opines, “This word remembered is usual in Scripture, both when God is about to deliver his people out of Affliction, and to grant them the petition which they ask of him. It is said, God remembred Abraham; and sent Lot out of Sodom, that He remembred Rachel, and hearkened to her; that He also remembred his Covenant with Abraham, when he went to bring Israel out of their Bondage” (Gen. 15.29, ch. 30, 22). 11 God’s remembrance was bloodstained.

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Bunyan wrote of God’s remembrance of the death of Abel at the hand of Cain in the same commentary, “When he maketh Inquisition for Blood, he remembreth them: he forgetteth not the Crie of the humble [Ps. 9.12]. Blood that is shed for the sake of God’s Word, shall not be forgotten or disregarded of God” (Genesis, MW 12, 165). As was common among the radical reformers, Bunyan took Cain and Abel as the types of persecutor and victim that gave contours to the ongoing war between Antichrist and the godly in human history. “The blood of thy Brother cries,” Bunyan explains of Genesis 4:10. “Beware Persecutors,” he continues, you think that when you have slain the Godly, you are then rid of them; but you are far wide, their Blood which you have shed, cries in the ears of God against you. O the Cries of Blood are strong cries, they are cries that reach to Heaven; yea they are cries that have a continual voice, and that never cease to make a noise, untill they have procured Vengeance from the hands of the Lord of Sabbath: And therefore this is the Word of the Lord against all those that are for the Practice of Cain: As I live, saith the Lord God, I will prepare thee to Blood, and blood shall pursue thee: Sith thou hast not hated blood (that is, hated to shed it), blood shall pursue thee. (The Ten First Chapters of Genesis, 166)

Memory of God’s powerful acts could repair hope for justice for a community that had been abased and fractured by persecution. “The Apostle makes this Voice of the Blood of Abel,” continues Bunyan, “a Type of the Voice of the Justice of the Law” (166). God’s remembering would assure that all would be righted by justice in the end. By forming a communal identity out of disparate instances of suffering in the type of Abel, those persecuted could remember God’s memory and thus protest against the persecuting regime. The appeal to Abel pleads for justice and retribution. Bunyan is careful to interpret the story of Cain and Abel as a story of divine—not human—retribution. Writing almost in a personal note of his own experience, Bunyan explains, “the quarrel is in special between the Persecutor and God himself: For we are not hated because we are Men, nor because we are Men of evil and debauched Lives; but because we are Religious; because we stand to maintain the Truth of God. Therefore no Man must here intercept, but must leave the Enemy in the hand of that God he hath slighted and condemned” (172). “Let Cain and God alone, and do you mind Faith and patience; suffer with Abel, until your Righteous Blood be spilt: Even the Work of Persecutors, is, for the present, Punishment enough; the Fruits thereof being the provoking God to Jealousie” (173). Memory invoked God’s action.

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Bunyan’s interest in the Cain and Abel story is of a piece with his contemporaries seeking to make sense of their experiences of persecution. Cain and Abel were long used by radicals to exemplify the intertwined relation of persecutors and persecuted, Biblical types evoked again and again during the period 1640 to 1660 to describe the fratricidal civil wars. In Bunyan’s Holy War the godly blood of Abel cries out for vengeance against the tyrannous persecution by Cain and his offspring. During the Restoration period, not only were Cain and Abel the first of the visions Adam viewed in his run-through of the history of vice in Paradise Lost (PL, 11:429–65); Richard Baxter would write his tract Cain and Abel Malignity using the story to analyze the recent history of the struggle between the godly and ungodly. John Owen wrote of the bloody brothers in his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to Hebrews: “here we have the Prototype of the Believing and Malignant Church in all Ages . . . This was the first publicke visible acting of the Enmity of the seed of the Woman, and the Seed of the Serpent.”12 The republican Independent Lucy Hutchinson gives the murderous brother a topical polemical spin in her Biblical epic, using his curse as an occasion to condemn the overweening power of magistrates and ministers, figuring Cain in the image of the “formal hypocrite.”13 During the period of Restoration persecution, Abel’s suffering signified more than a type of Christ; his suffering “speaks.” Whiston’s Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey takes Heb. 11.4, “He being Dead, yet speaketh,” as an epigraph; Ralph Venning’s homiletic sayings were published in a single-sheet folio entitled The Dead Yet Speaking in 1674. The fiery funeral sermon of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, the justice of the peace (JP) whose murder in 1678 touched off a wave of anti-papist prosecutions, added fuel to the flames. “Here’s a subject that makes it’s own Sermon and its own Prayer,” exhorted William Lloyd: “The Blood of Abel speaks, saith the Apostle . . . This Innocent Blood speaks and cries in the Ears of God . . . it speaks and cries aloud to him for Vengeance: How Long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not Judge and avenge?”14 For the blood of Abel to speak was a call for God’s vengeance to bring down violence against persecutors. The call of the blood of Abel, the summons to commemorate, was thus political work. Hearers were enjoined to remember the words and lives of the persecuted; they were encouraged to repeat the deeds of the martyred godly in their own lives; they were consoled to bear up under suffering for the sake of those memories; and, in the case of Abel’s speech, they were to prepare for a role in a militant cosmic

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drama. Such work of memory was crucial in a time of persecution. Remembrance was more than theologically consoling; it was essential for maintaining hope that times could change. Remembrance was productive of the cultural identity of the godly as existing in a time of Antichristian powers, serving as a kind of oppositional political speech. Thus memory was not simply a turn to a completed past or an interiorized, nostalgic retreat; rather, it contained several ideological components: maintaining a contract with God; fixing identities by known stories; binding the excluded to each other through shared experiences; and registering protest against the political campaign of silencing and forgetting.

2. Remembering Bunyan What does it mean for our understanding of the Dissenting—and for Bunyan’s—politics of remembrance for the author of Pilgrim’s Progress then not to have had such a heroic memorialization, a martyr-fashioning inscription at the time of his death, indeed, to wait until 1737 to have the place of his last rest recognized? Without a memorial, what forms of memory would give meaning to the legacy of John Bunyan in his own day? How did the author so famous for his lengthy sitting in prison disappear so completely at this time? Answers to these questions lie, I suggest, in the complicated political situation for Dissenters at the time of Bunyan’s death, during the reign of James II. What we find is that the history of Dissent, and its central martyrological tropes, stem from the turbulent 1660s and 1670s, from the reign of Charles II. The heroic narratives of persecution and perseverance forged then have some trouble matching the situation in the later 1680s, a period when Dissenters found rapprochement with Court and King through the policies of James II. For under James II, Dissenters found an unlooked-for friend. The issuance of James’s Declaration of Indulgence on April 4, 1687, led to a realignment of the terms of Anglicanism and Dissent, when the policies of persecution were reversed. James it is true sought to place Roman Catholics in political and military offices and found himself roundly opposed by many Anglicans—Whigs and Tories alike. But unlike his brother Charles, James wooed Whigs and Dissenters. He repealed the Test acts and the penal laws and replaced many positions in county administration or municipal government with those supporting his new policies: Catholics, yes, but also Whigs and Dissenters. He

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dissolved Parliament in the summer of 1687 and attempted to make preparations for a fresh Parliament, one which would support his plans for toleration. During this period of “remodeling,” nearly half of the JPs of England were displaced.15 Even the Dissentophobic John Dryden made a special point of the particular relevance of Dissenters at this same time in the work composed to defend James’s policy, The Hind and the Panther. These are the events leading up to the Glorious Revolution in which Bunyan’s death must be given a context. In the spring of 1688, the King reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered the clergy to read it from their pulpits. In May, seven bishops, led by Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, petitioned the King to withdraw his order. These “Seven Bishops” were imprisoned, a fact seen by many Whigs as an attack on Protestantism in general; although the bishops were acquitted in June, to great celebration, the birth of the King’s son in that month assured a Catholic succession.16 Meanwhile, William, Prince of Orange, was in communication with sympathizers in England by the end of June. By mid-August, reports of a large-scale Dutch military buildup had reached Whitehall.17 A new Parliament was scheduled to meet in the autumn of 1688. It was during this uncertain period that Bunyan died, on or about August 31. Very soon after, William landed in the west of England, along with 21,000 professional troops on November 5, 1688. James fled London on December 11, returned a week later, and then fled again on December 23 to France. The damage had been done—the Convention Parliament assembled in January 1689, and William and Mary were declared King and Queen on February 9. Dissenters’ commemoration of their dead was a means by which the living forged bonds to one another through revered figures. But a moment of political uncertainty creates problems for the stable settling of meaning that is performed in an act of veneration. What narrative forms could give shape to a life whose end came when the political circumstances of his nation could yield neither closure nor certainty? What would be celebrated—neither the life of a persecuted saint who was still a victim, for Bunyan found himself in favor after the tolerations of James, preaching openly to vast crowds in London; nor the life of a persecuted saint, delivered from his suffering by the hands of a king—that would register a support for James that would be too deliberate at this uncertain moment. If there is no remaining record of the public recognition or protest accorded Bunyan in his death, nor of his funeral in London, nonetheless

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the Bedford congregation that had been close to his heart for most of his adult life did commemorate their illustrious leader in a series of fast days, a living memory. And, according to Dissenting practice, that living memory was not simply to remember the virtues of their leader but was to serve the interest of the community rent by its loss. The Church Book at Bedford records that the congregation set a day for “prayre and humiliation for this Heavy Stroak upon us, ye Death of deare Brother Bunyan. Apoynted also that Wednesday next be kept in praire and humiliation on the same Account.” The “Heavy Stroak” was the blow to community identity of the loss of the preacher; but it was also understood as a judgment of God upon them: that second fast day records how the gathering met “to Humble themselves for this Heavy hand of God upon us,” and, the following week, again, the “whole congregation mett to Humble themselves before God by fasting and prayre for his Hevy and Sevear Stroak upon us.”18 If the loss of their minister was understood as God’s judgment, signified by the atoning acts of fasting and humiliation, then Bunyan’s departure could be made into a surrogate penance for the community at large. The gestures of repentance—prayer, fast, humiliation—have little to do with a political commemoration of Bunyan’s legacy, quite unlike those monuments at Bunhill that celebrated Dissenting worthies. The historical context of Bunyan’s death would have made it a strange moment to stress protest against the state: it was during the period of the Indulgence of James II, when Dissenters found new freedoms from persecution. Indeed, Bunyan took the occasion of the new freedom of worship to publish five works in the year 1688, the highest number in a single year during his entire life. It may not have been a burst of productivity that made this last year of his life an especially prodigious year for writing, but, rather, that political circumstances made it possible for Bunyan to put through the press what he had written in the years of enforced silencing.19 Bunyan’s political views regarding James’s Indulgence are not known; yet there is some evidence that he supported the removal of the Test and Penal Acts that James brought about through his executive fiat. Unlike many Dissenters, especially the Whigs, who had not universally taken to James’s Indulgence, members of Bunyan’s own congregation seem to have benefited from the political shifts during the years 1686–88. An order of the Privy Council for January 1688 removed the leadership of the town of Bedford for not supporting the withdrawal of the Test and Penal Acts with Indulgence, and fourteen

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men were dismissed from the Corporation. Another Act in March removed still more of the Bedford town leadership. To fill their places, six or seven of the new men chosen to be brought into the Bedford Corporation by the King’s order were “prominent members of Bunyan’s congregation,” three of them—Thomas Woodward, William Hawkes, and William Nichols—being then or shortly after deacons of the church.20 The Tory backlash was thus upended by James’s rewards to Dissenters, many of them not from the traditional elite ruling class. Bunyan did benefit from Indulgence, preaching and publishing freely through 1688. He, like other radicals, may have chosen the King’s protection, giving, as Greaves sees it, a “cautious cooperation” (Glimpses 572). Unlike those Whigs who were fighting the King’s bid for toleration on the grounds that it depended upon arbitrary fiat, there were Dissenters and even some Whigs who wanted to undo the years of Tory backlash and thus sided with the King. The Quaker leader William Penn was a leading supporter, working with James to solicit Whig and Dissenting support; and there were some expressions of Nonconformist approval, although some of these may have been offered under pressure.21 We know now, however, the depth of Nonconformist dissatisfaction with the Royal Dispensation. The experience of the King’s Declaration, indeed, transformed many Dissenters and Whigs into radicals. A large number of Dissenters, as Roger Morrice pointed out, did not participate in the addresses at all, and Penn’s support put him at odds with other Quaker leaders.22 In contrast to Penn, a number of leading Nonconformist ministers, Richard Baxter, John Howe, and the Baptists William Kiffen and Joseph Stennett among them, chose not to cooperate with the expressions of gratitude; indeed they refused to subscribe to the Address when it was offered them and spoke against the “Dispensing power,” although there was pressure on them to sign.23 Bunyan tended to place his political hopes in kings rather than in other members of the legal and social establishment; his royalism sprang from the view that kings would bring down Antichrist.24 During the Tory Reaction (1681–86), he wrote in Of Antichrist, and His Ruine, that he saw himself as “one of those old-fashion Professors, that covet to fear God, and honour the king.”25 His reluctance to overturn the political right of kings led him to avoid any association with the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in the summer of 1685. Though many Nonconformists in Bedfordshire were rounded up in connection with the rebellion—after all, the duke took temporary refuge in his mistress’s

