Metamorphoses of Spiritual Autobiography

Abstract

conversion narratives produced in droves by seventeenthcentury faithful. Professor Tindall argues that the details of Bunyan's conversion could be supplied by a diligent anthologist from autobiographies of other preachers.' There was even a recipe for spiritual autobiography, and a defense of genre published in 1656 by John Beadle, entitled The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian. Originality was surely not Bunyan's goal, nor could it be, because Puritan doctrine fixed structure and content of all such accounts.2 Even striking title turns out be a formulaic epithet; many Puritans, including Cromwell, envisioned themselves as chief of sinners. Like many of his brethren, then, Bunyan depicts a plain man's growth in grace; his story contains sections corresponding standard stages of regeneration: conviction of sin, vocation, justification, sanctification, and glorification. Since spiritual autobiographers imagine themselves re-enacting an age-old passion, dying life that they might live in God, it is not surprising, but altogether appropriate, that Bunyan conforms generally a stock pattern of conversion. Ultimately all these lives are modelled upon great patterns of Christian sainthood, Christ and Paul. Bunyan's reliance on both literary and personal models, which he describes as his great longing to see some ancient Godly