Book Review: The Key in the Window: Marginal Notes in Bunyan's Narratives

Abstract

By Maxine Hancock. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2000. ISBN 1-57383-115-8. Pp. 190. $34.95. Do the marginal notations of John Bunyan's allegories deserve, or even provide adequate subject material for, a book-length scholarly treatment? Maxine Hancock has made it her task to prove that Bunyan's marginalia are not merely marginal but integral to his authorial purpose. Hancock is very aware that, in making Bunyan's own intentions the primary focus of her investigation, she is distancing herself from a strictly reader-response approach as advocated by one of the seminal names in seventeenth-century literary studies, Stanley Fish. Hancock acknowledges Fish's oft-cited claim in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972) that Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress demonstrates no progression at all but instead shows the protagonist Christian again and again confronting the same inner demon of despair. Hence, writes Fish, the reader discerns a cyclical pattern that largely undermines any linear progress that to convey. There are certainly theological ways by which to answer Fish. For example, in `Be Not Extream': The Limits of Theory in Reading John Bunyan (Christianity and Literature 49 [2000]: 447-64), I suggest that Christian's constant struggles reflect Bunyan's belief that salvation is by grace no less at the end of one's pilgrimage than at its beginning. Hancock clarifies how the reader cannot fully respond to without accounting his marginal supplements, and she demonstrates that such an accounting restricts how his texts should be interpreted. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Spiritual Theology at her publishing institution, Regent College, and also a popular Christian speaker in her native Canada, Hancock has written several books on child-rearing and household management. In the Acknowledgements of The Key in the Window: Marginal Notes in Bunyan's Narratives, she mentions without elaboration her return to and academic inquiry from these mass-market publications (xi). I suspect that her approach to owes much to her training in biblical languages, which led to her coauthoring of Readings in Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Textbook (1993). The predominant exegetical approach in biblical studies today is the attempted reconstruction of what the original would have heard and understood via careful attention to the meaning of words in their social and political environment, and this is Hancock's own approach to Bunyan. She emphasizes authorial intention and Bunyan's original, biblically literate audience. Hancock also points to the studies of literary historians Robert Darnton and Margaret Spufford as precedents applying the methodology of intended audience to literature. Again, she is conscientious in doing this, the introductory chapter of her work is largely an apology what she calls a re-reading of Bunyan's allegories. New Criticism, of course, finds the meaning of texts in a of the words on the page without deference to historical context or authorial intention, but Hancock's approach sees a close reading of Bunyan's marginal notes precisely as the intention of the author. Her study thus argues that for Bunyan, and the readers whom he wrote, the references in the margins were highly important elements in constant interplay with the narrative (17). This is a bold claim to stake on brief notations that are often no longer even printed in modern editions of Bunyan's works. Hancock makes good on her assertion, however, by tracing the theological significance of marginalia and his century and then by demonstrating how Bunyan's texts and side texts knit together into a tightly integrated presentation of meaning. Hancock cites studies of seventeenth-century marginalia in recent articles by Lawrence Lipking, Valentine Cunningham, and William Slights, along with Evelyn B. …