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Bedfordshire house—Bunyan was not hauled in as a suspected supporter. Christopher Hill suggests that Bunyan preferred the protection of the King to that of corrupt gentry and clergy.26 Bunyan can thus be seen as a potential new political ally for James II in his reconciliation with Nonconformists—a collaborating image that his biographer Charles Doe was at pains to expunge after the Whig Revolution of 1688.27 This is an interesting case where Bunyan was willing to reconcile politics to serve his theology, even as that meant more opportunities for what he might see as error. Freedom to worship made possible the work of salvation of souls. What he published in this freer climate was in no sense tolerationist literature; Bunyan was intolerant of idolatry and false worship to the last. In one of his last tracts published in his lifetime, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualiz’d (1688), which Greaves dates to this period of James’s toleration (Glimpses, 573), Bunyan interprets the design and construction of Solomon’s Temple so as to explain “how we should worship God” (MW 7, 8). It is no tolerationist work; the tract repeatedly distinguishes right from wrong worship: “Let us then keep . . . distinctions clear, and not put an Apostle in the room of Christ, nor Christ in the place of one of those Apostles. Let none but that Doctrine which is Apostolical be to you as the Mouth of Christ for Instruction to prepare you” (19). Taunting “at the day of the Bridegroom’s coming, when many a Lamp will go out, and many a Professor be left in the dark” (64), and warning against “false Ministers” (57), Bunyan does not waver from his contempt of what he sees as hypocritical worship: “cruelty [that] was acted under smooth pretences” (59). The evidence for Bunyan’s political cooperation with James II is scant, however, and Greaves comes to his verdict of “qualified approval” (Glimpses, 572) on the lack of evidence of dissention within the Bedford congregation. In November 1687, John Eston, one of the most ardent supporters of the king’s policy in Bedfordshire and a conforming Anglican whose father had been a founding member of Bunyan’s congregation, wrote to Peterborough that he had met with Bunyan and other Nonconformist leaders who had promised support and “were unanimous for electing members who would vote for the repeal of the Test and Penal Laws.”28 In his Continuation of Mr Bunyan’s Life Beginning where he left off, a work appended to the seventh edition of Grace Abounding in 1692, the author, probably Charles Doe (although George Cokayne has also been posited)29 felt it important to explain Bunyan’s relations with the Church of England in his last years, apparently fending off possible as-

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persions that Bunyan was a collaborator. In accepting Charles’s Indulgence, for instance, Bunyan is portrayed as a “beneficiary of Anglican benevolence” in 1672 rather than as the victim of sustained Anglican intolerance.30 Doe was at particular pains to explain Bunyan’s attitudes under James’s Indulgence, and in this post-Revolution work we can see some effort to cleanse Bunyan’s reputation. Of the purging and restructuring of the town leaderships, “against this,” Doe writes, “Mr Bunyan expressed his zeal with some wariness, as foreseeing the bad consequence that would attend it, and laboured with his congregation, to prevent their being imposed on in this kind.”31 This kind of prescience, however, is hard to find in Bunyan’s last writings. And as for the concrete benefits of James’s policies, Bunyan had much to gain. Although we do not know Bunyan’s opinions on the new modeling of the town government, it is striking that several of the new civic leaders were leaders of Bunyan’s own church. Although in The Holy War Bunyan had castigated the forced remodeling of town governance, the circumstances of James’s Indulgence and those of the Exclusion period, 1682, when The Holy War was composed, are markedly different.32 Charles in 1682 had moved to expel Whigs, ever the friends of Dissent; whereas, in the remodelings of the later 1680s, James was working to oust the very persecuting Tories who had been promoted by Charles. Of the remodeling under James, Doe admits, “Mr Bunyan, following the examples of others, did lay hold of this liberty [the King’s Indulgence] . . . yet, in all this, he moved with caution and a holy fear, earnestly praying for the averting impendent judgements, which he saw like a black tempest hanging over our heads, for our sins, and ready to break upon us” (Continuation, 115). The Glorious Revolution seems inevitable only in hindsight and by fiat of a good deal of whitewashing of history. Bunyan was no Whig resistor; he might even have been in cooperation with James. Could this have something to do with the near silence in the press in late 1688 about his death? His death, at a confusing and turbulent time in the political revolutions of England’s seventeenth century, could have become a political football; instead, it was used for little political purpose. The uncertain historical conditions of his last months could shed light on the complicated business of the construction of memory. After the Revolution, memories were sealed, and Bunyan did not become a Whig martyr; our question is why not. Bunyan’s refusal to reject the King’s means to Indulgence may have set him at odds with other Dissenters, sharpening differences that had

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already developed over doctrine and discipline. Passively cooperating with James, Bunyan in his last years turned to millennial, rather than political, hopes, and this may have put more distance between him and those Whig heroes and martyrs, the Miltons and Marvells, enshrined by the Whigs after 1688. Let us remember that Tory gentlemen flocked to William of Orange’s standard, horrified at the specter of the “upstart Baptist colonels and canting Quaker merchants stalking Whitehall and Guildhall,” as Mark Goldie puts it, frightened of the alliances James had forged with those very like John Bunyan.33 And what of Bunyan’s “monument”? Celebration of his life was to take new forms once the political dust from the Dutch invasion had settled. In 1690, two years after his death, a call for subscriptions to a published edition of his writings pleaded “that these his Christian Ministerial labours, may be preserved in the world.”34 The preface to the first published collection of Bunyan’s Works in 1692 offers a brief account of Bunyan’s life and death, a good place to see how Bunyan’s memory was to be constructed for those living then. His death “was, and is much lamented, . . . His Remembrance is sweet and refreshing to many, and so will continue.” Then the editors quote Psalm 112: “For the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.”35 Bunyan’s writings, unlike his physical remains, were to serve as memory objects for the worthy, and the godly, as the works themselves would solicit commemoration—of a spiritual, and not of a political, sort. In fact, Bunyan’s writings were themselves liable to emendation to serve the goal of proper memory. Bunyan had written in 1685 in The Pharisee and the Publican, “what shall we think of compliance with a foreign prince to rob the church of God?” (MW 10, 75)—a passage omitted from editions published after 1688, perhaps because it might be thought to refer to William III.36 As Tamsin Spargo has explored, the name of John Bunyan became open to many meanings after his death, but it is significant that the life remembered was not that of the political leader, nor of the persecuted martyr, but of the spiritual seeker. In this first edition, the editors, Ebenezer Chandler, Bunyan’s successor at Bedford, and John Wilson, another minister, referred readers to Grace Abounding for an account of the author’s life. Bunyan’s life and his death seemed to merge so completely with his writings. Abel’s cry of blood was silent at Bunyan’s death. There was nonetheless an Abel-like moment in Bunyan’s afterlife. The first of Bunyan’s works to appear posthumously in the Term Catalogues was the second edition of The Barren Fig-Tree, a tract initially printed in 1673. Licensed

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in December 1688, the work named Bunyan as the author of the tract for the first time. Its title page identified its author as “John Bunyan— who being dead, yet speaketh,” citing Heb. 11.4, that fiery call for Abel’s revenge.37 Yet this was not the same work as that of 1673. John Robinson as the publisher, or some other hand, appended a hitherto unpublished work allegedly by Bunyan to this tract, An Exhortation to Peace and Unity. This work seemed to require a postscript averring its authenticity: “I have delivered this to thy Hand, in the same Order and Method in which it was preached,” writes the authenticator, however excepting some “Particulars upon some of which I have made some enlargements, which I could not then do for want of time.”38 George Offor doubted the authenticity of this piece; it was not included in Cokayne’s list of manuscripts, and other Bunyan editors have followed the practice of ignoring it. Although it was republished with The Barren Fig-Tree in the third edition of 1692, it was subsequently omitted. Indeed, it appears nowhere in the modern Oxford edition of Bunyan’s Miscellaneous Works. Offor doubted the work was Bunyan’s for a number of compelling reasons: doctrinal, circumstantial, and stylistic. Indeed, as Offor notes, “the author introduces scraps of Latin references to ‘Machiavel,’ to ‘the learned Stillingfleet,’ and to ancient heathenish writers,” a practice quite unlike Bunyan’s usual reliance on Scripture alone.39 What is interesting about this work, if it is not by Bunyan, is the attempt it makes—in Bunyan’s name, and by Bunyan’s publisher—to associate a specific political approach with Bunyan. It is not simply an argument for moderation and unity and a reconciliation with Anglicans, but also a pledge to remain loyal to present leaders. In short, it could be interpreted as a pro-James document. The pamphlet appended to Bunyan’s tract does not, of course, bear support for James against William on its sleeve. Instead, it is a general counsel to peace and unity. Yet there are compelling possibilities. The emphasis on “peace” may indicate an anti-Williamite image: William, of course, was always depicted in martial imagery, and in autumn 1688 was very palpably mounting war against the English. This work was published after Bunyan’s death in late August and before December of 1688, a time when William had already arrived in England with his forces from the Netherlands but was not yet declared King. An argument to remain loyal to present leaders, to question the legitimacy of the Protestant Succession, would have had powerful political meaning then.

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An Exhortation explains that our “Master taught that his Kingdom was not of this world; yet in the first of the Acts, ver. 6., we read, that they asked of him if he would at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel? thereby discovering that Christ’s Kingdome (as they thought) should consist in his Temporal Jurisdiction over Israel, which they expected should now commence and take place amongst them. Again, Our Lord tells them that he had many things to say, and these were many important truths which they could not now hear” (Exhortation, 6; cf. Offor ii, 744). The advice warns the godly not to seek in earthly rule a solution to spiritual matters. This could be interpreted as counsel for passive obedience, to avoid political action such as that required to replace James with William. Amity among the nations is professed instead. The pamphlet seems to resist William’s bid for legitimacy even as it embraces a wider Protestant cause. Citing Stillingfleet’s Irenicum, a 1660 tract designed to show that it was not divine right but human society that determined the shape of the church, the spurious Bunyan tract urges a broadly tolerant Protestant nation to reconcile differences: “As want of Unity and Peace keeps those out of the Church that would come in, so it hinders the growth of those that are in. Jars and Divisions Wrangling: and Prejudices, cut out the Growth, if not the Life of Religion” (38). Another counsel is, “Be willing to hear, and learn, and obey those that God by his Providence hath set over you; this is a great means to preserve the Unity and Peace of Churches.” This seems advice to remain obedient to currently established authority. The work continues, “but when Men (yea, and sometimes Women) shall usurp Authority and think themselves wiser than their Teachers, no wonder if these People run into Contentions and Parties” (59; cf Offor ii, 754). The precise reference to “sometimes Women” may suggest a Williamite context, as the legitimacy of Mary seemed more plausible than that of her husband. With elections scheduled for January, the pamphlet is a timely intervention in the moment of decision over whether to support James or William. “How needful is it,” the pamphlet argued, “that if we desire the peace of Churches, that we chuse out Men of Knowledg, who may be able to keep them from being shattered . . . And who may be able to convince and stop the mouths of gainsayers” (Exhortation, 49). This kind of censorship, of course, is not a sentiment one might imagine Bunyan promoting. It is a strong argument for acquiescence to the current order rather than an overturning of it. For Bunyan’s name to appear on this tract would, it seems to me, have been to solicit

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Dissenting and Whig readers whose loyalties were as yet undecided. The tract is a bid, as I see it, to nonconformists and the more “leftist” Whigs not to support the overthrow of the present government. The Convention Parliament that was to offer the crown to William and Mary early the next year was overwhelmingly a Whig body. Whigs had supported James; they did become politically tainted by their having made the most of the occasion to take roles as magistrates, JPs and other civic officers. But the fact is that they had seen James as the route to tolerance and the defeat of a Tory gentry stranglehold on politics and religion.40 Now, I do not believe this tract was written by Bunyan. But the fact that it appears in his name does tell us something about the range of thinkable positions attributable to the Tinker. If nothing else, it tells us about the audience the tract wished to reach: those for whom Bunyan would have been a good guide. Bunyan’s name may not have been on the winning side of the Revolution to come. It would be a mistake to charge Bunyan with the ideas promulgated in his name. However, as a chapter in the history of “the invention of tradition,” this particular case shows the ferment out of which legacies are made. But what can we learn? First, it is important for us to realize that “Tory” and “Whig,” or Royalist and Radical, are not the only categories through which to understand the terms of Dissent in the Restoration. Second, the binary opposition between “Anglican” and “Dissenter” may not be the most helpful guide to the politics of the reign of James II. Third, we should not interpret the response to Charles II as the same as that to his brother. Last, and most obviously, the Glorious Revolution seems inevitable only in hindsight. We still do not know what was said at Bunyan’s funeral, nor whether his late political views were still supportive of James. This essay’s conclusion I admit is a little speculative. It argues from the absence of evidence, and it proposes a set of caveats and questions rather than conclusive answers. But these are important caveats, at least I think so, and with them I am hoping to engender some discussion about literary reputation, martyrology, and Bunyan’s last years, a period of his life that has been little studied; Greaves’s otherwise outstanding biography is remarkably taciturn on this question. An interest in the politics of remembrance and, with it, the construction of the past has led me to consider the implications for writing the lives of members of dissenting communities. From the moment of their exile from

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the national church, the history of Nonconformists has been told as a sympathetic story of victims, thus mirroring the task of the early dissenting commemorative projects. I am thinking of Edmund Calamy’s abridgement of Richard Baxter’s autobiography, which turns it into a collective story, or the Quaker Book of Sufferings. The historiography of Dissent has reinscribed an archetype of loss and collective suffering even to this day. The importance of this trope for the history of Dissent may be noted in the title Samuel Palmer gave to his biographical catalogue of ejected ministers, Nonconformists’ Memorials, which remains a chief reference tool in the study of Dissent. This name fuses the genres of funerary commemoration and history. The cult of victimhood marks later historiography, from the Victorian studies whose sentimentalism about suffering saints helped to push through Reformist legislation, to the primary modernist account, Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is based upon that magnificent and partisan Victorian historiography.41 This archetype of puritan Dissent has made it hard to perceive Dissenters on any other terms, and I hope we can engage with that heroic tradition of remembrance, even as doing so is to commit new acts of iconoclasm.

