The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiographies in Early Modern England by D. Bruce Hindmarsh (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 139 Camden considers Michael Davies's essay, "Bunyan's Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John Bunyan;' to be "an interpretive tour de force" (10). My reaction to my friend's paper is frankly more skeptical. Very different in tone from his 2002 book, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan, Davies here makes phallic puns of many of Bunyan's turns of phrase in his introduction to The Pilgrims Progress, such as, "When at the first I took my pen in hand;' and, "Still as I pull'd, it came ..., until it came at last to be / For length and breadth the bigness which you see:' Davies admits that any word play on Bunyan's part would be pastoral rather than titillating in intent, and yet he cannot give hardy evidence that seventeenth-century Puritan readers would have taken Bunyan's words in this "bawdy" way, and in some instances, such as his association of Bunyan's use of the word "ditch" with the female pubis, Davies is so committed to maintaining his theory that he overlooks that "ditch" would have been the translation Bunyan knew of the Hebrew word for afterlife, "Sheol," and was not a euphemism for female anatomy. The final two essays, Pooley's "Bunyan and the Antinomians" and Sharon Achinstein's "John Bunyan and the Politics of Remembrance;' are among the most interesting and least controversial of the book. Pooley explains the opposition between salvific and moral antinomianism in Bunyan's thought, and Achinstein wonders why nonconformists did not make more of a fuss over Bunyan's death in 1688, since funerals of ministers after the Restoration were often occasions for dissenters to render mutual encouragement. But again here, the author disclaims, "This essay'sconclusion I admit is a little speculative" (151). This is an appropriate thing to say on the final page of the book, for it in fact echoes so much of the tenuousness that comes before it. I am not at all dismissive of the interest that Trauma and Transformation will have for Bunyan scholars, though I suspect that not all its contributors will think that I have reported on it in a manner that fully appreciates the various theoretical perspectives to which they are committed. YetI think it is uncontrovertibly fair simply to say that between the options of reading Bunyan as a biblicist who was unfamiliar with critical methods, or to subject Bunyan to behavioral and literary models which mayor may not produce new and solid conclusions about his "political progress;' the editor and the publisher have for better or worse foresworn a balanced approach and made their very clear preference for the latter. Galen K. Johnson John Brown University The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: SpiritualAutobiographies in EarlyModern England. ByD. Bruce Hindmarsh. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN978-0-19-923671-8. Pp. x + 371. $49.95. The spiritual autobiography is a narrative form with a long history in Western Christianity. Beginning with Paul's Damascus Road experience, holy men and 140 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE women have sought to capture in narrative their experience with a living God. But what do we make of the sudden proliferation of such accounts in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the American colonies in the eighteenth century? This is the question D. Bruce Hindmarsh ponders in The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. This amazingly comprehensive text examines the personal and collective practices of clergy and laity as they seek what Professor Hindmarsh calls "the great desideratum of human life ... the recovery of right relationship with God" (7). He examines a number of separate but related movements toward religious revival in England, Scotland, and abroad beginning in the 1730s and extending into the 1800s. Seamlessly integrating theological history and literary criticism, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative documents the "perfect storm" that produced an unprecedented wave of confessional literature at the threshold of modernity. Hindmarsh usefully lays the groundwork in his introduction by reviewing received wisdom on the nature of narrative, identity, conversion and other concepts that inform his analysis. He also provides a briefhistory of spiritual autobiography, from the Confessions...