Lectures In Intellectual History

First published in two parts in 1678 and 1683, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was to become the most popular religious work in English after the King James Bible. In this lecture, Isabel Rivers explores its fortunes in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century: how it was made into a polemical text in the battles between Arminians and Calvinists; how it was used for pastoral purposes, both in print and in society meetings; and how it became a means of writing the history of dissent and evangelicalism.