Notes

1. camden introduction 1. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second 1688 by David Hume, esq. To which is added a short account of his life written by himself. 5 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1849) 5:386. See also Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 2. John Bunyan, “The Author’s Apology for His Book,” The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come, edited with an Introduction by Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press: 1966) p. 145. 2. rudnytsky: dissociation and decapitation 1. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 247. 2. Tacit paraphrases of Eliot’s theory include Blair Worden’s reference to “the fundamental shift in English civilization that, when every reservation has been made, the middle of the seventeenth century brought about” (“Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode,” in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 178); as well as Francis Barker’s assertion of this same cultural moment that “in the space of a relatively few years a new set of relations between state and citizen, body and soul, language and meaning, was fashioned” (The Tremulous Private Body [London: Methuen, 1984], 10). 3. See Frank Kermode, “ ‘Dissociation of Sensibility,’ ” in Romantic Image (1957; rpt. London: Fontana, 1971), 153–77. The ensuing page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

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4. The phrase from For Lancelot Andrews is quoted in David Bradshaw, “Lonely Royalists: T. S. Eliot and Sir Robert Filmer,” Review of English Studies 46 (1995): 376. 5. Quoted in Bradshaw, “Lonely Royalists,” 376. 6. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Vintage, 1966), 3. The ensuing page references will be given parenthetically. 7. For the passage from Locke, see John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), 179. 8. For Freud’s letter to Martha and response to the questionnaire from Heller, see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957), 1: 179, 3: 422. 9. The day prior to his execution, the king met with his daughter Elizabeth (aged thirteen) and son Henry (aged eight). To Henry he said, “They will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king. But mark what I say, you must not be a king so long as your [elder] brothers Charles and James do live.” To this the boy replied, “I will be torn in pieces first,” which caused the king to “rejoice exceedingly” (The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History, ed. David Lagomarsino and Charles J. Wood [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989], 153–54). This exchange shows the centrality of primogeniture to Charles’s ideological struggle. 10. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 247. 11. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet” (1919), in Selected Essays, 123. 12. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 13: 143. 13. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 150. 14. See Franco Moretti, “ ‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Forms and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 7–40; and David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459–75. 15. Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Laslett, 172. 16. William Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All references to Shakespeare will be to this edition with line numbers given parenthetically in the text. Even in Richard II, however, the comparison of Richard’s murder to the Fall, is not limited to Royalist characters, but is embedded in the structure of the play. 17. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, in Selections, ed. G. Huehns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 315; and John Cleveland, “An Elegy upon King Charles the First, murdered publicly by his Subjects,” in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 3: 92–93. 18. The passages from Philip Henry and The Bloody Court are quoted in Nancy Klein Maguire’s excellent article, “The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: The Case of Charles I,” Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 3.

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19. All quotations from Marvell’s poetry will be to The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis with E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), with line numbers given parenthetically in the text. All italics in quoted passages throughout this chapter are found in the original sources. 20. See the notes on lines 69–72 of the “Horatian Ode” in Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (1972; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978). Donno cites the pertinent passage from Livy in Holland’s translation in which, moreover, the head is described as “whole and sound,” giving the incident a cheery tone quite unlike that in Marvell. 21. Quoted in The Trial of Charles I, eds. Lagomarsino and Wood, 142. 22. Paul Hammond, “Marvell’s Sexuality,” The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 101–2. 23. Hammond, “Marvell’s Sexuality,” 106. 24. See Annabel M. Patterson’s extended political reading in Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 20–25. Hammond’s homoerotic reading is consistent with my emphasis on its political dimension, though his suggestion that “one might expect ‘our poor lover’ [instead of ‘my poor lover’ in l. 11] if this were a poem about the young Prince Charles addressed to other royalist sympathizers” (“Marvell’s Sexuality,” 109) can be dismissed once one recognizes that “The Unfortunate Lover” is not about the “young Prince” but his late father, and it is thus a love lyric to the memory of the King. Hammond’s puzzlement about the connection of the opening stanza to the rest of the poem can likewise be cleared up by noting that the “climb”/“Time” rhyme in lines 7–8 echoes the praise of Cromwell in the “Horatian Ode” (ll. 33–34). The innocent opening stanza forms a prelude to Marvell’s recital of the lamentable story of his love for “The Orphan of the Hurricane” (l. 32) of history. 25. The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (1912; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1: 49–50. Marvell’s echo of Donne is noted by Legouis in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. Margoliouth, 1: 258. 26. Quoted in The Trial of Charles I, ed. Lagomarsino and Wood, 144. 27. William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 15. On the biographical origins of Empson’s insight into Marvell’s ambiguous sexuality, see John Haffenden, “Three’s Company: William Empson and ‘The Wife Is Praised,’ ” Times Literary Supplement, December 1, 2006, 14–15. 28. Jim Swan, “History, Pastoral and Desire: Andrew Marvell’s Mower Poems,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 3 (1976): 195. 29. Quoted in Worden, “Marvell, Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Sharpe and Zwicker, 179. 30. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, in Selections, ed. Huehns, 314. 31. Quoted by David Norbrook in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 288.

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32. Gerrard Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift Sent to the Parliament and Armie, Part I, in Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Graham Storey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 155. See the analysis of Winstanley’s pamphlet in David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 69–70. 33. Winstanley, A New-Yeers Gift, 156. 34. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962–73), 3: 194. (Vol. 3 edited by Merritt Y. Hughes.) All references to The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes will be to this volume, with page numbers given parenthetically in the text. 35. Quoted in The Trial of Charles I, ed. Lagomarsino and Wood, 144. 36. Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton, Macbeth, and Buchanan,” The Seventeenth Century 4 (1979): 58. 37. David Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Sharpe and Zwicker, 99. 38. Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” 99. 39. On the concept of projective identification, introduced by Melanie Klein in a 1952 addendum to “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), see R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 2nd ed. (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 179–208. 40. Quotations from Paradise Lost are to John Milton, The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), with line numbers given parenthetically in the text. 41. See my essay, “‘Here Only Weak’: Sexuality and the Structure of Trauma in Paradise Lost,” in The Persistence of Myth: Psychoanalytic and Structuralist Perspectives, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: Guilford Press, 1988), 153–76. 42. For Royalist glorifications of the restoration of Charles II as the regaining of paradise, see Waller’s “On St. James Park as Lately Improved by His Majesty” and the various inflections of this pattern in Dryden’s “Astrea Redux,” “To His Sacred Majesty,” “To My Honour’d Friend, Dr. Charleton,” and Annus Mirabilis. 43. Eikon Basilike, ed. Edward Almack (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907), 261. I am treating Eikon Basilike as a work by Charles I and ignoring the controversies concerning its authorship. 44. Eikon Basilike, ed. Almack, 256. 45. First introduced in “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929), reparation becomes integral to Klein’s account of the depressive position in “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935) and “Mourning and Its Relation to ManicDepressive States” (1940). 46. Quoted in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 142.

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47. On the two plays in question, see, respectively, Gail Kern Paster, “ ‘In the Spirit of Men There Is No Blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 284–98; and David Willbern, “Phantasmagoric Macbeth,” in Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 101–34. As Willbern notes, Duncan is feminized by his loving and generous nature even before his murder, and his murder is depicted also as a symbolic infanticide. 48. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 357, 359. 49. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 62. 50. I would be remiss not to point out that John Bunyan, too, is conspicuously silent about the regicide in his published works. On Bunyan’s silence see Vera Camden’s essay, this volume. 51. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), 124. 52. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. Pocock, 265. 53. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 374. 54. On this theory of the formation of trauma, introduced by Freud in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and which holds that a randomly occurring later event can reawaken the memory of a repressed earlier event and endow it with a meaning that it did not possess at the time, see Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ch. 2. 55. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 161. 56. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 13. As Lukacher explains, deferred action “demands that one recognize that while the earlier event is still to some extent the cause of the later event, the earlier event is nevertheless also the effect of the later event” (35). 57. For this defense of the concept of the Renaissance, see Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’ ” Speculum 17 (1942): 226–42; and Herbert Weisinger, “The Self-Awareness of the Renaissance as a Criterion of the Renaissance,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 29 (1943): 561–67. 3. norbrook: a response to peter rudnytsky 1. See Rudnytsky’s commentary on this in this volume. 2. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), in Standard Edition, vol. XIII, 1–161. On sacred kingship, see also Richard McCoy, Alterations of States: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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3. On the complex composition history of the Patriarcha see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 262–71. 4. See Paul Hammond, “Marvell’s Sexuality,” The Seventeenth Century, 11 (1996), 87–123. For a more recent discussion of homoeroticism and tyrannicide see my “Marvell’s Scaevola Scoto-Brittannus and the Ethics of Political Violence,” in Marshall Grossman (ed.), Reading Renaissance Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2007), 173–89. 5. David Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 78–116 6. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963). 7. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution 1642–1660 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 103–4. 8. See David Norbrook, “ ‘A Liberal Tongue’: Language and Rebellion in Richard II,” in John M. Mucciolo (ed.), Shakespeare’s Universe (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 37–51. 9. In a stimulating if controversial study, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson has recently reopened the legal case for the regicide: The Tyrannicide Brief (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005). 4. camden: young man bunyan 1. Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688 (New York: Knopf, 1988), 10. See Stuart Sim and David Walker, Bunyan and Authority: The Rhetoric of Dissent and the Legitimation Crisis in Seventeenth-Century England (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 76. Bunyan did publish a handful of sermons and pamphlets before the Restoration which are similarly silent as to direct comment on political or state matters. See also Hill, A Tinker, 14, 38. 2. Sim and Walker, Bunyan and Authority, 109. 3. Bunyan’s stance can be compared to the pacifism of contemporary Anabaptist sects. See David L. Weaver-Zercher, “A Modest (Though Not Particularly Humble) Claim for Scholarship in the Anabaptist Tradition,” in Scholarship and the Christian Faith, ed. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda HustedtJacobsen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 124–147, 105. See also Michael Mullett, John Bunyan in Context (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1996), 27. 4. Richard Greaves, “The Spirit and the Sword: Bunyan and the Stuart State,” in Bunyan In Our Time, ed. Robert G. Collmer (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1989), 138–160, 152. Greaves notes that during Bunyan’s years of imprisonment for preaching, he did not support those radical sectarians who advocated armed resistance to the restored regime of Charles II. “Throughout his career, excepting only his youthful period of military service (which predated his conversion), Bunyan stood constant in his advocacy of passive disobedience to state decrees that contravened divine precepts” (160).

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5. See Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis” (1912), in The Complete Psychological Works, Standard Edition, vol. 12 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 109–20. Freud in this essay talks about new ways of listening. 6. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962), 40–41. 7. John Knott, “Bunyan and the Cry of Blood,” in Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community, ed. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 51–67. See also Sharon Achinstein, “Honey from the Lion’s Carcass: Bunyan, Allegory, and the Samsonian Moment,” in Awakening Words, ed. Gay, Randall, and Zinck, 68–80. 8. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), para. 12. All references to Grace Abounding will refer to his paragraph numbers. See also Hill, A Tinker, 64. For a comparison to George Fox’s silence on the English Civil War until 1651, when it was over, see Michael Mullet, John Bunyan in Context, 27. 9. Ibid., 46. See also Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 19. 10. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 22–25, 41 n. 30. Greaves cites Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 224–225. Marianne Moore, “In Distrust of Merits,” in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1981). 11. Greaves, “The Spirit and the Sword: Bunyan and the Stuart State,” 138. 12. Hill, A Tinker, 52–56. For further discussion of possible “psychiatric wounds” throughout England at this time, due to the King’s beheading, see Rudnytsky, this volume. 13. Ibid., 43, 47. Based, among other things, upon the fact that Thomas Bunyan christened his new baby Charles in 1645, Hill assumes that John’s father was a Royalist. This assumption is generally shared by Bunyan biographers. 14. Ibid., 55. 15. Quoted in Hill, A Tinker, 58. 16. Anne Laurence, “Bunyan and the parliamentary army,” in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–88, ed. Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (London: Hambledon, 1990), 17–29, 29. 17. W. R. Owens, “ ‘Antichrist must be Pulled Down’: Bunyan and the Millennium,” in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–88, ed. Laurence, Owens, and Sim, 77–94. 18. Hill, A Tinker, 52. 19. Bunyan’s readers have always recognized his extraordinary suffering. “Scarcely any madhouse could produce an instance of delusion so strong, or of misery so acute” (Thomas Babington Macaulay, “John Bunyan,” in Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols, ed. A. J. Grieve [London: J. M. Dent, 1907], ii., 399–410). Other Victorian readers say Bunyan was subject to “hallucinations, if you please to call them such” because the devil persecuted him: “It would seem as if Satan disgorged upon Bunyan the hell of his own soul more fully than ever

