Bunyan\u27s Progress and Glanvill\u27s Stand: Narration and Stasis In Later Seventeenth-Century English Religious Discourse

This paper investigates the nature of religious language in later seventeenth century England, and particularly the radically different religious positions of Anglican bishop Joseph Glanvill(1636-1680) and the dissenting preacher John Bunyan(1628-1688). Whereas Glanvill leans toward static confession and thus the first three stages of stasis(conjecture, definition, and quality), Bunyan virtually begins his Pilgrim\u27s Progress at procedure. Glanvill, an establishment figure, is concerned with staffing the restored Anglican church and investigating God\u27s creation in terms of the new science, while Bunyan, a persecuted nonconformist, is concerned with preaching otherwordly truths in his sermons and allegories. Not only do their uses of narrative differ but also their sense of where the staseis were located in the religious discussions of their day

The Ghost of Rhetoric: Milton\u27s Logic and the Renaissance Trivium

Although English Renaissance poet John Milton (1608-1674) wrote both a grammar and a logic, he did not write a rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric made up the trivium, the verbal portion of the seven liberal arts, the ideal curriculum since antiquity. Milton\u27s failure to write a rhetoric is partly due to the popularity of the disciplinary simplifications of Peter Ramus, which reduced rhetoric at the time to little more than a finding list of tropes and figures, and also partly due to Milton\u27s own temperament. Milton scholars are now beginning to understand how much the ideas expressed in Milton\u27s Logic can help interpret his other works, such as Paradise Lost