Peacemaking in the Renaissance

Abstract

Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 393, hb. £55, ISBN: 0199242402Michael Davies' fine study demonstrates the vigour of the new Bunyan scholarship emerging from the ferment of recent decades. Arguing that Bunyan has been misread as a writer who, with his readers, was motivated by anxiety over a hyper-Calvinist doctrine of double predestintation, Davies insists that, instead, he should be seen as a moderate English Calvinist who offers a theology 'inherently accommodating, comforting, and reassuring' (pp. 42-3).In his invaluable first chapter, 'Bunyan's Theology of Grace', Davies illustrates his point admirably through drawing on many of Bunyan's tracts and polemical works. In the subsequent chapters, he offers readings of Grace Abounding (Chapter 3), The Pilgrim's Progress (Chapters 4 and 5), and what he terms 'sequels' to The Pilgrim's Progress - Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The Holy War, and The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II (Chapter 6). While the work is undoubtedly strongest in its first three chapters, becoming less precise in what sometimes seem to be rather superficial readings of Bunyan's later works, these three chapters alone would make the book a necessary part of any library's holdings on Bunyan.At his best, Davies shows a wide reach in Bunyan and ancillary seventeenthcentury writers and a satisfyingly close reading of specific Bunyan texts. Particularly able is his reading of Bunyan's Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, where he argues that the problematic diagram is less a map showing a general view of 'the way things are' than a periplus, a map 'that projects the stages of a journey as they succeed each other for the traveler ... as opposed to a map that gives an image ... [of] the terrain' (p. 69). Davies makes an original and interesting contribution to the discussion of Bunyan's 'Apology' to The Pilgrim's Progress by denying that Bunyan's preoccupation in the 'Apology' is with making his literary method acceptable to the puritan reader, arguing rather that Bunyan is engaging a discussion about acceptable modes of theological discourse in the context of the new Anglican moralism.Davies places his study firmly in the context of seminal twentieth-century Bunyan and Puritan scholars, with the surprising exception of any serious engagement with Wolfgang Iser, despite Iser's anxiety-driven implied reader of The Pilgrim's Progress having been an extremely influential construct. Davies mounts a 'stout and valiant' defence against what he deems to be misreadings of Bunyan's texts. Not surprisingly, secularizing readings such as those offered by Perry Miller (p. 33, n. 26), Christopher Hill (p. 183), and Roger Sharrock (pp. 146, 179, 323) get knocked about; but Davies also takes exception to what he sees as oversights or misreadings in a range of readings which are respectful of Bunyan's theology, including readings by U. Milo Kaufmann (p. 125), John R. Knott, Jr. (pp. 243-5), and the meticulous Richard Greaves (p. 320, n. 33). This thorough engagement with the critical discussions of Bunyan make Davies' notes and bibliography an important part of the contribution of this work to a fuller reading of Bunyan.While calling for a reading of Bunyan's works informed by a theology which can be deduced from Bunyan's own works rather than imposed upon it, Davies also sees what he calls 'an ur-post-modernism' in the complex metafictional narrative stance Bunyan takes in his major works. …