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he did upon any other mortal” (George B. Cheever, Lectures on The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Life and Times of John Bunyan [London: T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row and Edinburgh, 1853], 49). I cite these admirers of Bunyan because both are pre-psychoanalytic and believe that Bunyan’s calling is “real” and a matter of “direct spiritual revelation” (Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 85) yet such readers recognize that Bunyan was, at least for the period of his youthful conversion, mentally ill. 20. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 132. 21. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 5–59. See Greaves’s discussion of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria on DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed. [Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994]) as a means of interpreting Bunyan’s depression (39) My debt to Greaves’s unparalleled knowledge of Bunyan and his world is obvious and immense. My divergence from his reliance on the DSM-IV I shared with him while he was writing the biography. For a discussion of the differences between psychiatric and psychodynamic manuals and models of diagnosis, see Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structures in the Clinical Process (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). 22. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 13, 14. 23. Ibid., 102–103. Erikson’s chapter on “The Meaning of ‘Meaning It,’ ” 172–222. 24. See also my “ ‘Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience’: The Place of Luther’s ‘Commentary on Galatians’ in Grace Abounding,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 819–49. 25. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 42–43. 26. Ibid., 14. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. See Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, “[H]is spiritual awakening in 1650 [followed] . . . an encounter with three or four godly women in Bedford” (33). 29. Bunyan’s mother dies in June, 1644; his sister dies a few months later in 1644; his father remarries shortly after this; the marriage is not registered; Bunyan joins the army in November, 1644; Thomas Bunyan’s infant son is christened Charles in 1645, an act which Hill understandably reads as a slap at John, the young soldier-in-arms (Hill, A Tinker, 45). 30. Vera J. Camden, “Blasphemy and the Problem of the Self in Grace Abounding,” Bunyan Studies 1, no. 2 (1989): 5–22. 31. See Greaves, Glimpses, on Bunyan’s childhood nightmares, 8–10. 32. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed., trans. Cecil Baines, in The Writings of Anna Freud, vol. 2 (New York: International University Press, 1966), 120. 33. She further explains this concept: “In [Freud’s] Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) the significance of this change from the passive to the active role as

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a means of assimilating unpleasant or traumatic experiences is discussed in detail: “As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the [aggressive] game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute” (Ibid., 113). A. Freud cites Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Standard Edition, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958) 3–64. 34. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18–20. 35. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 509. Thomas cites R. Younge, The Cause and Cure of Ignorance (1648), 89. 36. Quoted in Thomas, Religion, 511. Thomas cites R. Kilby, The Burthen of a Loaden Conscience, 6th ed. (Cambridge, 1616), 48. 37. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680), ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 35–37. 38. Hill, A Tinker, 14, 27. Hence the proverbial “tinker’s damn.” 39. Bunyan, Mr. Badman, 37–38. 40. Hill, A Tinker, 46. 41. Nigel Smith ed., “Introduction” to A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century (London: Junction Books, 1983), 14, 15, see also 23–31. Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 42. Bunyan derives his image from I Kings 7:25 and II Chronicles 4:4. 43. See Nigel Smith, “Bunyan and the Language of the Body in SeventeenthCentury England,” in John Bunyan and his England 1628–88 ed. Laurence, Owens, and Sim, 161–174. John Knott, “Bunyan and the Cry of Blood,” 51–67. 44. Greaves, Glimpses, 22–29; 13–14. 45. Laurence, “Bunyan,” 28–29. See also Hill, A Tinker, 46. 46. See Greaves, Glimpses, 17–19. John Bunyan, The Holy War (1682), ed. Roger Sharrock and James L. Forrest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2. 47. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 195, 198. 48. Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2002), 29. 49. Stuart Sim and David Walker, The Discourse of Sovereignty Hobbes to Fielding: The State of Nature and The Nature of the State (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 2–3, 136. 50. Hill, A Tinker, 58. Italics mine. 51. Ibid., 58. 52. Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 30. 53. Hill, A Tinker, 52. 54. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), 157. 55. Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 30. 56. Quoted in Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 30. Tomalin cites George Downing in Islington to Winthrop, 8 Mar. 1648, cited in John Beresford, The Godfather of

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Downing Street: Sir George Downing, 1623–1684 (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1925), 49–51. 57. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 18, 21. Anne Laurence also writes, “In the summer of 1645 everyone was fighting, at least in name, for the King. There had been no . . . idea that the King might be executed and the monarchy abolished. Everyone assumed that when the war ended the King would again rule, though perhaps under different circumstances” (19). In this light, the Earl of Manchester’s anxious remarks to Cromwell proved prescient in the short run: “If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves” (Tomalin, 23). Hegemony creates ambivalence even in revolutionaries. 58. Greaves, Glimpses, 20. 59. Owens, “Antichrist,” 91. 60. Quoted in Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 33. Tomalin cites Philip Henry, The Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, MA, of Broad Oak, Flintshire 1631–1696, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), 12. 61. Sigmund Freud, Fragment of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]), Standard Edition, vol. 7, 3–122. p. 78. 62. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Vintage, 1966), 3. 63. Brown, Loves Body, 5. 64. Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 328–329. 65. Phillips, Promises, 330. 66. Henri Talon, John Bunyan: The Man And His Works, trans. Barbara Wall (London: Rockliff, 1951), 43. 67. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 138. 68. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 67. 5. ezell: bunyan’s women, women’s bunyan 1. This essay is gratefully dedicated to Owen and Barbara Watkins, who, many years ago when I was a graduate student, invited me to share a table in a crowded Oxford café and thus introduced me to the world of Bunyan scholars and scholarship in its most gracious and hospitable face. I am also more recently indebted to conversations with my friend and colleague James Rosenheim in clarifying the issues in this essay. 2. William York Tindall, John Bunyan Mechanick Preacher, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 17. 3. Christopher Hill , A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 302. 4. Ibid., 302.

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5. Ibid., 303. 6. Elspeth Graham, “Authority, Resistance and Loss: Gendered Difference in the Writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen,” in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–88, edited by Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), 129. 7. N. H. Keeble, “ ‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him’: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan,” in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–88, ed. Laurence, Owens, and Sim, 140. 8. Tamsin Spargo, The Writing of John Bunyan (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1997), 71. 9. Ibid., 119, 123. 10. Bonamy Dobrée, ed. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classic, 1927), v. 11. M. P. Willcocks, Bunyan Calling (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1943). 12. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), para. 309. Further citations shall be by paragraph number in the text. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” (1933 [1932]), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE 22:113. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). 14. For more on the social custom of kissing as a form of “salute,” and of Bunyan’s discomfort with it, see Davies, this volume. 15. Laurence Clarkson [Claxton], The Lost Sheep Found (London, 1660), 15. 16. Ibid., 25, 26. 17. Tindall, John Bunyan Mechanick Preacher. 18. The transgressive women I shall be referring to are of a different nature than those Spargo discusses in Bunyan’s objections to women meeting separately for prayer in Bunyan’s A Case of Conscience Resolved (1683), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Vol. 4, ed. T. L. Underwood (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989). 19. The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont, edited by Vera J. Camden (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992), 43–44. 20. Abiezer Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Roule, in A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Junction Books, 1983), 102. 21. Hill, “A Turbulent,” 302; John Bunyan, The House of the Forest of Lebanon, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 7, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), 142. 22. For further discussion of this, see Davies, this volume. 23. A Few Sighes from Hell (1653), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 1, ed. T. L. Underwood (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), 333. 24. G. B. Harrison, John Bunyan: A Study in Personality (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), 135. 25. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Bunyan (London, 1961), 83.

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26. Tindall, 222. 27. Anonymous, Strange & Terrible Newes from Cambridge. . . . (London: C. Brooks, 1659), 4. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Blackley and Whitehead, A Lying Wonder Discovered (London: 1659), 2. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text. 30. Anonymous, Strange & Terrible Newes, 3. 31. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, edited by James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 1. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. 32. Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan, rev ed. (London: Macmillan 1968), 110; Winslow, John Bunyan, 171; see also Harrison, John Bunyan, 153. 33. Keeble, “Here is her Glory,” 139. 34. Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 205. 35. Laurence Srenock, Gods Sword Drawn against Drunkards and Swearers, Blasphemeres of Gods Holy Name, Whore-Mongers, Sabbath-breakers and other lewd Livers of all sorts (London, 1677), 12. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. John Bunyan, Christian Behavior, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 3, ed. J. Sears McGee (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), 51. 38. Bunyan, Sighes, 287. 39. Anonymous, Strange & Terrible Newes, 3. 6. luxon: one soul versus one flesh 1. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. Eugenia Laker, S.S.N.D. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1974); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Complete American Edition, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Glencoe, IL: McGraw Hill, 1947). For handy access to the key texts of friendship doctrine from Plato and Aristotle to Kierkegaard and Elizabeth Telfer, see Michael Pakaluk, ed., Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991). 2. William Haller, “Hail Wedded Love” in ELH 13 (1946): 81. See also William Haller and Malleville Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941–42): 234–72. 3. The status of female selfhood in cultures dominated by patriarchs and fratriarchs has been the focus of much feminist criticism, philosophy, and history. For an excellent historical and political analysis of the issues, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 4. On Reformation readings of Genesis, and Milton’s in particular, see Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Margaret Ferguson and Mary Nyquist (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99–127.

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5. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S. J. Two volumes in Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation number 42 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 9.5. 6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985). This edition is cited throughout and referred to parenthetically by Bekker line numbers. 7. Two important treatments of early modern perceptions of homosocial and homoerotic relations are Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). On the homoerotics of the classical world, see David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990). Also of interest in this regard is my recent book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005), esp. the introduction and chapter one. 8. Charles G. Smith, Spenser’s Theory of Friendship (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935). 9. Most Christian teaching on marriage derives from Genesis 2 and 3, and the Pauline and so-called “pastoral” epistles. See 1 Corinthians 7, Ephesians 5, 1 Timothy 2, and 1 Peter 3. 10. Haller, “Wedded Love,” p. 97. 11. Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship, cited above. 12. John Bunyan, Christian Behaviour, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, volume 3, ed. J. Sears McGee (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), 32, hereafter all subsequent references in text MW. 13. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988); John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 222–356. 14. Edmund Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 75. 15. Milton, unique among Puritan authors I have read, argues that Paul’s caution about burning in 1 Corinthians 7:9 (“It is better to marry than to burn”) refers not to lust but to a “rational burning” for fit conversation. Lust, he alleges, may best be controlled by “strict life and labour, with the abatement of a full diet”; one should not demean marriage by considering it a remedy for lust, however legitimate (The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in Complete Prose Works 2.251). 16. See my arguments against the prevailing view of Miltonists in “Milton’s Wedded Love: Not about Sex (as we know it),” Milton Studies 40 (2002): 38–60. 17. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), para. 315. For further discussion on this topic, see M. Ezell, this volume. 18. John Bunyan, Seasonable Counsel, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Volume 10, ed. Owen C. Watkins (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 82.

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19. John Bunyan, Saved by Grace, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Volume 8, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), 181. 20. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), 10. 21. John Milton, The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). 22. John Bunyan, The Advocateship of Jesus Christ in Miscellaneous Works, Volume 11, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985), 163. 23. John Bunyan, The Saints Knowledge of Christ’s Love, in Miscellaneous Works, Volume 13, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994), 395. 24. In his poem, “Of Heaven” from One Thing is Needful, Bunyan very briefly imagines the reunion of families in heaven (stanza 69) amongst scores of stanzas celebrating the passing of this world “as a scrole, / Or garment folded up” (lines 510–11) and the gathering of believers at the marriage supper of the Lamb with “the Bridegroom” (514) (Graham Midgley, ed., The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Volume 6: The Poems [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980]). 25. Christian’s wife reappears in The Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress as Christiana, now a believer. She, like her husband, is tempted by concerns of the flesh, including her children, to refrain from seeking salvation; see Mrs. Timorous’s charge that Christiana is casting herself away in “so unwomanly” a fashion (181) and putting at risk “these four sweet Babes . . . , thy Flesh and thy Bones” (182). Christiana (and Bunyan) are spared the difficulty of imagining a mother divorcing her children; for, the children, as it turns out, are glad to go along with her. 26. See, for example, Milton’s midrash on Genesis 2:24 in Tetrachordon in The Complete Prose Works 2.606. 27. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 28. John Bunyan, An Exposition on the First Ten Chapters of Genesis, in The Miscellaneous Works, Volume 12, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994), 124. 29. John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Volume 6, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980) 236. 30. On “the Ethiop” as a commonplace emblem of unchangeability (or unredeemability), see Karen Newman, “ ‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 124–43. 31. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as one of the plenary addresses at the Third International John Bunyan Symposium in Cleveland, Ohio on October, 11, 2001. I am grateful to Vera Camden and the officers of the International John Bunyan Society for inviting me to speak there, and for the many wonderful suggestions for improvement offered by those in attendance.

