Search

The Bible is John Bunyan’s primary text, but the range of his reading, before and after his conversion experience, reveals some of the sources of his imaginative works as well as his pastoral and theological concerns. This chapter discusses, in turn, some of the key books in his intellectual and spiritual formation, including popular ballads, newsbooks, and romances; best-selling religious works by Lewis Bayly and Arthur Dent; Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians; the terrifying story of the apostate Francis Spira; a treatise by Isaac Ambrose in which (it is claimed) he wrote marginal annotations; and John Foxe’s great ecclesiastical history, Acts and Monuments, a copy of which Bunyan had with him in prison, and to which he refers often in his writings.

Clog dancing in Shakespeare? Where else but in a Northern Broadsides production? I don't know if it was a deliberate riposte to the hallucinogens and high camp of the Baz Luhrmann film version of t...

(1988). Spiritual Experience and Spiritual Autobiography: Some Contexts for Grace Abounding. Baptist Quarterly: Vol. 32, No. 8, pp. 393-402.