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Thanks also to The Acacia John Bunyan Online Library (http://acacia.pair.com/ Acacia.John.Bunyan/index.html) for its very useful search function. 7. davies: bunyan’s bawdy I owe thanks to Professors Vincent Newey and Greg Walker, at the University of Leicester, as well as to Carina Vitti, for commenting upon earlier drafts of this essay. 1. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. by James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn., rev. by R. Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 1–2. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. 2. J. T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 163, and cited in S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979 [repr. 1984], 652, n. 11). For other examples of how the pen has often been associated with male phallic power in literature, see Gilbert and Gubar, 3–20. 3. Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. with and intro. by K. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3; Ben Jonson, “Apologetical Dialogue” (ll. 196–202) of Poetaster, ed. by Tom Cain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 273. Sidney also writes famously of being “great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,” in the first sonnet (l. 12) of the Astrophil and Stella sequence. 4. See K. Eisman Maus, “A womb of his own: male Renaissance poets in the female body,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–88. Bunyan uses the same language of literary paternity too in the “Advertisement” attached to The Holy War, on which see T. Spargo, The Writing of John Bunyan (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 35–39. 5. “To my sisters,” fos A1–A2, and collected in Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. by K. Aughterson (London: Routledge, 1995), 253–55. On this trope, see E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writings 1649–88 (London: Virago Press, 1988), esp. 54–63, and The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader, ed. by N. H. Keeble (London, 1994), 264–79. 6. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. by R. Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), paragraphs 37, 38. Further paragraph references are given parenthetically in the text. 7. On the significance of this episode in terms of its “birthing” imagery, see J. Lindsey, John Bunyan, Maker of Myths (London: Methuen, 1937; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 188–96; V. Newey, “ ‘With the eyes of my understanding’: Bunyan, Experience, and Acts of Interpretation,” in John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, Tercentenary Essays, ed. by N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 189–216 (p. 195); T. H. Luxon, “ ‘Other Men’s Words’

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and ‘New Birth’: Bunyan’s Antihermeneutics of Experience,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36 (1994): 259–90 (pp. 279–83), reprinted in Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 130–58; and R. S. Beal, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: John Bunyan’s Pauline Epistle,” SEL 21 (1981): 147–60 (pp. 158–59). 8. See also M. W. Masson, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching 1690–1730,” Signs 2 (1976): 304–15, and M. Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 13, 21. 9. See L. A. Pollock, “Embarking on a rough passage: the experience of pregnancy in early modern society,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by V. Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 39–67. See also P. Crawford, “The construction and experience of maternity in seventeenth-century England,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, 3–38, and R. V. Schnucker, “The English Puritans and Pregnancy, Delivery and Breast Feeding,” The History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1974): 637–58. 10. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 163, and cited in Gilbert and Gubar, 6. On the seventeenth-century usage of “pen,” “came,” and “pull” as valid sexual euphemisms, see esp. Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, ed. by G. Williams, 3 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), II, 1007–9; I, 277; II, 1109–10. 11. This is the sense given by Sharrock in the “Penguin Classics” edition (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965; repr. with revisions 1987), 387, and again in N. H. Keeble’s edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 264. 12. For commentary on Bunyan’s “concrete” style, see for example R. Sharrock, John Bunyan (London: Macmillan, 1954; repr. 1968), 64–65, and D. Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth Century England: Theology and the Self (The Hague: Mouton Press, 1971), 67–70. 13. Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, III, 1285. On “distaff” and the corollary term “spin off,” see also E. Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947; 3rd ed. 1968, repr. 1990), 95, 187, where he cites a more famous use of this image in Twelfth Night, 1. 3, 99–101. 14. F. Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984; 2nd ed. 1989), xvii. On the interpretation and legitimacy of puns see esp. G. Hartman, “The Voice of the Shuttle,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 342–48; J. Culler, “The Call of the Phoneme,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. by J. Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 1–16; S. Sim, “Deconstructing the Pun,” British Journal of Aesthetics 27 (1987): 326–34; G. C. F. Bearn, “The Possibility of Puns: A Defense of Derrida,” Philosophy and Literature 19 (1995): 330–35; C. Bates, “The Point of Puns,” Modern Philology 96 (1999): 421–38. 15. On Restoration literature, decadence, and debauchery, see, for example, R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy

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Works Written or Published in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1979), esp. 8–17, 214–15; and M. Davies, “‘Bawdy in Thoughts, Precise in Words’: Decadence, Divinity and Dissent in the Restoration,” in M. St. John, ed., Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 39–63. 16. These transgressions range from Norwood’s “nocturnal pollutions” to Trosse’s “ ‘Sensual’ Inclinations” towards “wanton wenches” and the “sin of Onan,” as well as Clarkson’s antinomian promiscuity. See The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda, with intros. by W. F. Craven, and W. B. Hayward (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1945): 26–27; The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, ed. by A. W. Brink (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 54–65; Laurence Clarkson, Lost Sheep Found (London: 1660), 15, 22, 25, 26. Such admissions, though, are rare among Puritan spiritual autobiographers: see T. de Welles, “Sex and Sexual Attitudes in SeventeenthCentury England: The Evidence from Puritan Diaries,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 24 (1988): 45–64. 17. R. Pooley, “Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self,” in John Bunyan and his England, 1628–1688, ed. by Laurence, Owens, and Sim (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 105–14 (111). 18. C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 303. 19. See also Newey, “ ‘With the eyes of my understanding,’ ” 204–5, and N. H. Keeble, “ ‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him’: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan,” in John Bunyan and his England, 131–47 (pp. 139–40); as well as Ezell, this volume. On the custom “for persons of different sexes to greet each other by a kiss upon the lips” in early modern England, see L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, abridged and revised ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican Books, 1979; repr. Penguin, 1990), 325. 20. John Bunyan, Christian Behaviour (1663), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, III, ed. by J. Seers McGee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 9. 21. Bunyan, Christian Behaviour, 50–51. 22. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. by James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 49, and for Bunyan’s complaints about women’s fashions pp. 121–23, 125. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. 23. See, for example, Bunyan’s lament over “Debauchery” “swallowing up of a Nation, sinking of a Nation, and bringing its Inhabitants to temporal, spiritual, and eternal ruine” in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1–10. 24. W. Haller and M. Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941–42): 235–72; W. Haller, “Hail Wedded Love,” ELH 13 (1946): 79–97; E. S. Morgan, “The Puritans and Sex,” New England Quarterly 15 (1942): 591–607, and The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in SeventeenthCentury New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); E. Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986),

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esp. 12–14, 75–104. See also J. G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. 69–81, 113–20; and A. Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. 112–15. 25. For Gouge’s instructions on sexual duties in marriage, see Of Domesticall Duties, 3rd ed. (London: 1634; first publ. 1622), “Of common-mutuall duties betwixt Man and Wife,” 215–69, esp. 223–29. On Gouge’s wife’s death during childbirth, see Schnucker, “The English Puritans and Pregnancy,” 642–43. 26. For views of sex (even within marriage) as something which had to be negotiated with great spiritual care (if not anxiety) by Puritans, see Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 313–15; and K. Verdun, “ ‘Our Cursed Natures’: Sexuality and the Puritan Conscience,” New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 220–37. For qualifying views on sex within marriage for Puritans see K. M. Davies, “The Sacred Condition of Equality: How Original Were Puritan Doctrines of Marriage?,” Social History 2 (1977): 563–80; and M. Todd, “Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household,” Church History 49 (1980): 18–34. 27. See Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 211–29; Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (London, 1642), 146–63; Thomas Gataker, Marriage Duties Briefely Couched Togither (London: 1620), esp. 36–44; Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London, 1673), Part II “Christian Oeconomicks (or Family Duties),” 520–28. 28. Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 2–3. Similarly, Gouge (along with other Protestants) refuted the Roman Catholic view, as propounded by “their holy Fathers and Popes” in their “dotage,” that “there is no chastity, but of single persons.” Hence, “chastity and matrimony” are opposed by Catholics “as two contraries,” whereas Protestants such as Gouge could promote matrimony as the true means of chastity. Of Domesticall Duties, 218–20. See also Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, 11–12, 80–84, 171–72 n. 23. 29. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), I. iii. 2 (4) [I. 414–19], cited in Keeble, The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman, 37. 30. The absence in Bunyan’s writings of a developed theory of sex and companionship in marriage (in the manner of Gouge and Milton, for example) may be due to such ideas deriving from a humanist rather than a “Puritan” tradition. For more on this see T. Luxon, this volume. 31. As an example of this orderliness, see Bunyan’s instructions for “The Duty of Wives,” 32–36. 32. A Holy Life (1684), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, IX, ed. by R. L. Greaves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 319–20. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. On the seventeenth-century connotations of “chambring” see Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, I, 225–26. 33. A Case of Conscience Resolved (1683), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, IV, ed. by T. L. Underwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 321–22.

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34. On the alleged vices of the Roman Church in anti-Catholic polemic, including priests’ use of “buggery boyes” see, for example, John Bale, The Image of Both Churches (London, 1570; first publ. 1544), 139. See also B. R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; repr. 1994), 42–48. 35. Bunyan, Christian Behaviour, 50–51, and see Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 43, 48–49. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. 36. Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, III, 1359–60. 37. Bunyan, Christian Behaviour, 33. On how theologians rejected “Variant sexual positions” in this period, “since they were merely incitements to lust and designed for pleasure not procreation,” and how having “the woman on top was condemned” in particular, see Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 315. See too Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination, 114. 38. Rubinstein notes that “content” puns both on “sexual satisfaction” and upon “contend,” meaning “amorous struggle”; A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns, 56. 39. Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, I, 393–94. Williams cites this use of “pit” in Badman first and foremost (II, 1045–46). 40. Keeble, “‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him,’” 139; A. Ross, “‘Baffled, and Befooled’: Misogyny in the Works of John Bunyan,” in Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community, ed. by D. Gay, J. G. Randall, and A. Zinck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 153–68. 41. Keeble, “‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him,’” 139. 42. See Bunyan, An Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis (1692), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, XII, ed. by W. R. Owens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 128, 131–33, 141, 143–44, and esp. 147–49; and A Case of Conscience Resolved, 306–7, 325. On how “Wicked Women” are the “Snares of Death to their Husbands,” see An Exposition, 147. 43. A Case of Conscience Resolved, 295–96, 325. On the early modern perception of women as “the disorderly sex” see, for example, P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993; repr. 1996), 15–17; and “Sexual Knowledge in England, 1500–1700,” in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Sexual Attitudes to Sexuality, ed. by Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 82–106; Keeble, The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman, 17–43; Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 2–3, 85–8; Aughterson, Renaissance Women, 103–32; Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination, 60–82; I. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. 28–46. 44. Bunyan, An Exposition, 148–49, 191. 45. Bunyan, Badman, 55; A Case of Conscience Resolved, 307. 46. Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine, 1–2, 94–97; M. Breen, “The Sexed Pilgrim’s Progress,” SEL 32 (1992): 443–60 (esp. 450–51). For similar readings of the attack on Christiana and Mercy, see also Keeble, “ ‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him,’ ” 142–43; Ross, “ ‘Baffled, and Befooled,’ ” 163–64; Luxon, Literal Figures, 205.

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47. Breen, “The Sexed Pilgrim’s Progress,” 453–54. 48. Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, I, 371–74, and Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 93. 49. On such attitudes towards the rape of women in early modern England, see Crawford, “Sexual Knowledge in England,” 87–88; B. J. Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation,” ELH 65 (1998): 69–98; N. Bashar, “Rape in England between 1550–1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 28–42; S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976; first pub. Martin Secker & Warburg, 1975), 16–30; C. Bingham, “Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970): 447–72. 50. Newey, “‘With the eyes of my understanding,’” 205. 51. Bunyan, The Holy War, 164–68, 196. 52. M. Foucault, The Will To Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I, trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998; first. pub. by Allen Lane, 1979, as The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction), 23. 53. On the political significance of sexual slander for Nonconformist churches, see Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720, 51–2, 120–23, 127–30, 202–4; Spargo, The Writing of John Bunyan, 40, 68–95 (esp. pp. 77–83); and J. G. Turner, “The Properties of Libertinism,” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1985): 75–87. For evidence that Bunyan’s congregation was sensitive to scandal mongering, especially concerning its women, see The Minutes of the First Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford 1656–1766, ed. by H. G. Tibbutt (Bedford, UK: The Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1976), for example, 76 –77. 8. pooley: bunyan and the antinomians 1. Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 15. This was published in the United States with the much less “radical” title, A Tinker and a Poor Man. 2. Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 140–68. The title of this final chapter is terrific, though: “Will All the Radicals Please Lie Down, We Can’t See the Seventeenth Century.” 3. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, ed., Religion & Society in Early Modern England: a Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 174. 4. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), para. 113. There are subsequent references to this edition in the text. 5. Tobias Crispe, Christ Alone Exalted (London, 1690), “The Preface to the Christian Reader,” signed by Robert Lancaster. 6. See the Introduction to Gertrude Huehns, Antinomianism in English History (London: Cresset Press, 1951).

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7. Stephen Geree, The Doctrine of the Antinomians By Evidence of Gods Truth, plainely confuted (London, 1644), sig A2v. See Christopher Hill, “Antinomianism,” in Liberty against the Law (London: Penguin, 1996), 214–26. The association of women with antinomianism is of particular interest for the students of Anne Hutchinson in New England. Space precludes a proper study of her case here, though she does provide an example of the way an antinomian stance readily spills into the political sphere, especially in a Puritan theocracy. See Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Biblical Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 145–86. 8. I am grateful to Michael Davies for drawing my attention to this work. Davies’s own discussion of antinomianism in Bunyan is subtle and revealing: see his Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30–34. 9. Walwyns Just Defence (1649), in The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 395–96. 10. Walwyn, p. 398. For the importance of “free grace” in Walwyn’s conception of society, see Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 82–83. 11. Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found (1660), in John Bunyan, Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 178–79. See Davies’s work on Clarkson, this volume. 12. John R. Knott, “Bunyan’s Gospel Day: A Reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress,” in Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Casebook, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Macmillan, 1976), 221–43. 13. Abiezer Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Roule (1649), in A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th century, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Junction Books, 1983), 106–7. See Margaret Ezell’s discussion of Coppe in this volume. 14. Coppe, 96. See the discussion of Coppe in Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 56–65. 15. For this distinction see the discussion in Richard Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 67–74; see also Camden in this volume for a discussion of Bunyan’s youthful ambivalence. 16. See the discussion in Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “orthodoxy,” “heterodoxy” and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 179ff. 17. I am following Tim Cooper’s argument on Baxter here: see Fear and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (Ashgate, UK : Aldershot, 2001). 18. For Bunyan and the Ranters see esp. Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People, chapter. 7; and cf. Richard Greaves, John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 41–42. 19. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Gen. Ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), hereafter MW; passage cited is MW, 1:7.

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20. Stuart Sim and David Walker, Bunyan and Authority: The rhetoric of dissent and the legitimation crisis in Seventeenth-Century England (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 100. 21. For these issues relating to Bunyan, Baxter, and Fowler, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. chapter 3. 22. The key quotations are to be found in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 196–99. 23. David Como, Puritans and Heretics: the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Early Stuart England. Unpublished Princeton PhD dissertation, 1999, pp. 21–22, 25, 101. I am grateful to Professor Como for permission to cite his work, as well as illuminating conversation and email. The dissertation forms the basis of his book Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). One should note, however, that the Council of Trent had defined antinomianism as a heresy, in chapter 15 of the sixth session. See the article on “Antinomianism” in the Catholic Encyclopaedia, www.newadvent.org/ cathen/015646.htm. 24. E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 25. Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 115, referring to John Eaton. Wallace’s argument is that much seventeenth-century antinomianism comes from Luther, but also from a renewed emphasis on predestination. For the importance of Eaton, see also Como, Blown by the Spirit, chapter 6. 26. Cooper, Fear and Polemic, 19. 27. Quoted in J. Wayne Baker, “Sola Fide, Sola Gratia: The Battle for Luther in Seventeenth-Century England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 115–33. Luther’s piece was translated in Samuel Rutherford’s Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (1648), one of the main Presbyterian heresiographies of the Interregnum. See also Thomas M. McDonough, The Law and the Gospel in Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 28. David Como and Peter Lake, “Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50, no. 4 (1999): 684–715. 29. For this view of Bunyan’s theology, see Richard Greaves, John Bunyan (Abingdon, UK: Sutton Courtenay, 1969). 30. Tobias Crispe, Christ Alone Exalted (1690), 168. 31. Bunyan, The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded (1659) in MW, 2:90. 32. Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (London, 1648), 31. 33. Dell, The Tryal of Spirits (1653), p. 55. The standard biography of Dell is Eric Walker, William Dell, Master Puritan (Cambridge: Heffers, 1970). On Dell’s educational ideas, see Peter Burke, “William Dell, the Universities and the Rad-

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ical Tradition,” in Reviving the English Revolution, ed. G. Eley and W. Hunt (London: Verso, 1988), and Richard Schlatter, “The Higher Learning in Puritan England,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 23 (1954): 167–87. 34. Richard Greaves notes Bunyan’s closeness to Saltmarsh in his introduction to MW, 2:xxx. 35. Reinhart Hütter, “(Re-)Forming Freedom: Reflections after Veritatis Splendor on Freedom’s Fate in Modernity and Protestantism’s Antinomian Captivity,” Modern Theology 17 (2001): 117–44. 36. The reference is clearly to Jesus breaking the Sabbath in Mark 2.27. 9. achinstein: john bunyan and the politics of remembrance 1. Charles Doe, The Struggler, in John Bunyan, The Works of That Eminent Servant of Christ, Mr. John Bunyan, ed. Charles Doe (London, 1692), Sig. Ttttt, 2. I use the term Dissenter to signify Protestant nonconformists, those refusing participation in the orthodox Church of England. 2. John Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times and Work (London, 1885), 391–93; Mary Trim, “Bunyan’s Burial Place,” The Recorder 6 (2000): 3. 3. Thomas Gutteridge, The Universal Elegy, or a Poem on Bunhill Burial Ground (London, 1745), 13. On Bunhill as a rallying point for Restoration Dissent, see my Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 2. 4. Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter, UK: Paternoster Press, 1971), 128. 5. Committee of the Corporation of London, History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (London, 1902), 54. 6. Anonymous, The Inscriptions upon the Tombs, Gravestones, etc. In the Dissenters Burial Place near Bunhill Fields (1717), 17. 7. London. II. Civic and Municipal, Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (London, 1867), 83. 8. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1987), para. 3. 9. Richard Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 102. 10. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 77–78. 11. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, Gen. Ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), hereafter MW; passage cited is MW 12, 223. 12. John Owen, A Continuation of the Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (1684), 19. 13. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), Canto 6:235–300, 331; and see Norbrook’s introductory discussion of the Cain story, xxxvii–xxviii, as well as his essay, this volume. 14. William Lloyd, A Sermon at the Funeral of Sir Edmund-Berry Godfrey (London, 1678), 1–2.

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15. Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628–1688 (New York: Knopf, 1988), 318. 16. Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 2–4 passim. 17. Ibid., England in the 1690s, 6. 18. Cited in Brown, Bunyan, 390–91. 19. Bunyan, MW 12, xxiv. 20. Brown, Bunyan, 366; Greaves, Glimpses, 570–71; Hill, A Tinker, 319. On Dissenters’ rapprochement with James, see John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 214–28. 21. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, Letter to a Dissenter (London, 1687), 5. 22. Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 184. 23. N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 2, 286: in a letter to Sir John Baber, Baxter sets out his reasons. John Howe’s diligence against the Dispensing Power is detailed in Edmund Calamy, Memoirs of the Life of the Late Revd Mr. John Howe (London, 1724), 134–35, where Howe, despite pressure to do so, refused to sign; see Lacey, Dissent, 180. 24. Michael Mullett, John Bunyan in Context (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 110–11; Greaves, Glimpses, 572. 25. Mullett., 111; Bunyan, Of Antichrist, 407–89. 26. Hill, A Tinker, 322. 27. Mullett, John Bunyan, 112; Hill, A Tinker, 322; Greaves, Glimpses, 571. 28. Ibid., 114; Hill, A Tinker, 319. 29. Greaves, ed., MW 11, xvii. 30. Mullett, John Bunyan, 104. 31. Charles Doe, A Continuation of Mr Bunyan’s Life Beginning where he left off, published in Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 7th ed. (London, 1692) 115. 32. So argues Greaves, MW 11, xviii. 33. Mark Goldie, “John Locke’s Circle and James II,” Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 558. 34. The Labours of John Bunyan (1690), in BL 816.m. 21 (5). 35. Bunyan, Works (1692), A2. 36. See Hill, A Tinker, 318. 37. Arber, ed., Term Catalogues II (1683–1696), (London, 1905), Michaelmas Term. The Barren Fig-Tree (1688) in Wing B 5485. 38. The barren fig-tree: or, the doom & downfall of the fruitless professor . . . To which is added, his exhortation to peace and unity among all that fear God (London, 1688), 63. 39. George Offor, ed., The Works of John Bunyan, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1860), ii, 742. Mullett lists it as “spurious” in his bibliography of John Bunyan, 292. 40. See also Mark Goldie, “James II and the Dissenters’ Revenge: The Commission of Enquiry of 1688,” Historical Research 66, no. 159 (1993): 53–88. 41. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930).

Index

Adam and Eve, 82, 85, 91; Bunyan on, 95–96, 97–98, 113; the Fall, 5, 15, 16–17, 18, 21–23, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 156n42 Aelred of Rivaulx, 81 Agricola, John, 129 Anabaptists, 158n3 antinomianism: and authority, 122–23, 124; and Baxter, 123, 126, 131; and Bunyan, 11, 122, 126–27, 128–29, 130, 131, 132–34, 173n8, 175n34; and Catholicism, 174n23; and Clarkson, 124–25, 126, 133, 169n16; and Crispe, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 133; definitions of, 122–23, 128; and God’s grace, 122, 123–24, 130, 132; and Luther, 129–30, 131, 174n25; among Ranters, 122, 124–25, 126, 169n16; relationship to Puritanism, 128; relationship to sexual libertinism, 122, 124–25, 133; and women, 123, 173n7 Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution, 39 Aristotle: on friendship, 81, 82–83, 91–92; Nicomachean Ethics, 81, 82–83 Aubrey, John, 33, 38 Augustine, St., 65, 77, 82, 127–28 Bagshaw, Edward, 137 Baines, B. J., 172n49 Bale, John, 108 Baptists, 135, 145, 148 Barker, Francis, 153n2

Bashar, N., 172n49 Baxter, Richard, 133, 145, 152, 173n17, 176n23; attitudes toward antinomians, 123, 126, 131; A Breviate of the Doctrine of Justification, 123; Cain and Abel Malignity, 141; on conjugal sexuality, 107 Bayly, Lewis: The Practice of Piety, 90 Beaumont, Agnes, 8, 64, 65, 68, 78, 79–80 Bedford congregation, 109, 146, 172n53; Bunyan and women of, 7–8, 42, 45, 48, 49, 57, 64, 101, 160n.28; and Bunyan’s death, 144; Gifford and Bunyan, 7–8, 45, 48, 49, 57, 61 Bernays, Martha, 16 biblical passages: Acts 1:6, 150; II Chron. 4:4, 161n41; 1 Col. 3:18, 84; 1 Cor. 4:15, 102; 1 Cor. 7, 164n9; 1 Cor. 7:9, 165n15; 1 Cor. 11:3, 84; 1 Cor. 15:40,41, 88; 1 Cor. 15:42,44, 88; Dan. 12:3, 88; Deut. 22:25–27, 115; Ephes. 5, 164n9; Ephes. 5:22, 84; Ephes. 5:23–24, 91; Ephes. 5:25–27, 89; Ephes. 5:25–30, 91; Ephes. 5:29, 87; Gal. 3:13, 93; Gal. 3:28, 98; Gal. 4:19, 102; Gal. 5:14, 127; Gal. 5:18, 127; Gen. 2:18, 82; Gen. 2:23, 89; Gen. 2:24, 166n26; Gen 4:10, 140; Gen 15:29, 139; Gen. 22, 139; Gen. 30, 139; Gen. 39:7–23, 110–11; Heb. 11:4, 141, 149; John 12:25, 87; John 17:24, 93; 1 John 3:2,3, 88; 1 Kings 7:25, 161n41; Lk. 20:27–34, 89; Lk. 20:35, 36, 88, 89; Matt. 13:43, 88;

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biblical passages (continued): Matt. 22:21, 41; 1 Pet. 2:1, 84; 1 Pet. 3, 164n9; 1 Pet. 3:6, 84; Philip. 3:20,21, 88; Prv. 5:5, 112; Prv. 5:8, 74; Prv. 7:6–18, 117; Prv. 22:12, 75; Prv. 22:14, 112; Prv. 23:27, 112, 113; Ps. 9:12, 140; Ps 77:5–12, 138; Ps. 112, 148; Rev. 19:6–9, 93; Rom. 1:24, 27, 108; Rom. 6:1, 130; Rom. 13:13, 108; 1 Timothy 2, 164n9 biblical stories: Adam and Eve, 5, 15, 16–17, 18, 21–23, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 82, 85, 91, 95–96, 97–98, 113, 156n42; Cain and Abel, 94, 140–42, 148–49; the Exodus, 124–25; Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, 110–11, 112, 114; Law of Moses/ Ten Commandments, 122–23, 125, 127–30, 130, 134; Moses and his wife, 96–97 Bingham, C., 172n49 Blackley, James: A Lying Wonder Discovered . . . , 70, 71–73 Blake, William, 128, 136 blasphemy: and Bunyan, 50–53, 65, 75; relationship to sins of the flesh, 75, 77, 106 Bloody Court, The; or The Fatall Tribunal, 18 Bragge, Robert, 135 Bray, Alan, 165n7 Breen, Margaret Soenser, 114 Brown, Norman O., 60, 70; Love’s Body, 16 Brownmiller, S., 172n49 Buchanan, George, 28 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 29 Bunhill Fields, 12, 135–38, 144 Bunyan, John: on Abel and Cain, 94, 140–42; on Adam and Eve, 95–96, 97–98, 113; and antinomianism, 11, 122, 126–27, 128–29, 130, 131, 132–34, 173n8, 175n34; attitude and silence regarding Charles I’s execution, 4, 12, 41–42, 43–44, 59–60, 157n50; attitudes toward Christ, 9, 11, 41, 59, 87–88, 89, 90, 92–95, 96, 98, 99, 126–27, 130, 166n24; attitudes toward God as Father, 61–62; attitudes toward God’s grace, 122, 123, 132–33, 138; attitudes toward human authority, 3, 11, 41–43, 50–51, 109, 127, 129, 131, 133–34, 158nn3,4; attitudes toward individual conscience, 11, 133–34; attitudes toward justification by faith,

126; attitudes toward Law of Moses, 128–29, 130–31; attitudes toward marriage, 84–87, 88, 89–91, 92–97, 98–99, 107, 108–10, 166n25, 170n30; attitudes toward politics, 11–13, 41–42, 43–45, 58–59, 120–22, 133–34, 145–46, 158nn1,4; attitudes toward Quakers, 3, 10, 69–73, 126, 133; attitudes toward Ranters, 3, 10–11, 67, 105, 122, 125–26, 133; attitudes toward remembrance, 137, 138–42; attitudes toward salvation, 4, 73–74, 92–93, 101, 104, 118, 123, 130–31, 132–33, 139, 146; attitudes toward sexuality, 8–11, 64–65, 67–68, 69, 73–75, 78, 85–86, 86, 94–99, 105–7, 108–19, 166n25, 169n23, 170n30; attitudes toward soul and body, 87–89, 96–99; attitudes toward temptation, 64–65, 73–78, 106, 110–12, 113, 117, 118, 125–26; attitudes toward women, 8–11, 63–68, 86, 105–6, 109–17, 118–19, 163n18, 172n49; as blasphemer, 50–53, 65, 75, 77–78; conservatism of, 3, 7, 12–13, 47–48; conversion of, 3, 44, 60, 64, 68, 86, 101, 105, 133, 160n28; Covenant theology of, 123, 127, 130–31; death of, 12, 13, 135–38, 142–52; death of mother, 6, 43, 49, 50, 53, 58, 160n29; death of sister, 49, 50, 53, 58, 160n29; disavowal of the flesh, 8–10, 64–65, 67–68, 73–74, 78, 86, 87–89, 94–99, 105–7, 117, 166n25; as Dissenter/Nonconformist, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 8, 10–12, 44–45, 47–48, 55, 104, 105, 118–19, 120–21, 135–38, 142–43, 147–48; and Glorious Revolution, 3, 11, 12–13, 143, 147, 149–51; and James II, 3, 11, 12, 133–34, 138, 143, 144–48, 149–51; on Jews, 96, 97–98; on Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, 110–11, 112; literary development, 42, 45, 54–55; vs. Luther, 7, 11, 42, 46–48, 54, 61, 62, 129–30; on Marriage Supper of the Lamb, 93–94, 166n24; vs. Marvell, 4, 148; mental illness of, 3, 7, 43, 45, 46–49, 50, 138, 159n19; military service of, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, 41, 42–43, 44–45, 49–50, 52–54, 58–59, 120, 122, 158n4; vs. Milton, 4, 64, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 95, 96, 98, 108, 148, 170n30; and modernity, 4–5, 9; on Moses and his wife, 96–97; vs. Nayler, 3; vs. Pepys, 4;

Index persecution after Restoration, 3, 7, 11, 12, 13, 42, 45, 60, 84, 89, 101–2, 120, 121, 122, 139, 142, 158n4; as preacher, 3, 9, 11, 13, 41, 42, 45, 47–48, 60, 65–66, 69, 78, 79, 104, 129, 158n4; profligacy after military service, 3, 7–8, 44, 45, 49, 54–58, 59, 60, 65, 77–78, 105; and Pryor, 8, 70–73, 74, 78–80; and psychoanalysis, 42, 46–48, 50–52, 58, 59–60, 61; reenlistment in 1647, 43, 53, 59; relationship with Beaumont, 8, 64, 65, 68, 78, 79–80; relationship with Bedford women, 7–8, 42, 45, 48, 49, 57, 64, 101, 160n28; relationship with Dell, 131, 132; relationship with father, 2, 6, 7, 13, 43, 44, 49–51, 53, 55, 58, 61–62, 160n29; relationship with Gifford, 7–8, 45, 48, 49, 57, 61; and Sabbath sports, 56–57, 60; at shopkeeper’s window, 51–52, 55; and witchcraft, 65, 69–73, 74, 78–80 Bunyan, John, works of: The Barren FigTree, 148–49; A Case of Conscience Resolved, 108–9, 163n18; Christian Behaviour, 77, 84–85, 86–87, 92, 106, 108, 109; A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, 127; A Discourse of the Building of the House of God, 133–34; Divine Emblems, 77; The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded, 132; Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis, 139–40; A Few Sighes from Hell, 69, 77; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 3, 6, 7, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51–52, 53, 54–55, 56–57, 59, 61, 65–67, 70, 77–78, 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 92, 101, 102, 105–6, 119, 121, 125–26, 129, 130, 131, 138–39, 146, 148; A Holy Life, 108, 110–11, 113; The Holy War, 42, 53–54, 118, 141, 147, 167n4; The House of the Forest of Lebanon, 69, 74–75; I will Pray with the Spirit, 121, 133; The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 51–52, 65, 67, 69, 73, 74–75, 76, 78, 85, 106, 109, 112, 114, 117, 169n23, 171n39; metaphors in, 52–53, 59, 69; Of Antichrist and His Ruine, 145; “Of Heaven”/One Thing is Needful, 166n24; “Of Moses and his Wife”/A Book for Boys and Girls, 96–97, 99; Of the Law and a Christian, 130; The Pharisee and the Publican, 148; The Pilgrim’s Progress, 3, 65, 69, 73–74, 86, 90,

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93–95, 99, 100–104, 111–17, 121, 125, 126, 128–29, 131, 139, 166n25; The Resurrection of the Dead, 89; Seasonable Counsel, 87–88; sexual wordplay in, 100–119, 171n39; Solomon’s Temple Spiritualiz’d, 146; Some Gospel-Truths Opened, 126; spiritual birthing in, 101–3; The Strait Gait, 69; Tetrachordon, 166n26; women in, 8, 63–65, 68, 69, 73–78 Bunyan, Thomas: relationship with John, 2, 6, 7, 13, 43, 44, 49–51, 53, 55, 58, 61–62, 160n29; remarriage of, 43, 44, 49–50, 58, 160n29; Royalist sympathies of, 2, 13, 50, 53, 60, 159n13, 160n29 Burrough, Edward, 126 Burton, John, 126 Burton, Robert, 108 Butler, Joseph, 37 Cain and Abel, 94, 140–42, 148–49 Calamy, Edmund, 152, 176n23 Calvinism, 38, 40, 101, 105, 107, 123, 131 Carlton, Charles, 43 Catholicism: Council of Trent, 174n23; and James II, 142, 143; sexual renunciation in, 107, 108–9, 170n28 Chandler, Ebenezer, 148 Charles I: and Buckingham, 29; conversation with children before execution, 154n9; Eikon Basilike, 18, 25–26, 28, 31–32, 40, 156n43; and Strafford’s execution, 28 Charles I, execution of: Bunyan’s attitude and silence toward, 4, 12, 41–42, 43–44, 59–60, 157n50; Charles and the axe, 19–20, 21; Charles and the executioner, 21, 25; compared to Christ’s crucifixion, 15, 18, 27, 40; compared to the Fall, 5, 15, 16–17, 18, 21–23, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 156n42; and dissociation of sensibility, 5–6, 15–17, 18, 22, 34, 36–38, 153n2; and Harrington, 32–33, 34, 37; Henry’s description of, 18, 60; Hume on, 1, 2, 3, 5; as killing of primal father, 16, 17, 33; and Marvell, 5, 18, 19–24, 30–31, 32, 33–34, 38–40; and Milton, 5, 18, 24–31, 32, 33–34, 37–38, 39–40; vs. murder of Duncan in Macbeth, 27–28; and psychoanalysis, 5–6, 16, 17, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33, 34–35, 37–38; Royalist attitudes

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Charles I, execution of (continued): toward, 15–16, 18–19, 30, 33, 37, 38, 40, 156n42; trauma created by, 4–6, 15, 16–17, 31–32, 33–34, 36–40; and Winstanley, 23–24, 32 Charles II: and Clarendon, 30, 31; Marvell on, 30–31; policies regarding religion, 136, 147, 151; relationship with Henry, 18. See also Restoration Cheever, George B., 160n19 Church of England, 1, 38, 49, 127, 146–47; Prayer Book, 121, 133, 135 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: De amicitia, 81, 91–92 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of: on execution of Charles I, 18, 38; on Fairfax, 23; resignation of, 30, 31 Clarkson, Lawrence, 80, 105; and antinomianism, 124–25, 126, 133, 169n16; The Lost Sheep Found, 67, 124–25, 126, 169n16 Cleveland, John: on execution of Charles I, 18 Cokayne, George, 146, 149 Commonwealth period: intolerance during, 1–2; Marvell on, 19, 20, 22–23, 155n20; Puritan codes during, 55–56, 57 Como, David, 128, 130, 174n23 Condren, Conal, 121 Continuation of Mr Bunyan’s Life beginning where he left off, 146–47 Cooper, Tim, 173n17 Coppe, Abiezer: A Second Fiery Flying Roule, 68–69, 78, 125 Crashaw, Richard, 38 Crawford, Patricia, 118, 172n49 Crispe, Tobias, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 133; Christ Alone Exalted, 131 Cromwell, Oliver, 20, 33, 55–56, 57, 155n24, 162n57 Curll, Edmund, 135 Davies, K. M., 170n26 Davies, Michael, 160n19, 173n8 Defoe, Daniel, 136; Conjugal Lewdness, 108 Dell, William, 123, 127, 131–32, 133; Doctrine of Baptisms, 132 de Man, Paul, 34 Dent, Arthur: The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven, 90

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 46, 160n21 Dissenters: and Bunhill Fields, 12, 135–38, 144; Bunyan as Dissenter, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 8, 10–12, 44–45, 47–48, 55, 104, 105, 118–19, 120–21, 135–38, 142–43, 147–48; defined, 175n1; and James II, 142–43, 144–48, 149–52, 176n23; remembrance of persecution among, 136–37, 139–42, 143, 151–52 dissociation of sensibility: Eliot on, 5–6, 14–17, 34, 36–38, 40, 153n2; and execution of Charles I, 5–6, 15–17, 18, 22, 34, 36–38, 153n2; and the Fall, 15; Kermode on, 14–15, 34; and modernity, 14–15, 34–35; vs. unified sensibility, 14–15 divine right of kings, 6, 11, 39, 134; Filmer on, 15–16, 17–18, 40 Doe, Charles, 12, 146–47 Donne, John, 17; “A Valediction: forbidding mourning,” 20, 21 Donno, Elizabeth Story, 155n20 Downing, George, 58 Dryden, John, 37; Annus Mirabilis, 156n42; “Astrea Redux,” 156n42; and dissociation of sensibility, 14; The Hind and the Panther, 143; “To His Sacred Majesty,” 156n42; “To My Honour’d Friend, Dr. Charleton,” 156n42 Dutch War of 1665–67, 20, 30 Dzelzainis, Martin, 27 Eaton, John, 174n25 Eliot, T. S.: on dissociation of sensibility, 5–6, 14–17, 34, 36–38, 40, 153n2; on Filmer, 15–16; For Lancelot Andrews, 15–16; on Hamlet, 17; “The Metaphysical Poets,” 14, 17; royalist politics of, 15–16, 34, 40 Eliza’s Babes, 101 Empson, William, 21–22 English Civil War, 12–13, 128, 162n57; Bunyan’s military service, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, 41, 42–43, 44–45, 49–50, 52–54, 58–59, 120, 122, 158n4; Hume on, 1–2, 3. See also Charles I, execution of Erikson, Erik: Young Man Luther, 7, 42, 46–48, 62 Eston, John, 146

Index Exhortation to Peace and Unity, An, 149–51 Exodus, the, 124–25 Fairfax, Thomas, 40; “On the Fatal Day,” 23, 33 faith: justification by, 123, 124, 126, 128, 130 Fall, the: and dissociation of sensibility, 15; execution of Charles I compared to, 5, 15, 16–17, 21–23, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 156n42 familism, 124, 126, 133 Fenichel, Otto, 58 Filmer, Sir Robert: on divine right of kings, 15–16, 17–18, 40; Patriarcha, 15–16, 17–18, 38–39, 60 Ford, John: Perkin Warbeck, 17 Foucault, Michel, 37, 118, 132 Fowler, Edward, 126, 127, 128 Foxe, John, 40 Freud, Anna: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 50–51, 161n33; on identification with aggressor, 50–51, 161n33 Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 161n33; on deferred action, 5, 34, 157nn54,57; “Fragment on a Case of Hysteria,” 60; on Paradise Lost, 16; on primal horde/patricide, 16–17, 60; Project for a Scientific Psychology, 157n54; on Puritans and Cromwell, 16; on repression, 157n54; Totem and Taboo, 16–17, 36; on trauma, 157n54. See also psychoanalysis friendship: Aristotle on, 81, 82–83, 91–92; Cicero on, 81, 91–92; equality and similarity in, 83, 91–92; as homoerotic/homosocial, 9, 82–83, 98–99, 165n7; Plato on, 91–92, 99; Thomas Aquinas on, 81 Gataker, Thomas, 107 Geree, Stephen, 123 Gifford, John, 7–8, 45, 48, 49, 57, 61 Glorious Revolution: and Bunyan, 3, 11, 12–13, 143, 147, 149–51; William of Orange, 17–18, 143, 148, 149–51. See also James II God: grace of, 78, 122, 123–24, 127–28, 130, 132, 133, 138; judgment of, 55, 139, 144;

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providence of, 55; remembrance by, 138, 139–42; remembrance of, 138–39 Godfrey, Sir Edmundbury, 141 Goldberg, Jonathan, 165n7 Goldie, Mark, 148 Gordis, Lisa M., 173n7 Gouge, William: Of Domesticall Duties, 107, 108, 170nn28, 30 Graham, Elspeth, 64, 65 Greaves, Richard L.: on Bunyan and Saltmarsh, 175n34; on Bunyan’s attitudes toward politics, 41, 120, 158n4; on Bunyan’s mental illness, 7, 43, 46, 138, 160n21; on Bunyan’s military service, 43, 44, 45; Glimpses of Glory, 7, 43, 45, 46, 145, 146, 151, 160nn21,28, 173n15; “The Spirit and the Sword,” 43, 158n4 Haller, Malleville, “The Puritan Art of Love,” 83–84, 85, 90, 107 Haller, William: “Hail Wedded Love,” 81; “The Puritan Art of Love,” 83–84, 85, 90, 107 Halperin, David M., 165n7 Hammond, Paul, 20, 155 Harrington, James: Oceana, 32–33, 34, 37, 38 Harrison, G. B., 69, 70 Hawkes, William, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 37 Heller, Hugo, 16 Henry, Philip: on execution of Charles I, 18, 60 Henry IV (France), 30 Henry VII, 33 Hill, Christopher, 7, 70, 159n13, 160n29; on Bunyan’s attitudes toward politics, 120, 146; on Bunyan’s attitudes toward women, 64, 105; on Bunyan’s military service, 41, 44, 45, 56, 57; The English Revolution of 1640, 60–61; A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, 64 homoeroticism: in friendship between males, 9, 99, 165n7; and Marvell, 20, 30, 39, 155n24 homosocial friendship, 82–83, 165n7 Howe, John, 145, 176n23 Hulme, T. E., 14

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Index

Hume, David: on England after Charles I’s execution, 1–2, 3, 5; on Nayler, 1–2 Hus, Jan, 131 Hutchinson, Anne, 173n7 Hutchinson, Lucy, 141 Independents, 135, 136 individualism, 1, 2, 3, 9, 11 International John Bunyan Society: Third Triennial Conference, 4 intertextuality, 35 intolerance, 1–2, 4 Irwin, John, 103 James, William: on Bunyan, 46 James I, 29, 33; Basilikon Doron, 32 James II: and Bunyan, 3, 11, 12, 133–34, 138, 143, 144–48, 149–51; and Catholicism, 142, 143; Declaration of Indulgence, 11, 142, 143, 144, 147; policies regarding religion, 11, 12, 142–43, 144–47, 176n23; relationship with Henry, 18; Test and Penal Acts removed by, 144–45, 146 Jesus Christ, 125, 131; Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 9, 11, 41, 59, 87–88, 89, 90, 92–95, 96, 98, 99, 126–27, 130, 166n24; Charles I compared to, 15, 18, 27, 40; and the Church, 91–95, 96–97; as Incarnation, 126; kingdom of, 41, 150; and the Law of Moses, 134; and Peter, 132 Jones, Ernest, 17 Jonson, Ben: “Apologetic Dialogue” to Poetaster, 101 Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, 110–11, 112, 114 Kastan, David Scott, 17 Keeble, N. H., 64, 65, 73, 113, 168n11 Kermode, Frank, on dissociation of sensibility, 14–15, 34 Kierkegaard, Søren, 47 Kiffen, William, 145 Klein, Melanie: on projective identification, 156n39; on reparation, 31–32, 156n45 Knott, John, 125 Lake, Peter, 130 Laplanche, Jean, 157n54

Laurence, Anne, 44–45, 162n57 Law of Moses, 122–23, 125, 127–30, 130, 134 Lead, Jane, 136 Leites, Edmund: The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, 85–86, 107 Levellers, 23, 38, 123–24 Livy, 19, 21, 155n20 Lloyd, William, 141 Lloyd-Jones, Martyn, 130 Locke, John: on Filmer, 15, 16, 17–18; Two Treatises of Government, 15, 16, 17–18 Lukacher, Ned, 35, 157n56 Luke, Sir Samuel, 59 Luther, Martin, 52; and antinomianism, 129–30, 131, 174n25; vs. Bunyan, 7, 11, 42, 46–48, 54, 61, 62, 129–30; Commentary on Galatians, 47, 130; Erikson on, 7, 42, 46–48, 62; on the Law of Moses, 129–30 Luxon, Thomas, 73–74 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 159n19 Manchester, Henry Montagu, Earl of, 162n57 marriage: Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 84–87, 88, 89–91, 92–97, 98–99, 107, 108–10, 166n25, 170n30; as figure for relationship between Christ and Church, 91–92; Milton on, 84, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 95, 98, 108, 165n15, 170n30; St. Paul on, 84, 91–92, 95, 108, 165nn9,15; Puritan attitudes toward, 81, 82, 83–85, 90; sexuality in, 83–85, 107–10, 170n28, 171n37 Marvell, Andrew: vs. Bunyan, 4, 148; on Charles II, 30–31; on the Commonwealth, 19, 20, 22–23, 155n20; and execution of Charles I, 5, 18, 19–24, 30–31, 32, 33–34, 38–40; and homoeroticism, 20, 30, 39, 155n24; letter to the Corporation of Hull, 22–23; vs. Milton, 24, 28–29, 30–31 Marvell, Andrew, works of: “Daphnis and Chloe,” 20–21; “Horatian Ode,” 14, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 32, 39, 155n24; Last Instructions to a Painter, 20, 30–31, 32, 39; Mower poems, 20, 21–22; “The Unfortunate Lover,” 20, 155n24; Upon Appleton House, 22–23, 28–29, 32, 40

Index Milton, John: blindness of, 33, 37–38; vs. Bunyan, 4, 64, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 95, 96, 98, 108, 148, 170n30; and dissociation of sensibility, 14; and execution of Charles I, 5, 18, 24–31, 32, 33–34, 37–38, 39–40; on marriage, 84, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 95, 98, 108, 165n15, 170n30; vs. Marvell, 24, 28–29, 30–31; Presbyterians attacked by, 24, 27–28, 39; after Restoration, 29; and Shakespeare, 25–28, 31, 32, 39; vs. Winstanley, 24 Milton, John, works of: Comus, 64; Eikonoklastes, 18, 25–26, 28–30, 31, 32; Paradise Lost, 16, 30, 84, 91, 108, 135, 141; Paradise Regained, 30, 135; Samson Agonistes, 135; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 24–25, 27–28 modernity: and Bunyan, 4–5, 9; de Man on, 34; and dissociation of sensibility, 14–15, 34–35; divided self in, 6, 15 Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of, 145–46 Montaigne, Michel de, 91–92 Moore, Marianne, 43 Moretti, Franco, 17 Morgan, Edmund, 107 Morrice, Roger, 145 Mullett, Michael, 158n3 Nayler, James, 1–2, 3, 53 Newey, Vincent, 117 Newman, Karen, 166n30 Nichols, William, 145 Norbrook, David, 28, 32 Norton, Thomas: Gorboduc, 17 Norwood, Richard, 105, 169n16 Offor, George, 149 original sin, 128 Owen, John, 126, 136, 141 Owens, W. R., 45 Palmer, Samuel: Nonconformists’ Memorials, 152 Papworth, E. C., 135 Partridge, E., 168n13 Paster, Gail Kern, 157n47 Pateman, Carole, 164n3 patriarchy, 6, 7, 9, 15–16, 164n3 Paul, St.: on Christ, 98, 99, 102; conversion of, 132; on grace of God, 130; on justi-

183

fication by faith, 126; on the Law of Moses, 127–28; on love of neighbor, 127; on marriage, 84, 91–92, 95, 108, 165nn9,15; on sexuality, 108, 109; on spiritual birthing, 102 Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, 129 Penn, William, 145 Pepys, Samuel, 4 Perkin Warbeck, 17 Petrarch, 14, 35 Philadelphians, 136 Philips, Mary. See Pryor, Margaret Phillips, Adam, 60–61; Promises, Promises, 41 Plato: on friendship, 91–92, 99 Pontius Pilate, 27 Pooley, Roger, 105 postmodernism, 34 Potiphar’s wife, 12, 110–11 Pound, Ezra, 14 Powell, Vavasor, 137 Prayer Book, 121, 133, 135 Presbyterians, 24, 27–28, 38, 39, 135 Pryor, Margaret, 8, 70–73, 74, 78–80 psychoanalysis: and Bunyan, 42, 46–48, 50–52, 58, 59–60, 61; condensation, 42; countercathexis, 58; deferred action, 5, 34, 157nn54,56; displacement of aggression, 42, 50–52; and execution of Charles I, 5–6, 16, 17, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33, 34–35, 37–38; identification with aggressor, 50–52, 59, 161n33; identity crisis, 46–48; indirection, 42; obsessive-compulsive disorder, 52; Oedipus complex, 5, 6, 13, 29, 30, 58, 61; primal horde/patricide, 5, 16–17, 33, 38, 60; primal scene, 35; projective identification, 28–29, 156n39; reparation, 31–32, 156n45; repression, 23, 28, 33, 37–38, 157n54; superego, 50 Puritans: attitudes toward marriage, 81, 82, 83–85, 90; codes during Commonwealth, 55–56, 57; and conjugal sexuality, 83–85, 107, 170n26 Quakers, 86, 132, 148; Book of Sufferings, 152; Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 3, 10, 69–70, 126, 133; Nayler, 1–2, 3, 53; Penn, 145

184

Index

Ranters, 86; antinomianism among, 122, 124–25, 126, 169n16; Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 3, 10–11, 67, 105, 122, 125–26 Reformation, 38, 129, 130–31; and marriage, 81, 82, 84. See also Luther, Martin remembrance: of Bunyan, 12, 135–36, 144, 148–49; of God, 138–39; by God, 138, 139–42; relationship to politics, 12, 136–37, 139–42, 143, 144, 151–52 Renaissance, the, 35, 81, 82, 101 Restoration, 4, 17, 127, 131, 142, 156n42; Act of Uniformity, 136; Bedford congregation after, 59; Bunyan’s persecution after, 3, 7, 11, 12, 13, 42, 45, 60, 84, 89, 101–2, 120, 121, 122, 139, 142, 158n4; comedies during, 105, 117; and Milton, 29. See also Charles II Robinson, John, 149 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 105 Rogers, Daniel, 107 Root and Branch petition, 24, 121 Ross, Aileen, 113 Royalists: attitudes toward execution of Charles I, 15–16, 18–19, 30, 33, 37, 38, 40, 156n42; Thomas Bunyan’s Royalist sympathies, 2, 13, 50, 53, 60, 159n13, 160n29; Eliot’s royalist politics, 15–16, 34 Rubinstein, F., 171n38 Rutherford, Samuel, 131 Sackville, Thomas: Gorboduc, 17 Saltmarsh, John, 123, 127, 131, 175n34; Sparkles of Glory, 132, 133 Sancroft, William, 143 self, the: as divided, 6, 15, 95; and feminism, 164n3; as narcissistic, 9, 83, 99; relationship to Christ, 98; relationship to friendship, 81–83, 91–92; relationship to marriage, 81–82, 83–84, 98–99 September 11th attacks, 4 sexuality: Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 8–11, 64–65, 67–68, 69, 73–75, 78, 85–86, 86, 94–99, 105–7, 108–19, 166n25, 169n23, 170n30; in marriage, 107–10, 170n28, 171n37; St. Paul on, 108, 109; Puritan attitudes toward, 83–85, 107, 170n26 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 17; Julius Caesar, 25–27, 32, 157n47; Macbeth,

27–28, 32, 39, 157n47; and Milton, 25–28, 31, 32, 39; Othello, 32; Richard II, 17, 18, 40, 154n16; Richard III, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30–31; sexual wordplay in, 115, 168n13, 171n.38; Twelfth Night, 168n13 Sharrock, Roger, 70, 73, 103, 104, 168n11 Sidney, Sir Philip: The Old Arcadia, 101, 167n3 Sim, Stuart, 127 Simpson, Sydrach, 132 Smith, Charles, 83 Smith, Francis “Elephant,” 136 Song of Songs, 125 Spargo, Tamsin, 64–65, 118, 148, 163n18 Spenser, Edmund, 83 Srenock, Laurence: Gods Sword Drawn against Drunkards and Swearers . . . , 75–76 Stennett, Joseph, 145 Stillingfleet, Edward: Irenicum, 150 Stone, L., 170n26, 171n37 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, 28 Strange & Terrible News from Cambridge . . . , 70–71, 72 Strudwick, John, 12, 135 Swan, Jim, 22 Swift, Jonathan, 37 Talon, Henri, 61, 70 Ten Commandments, 122–23, 125, 127–28 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 17 Teskey, Gordon, 95 Test and Penal Acts, 144–45 Thickstun, Margaret, 114, 116 Thomas Aquinas: on friendship, 81 Thompson, E. P.: Witness against the Beast, 128 Timoleon, 33 Tindall, William York, 63, 65, 68, 70, 80 Todd, M., 170n26 Tomalin, Claire, 56 Trosse, George, 105, 169n16 tyrannicide, 5–6, 33, 39, 41 Venning, Ralph: The Dead Yet Speaking, 141 Verdun, K., 170n26 Walker, David, 127 Wallace, Dewey D., 129, 174n25

Index Waller, Edmund: “On St. James Park as Lately Improved by His Majesty,” 156n42 Walwyn, William, 123–24 Watts, Isaac, 136 Weaver-Zercher, David L., 158n3 Weber, Max: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 152 Wesley, Susannah, 136 Wheeler, Elizabeth Skerpan, 40 Whigs, 2, 147; and policies of James II, 142–43, 145; support for William of Orange among, 12–13, 17–18, 146, 148, 151 Whiston, William: Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 141 Whitehead, George: A Lying Wonder Discovered . . . , 70, 71–73 Willbern, David, 157n47 Willcocks, M. P.: Bunyan Calling, 65 William of Orange, 17–18, 143, 148, 149–51 Williams, Gordon, 103–4, 168n10, 170n32, 171n39

185

Wilson, John, 148 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, 70, 73 Winstanley, Gerrard: and execution of Charles I, 23–24, 32; A New-Yeers Gift, 23–24, 32 women: and antinomianism, 123, 173n7; Bunyan’s attitudes toward, 8–11, 63–68, 86, 105–6, 109–17, 118–19, 163n18, 172n49; Bunyan’s relationship with Bedford women, 7–8, 42, 45, 48, 49, 57, 64, 101, 160n28; as preachers, 63, 64; relationships with male preachers, 67, 68, 73, 74, 76, 78–80 Woodward, Thomas, 145 Worden, Blair, 22, 153n2 Wycliffe, John, 131 Yeats, William Butler, 14–15 Younge, R., 51 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 98–99 Ziˇ