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Preacher, Soldier, Rebel: Who was the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most influential books ever written? John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most significant works of English literature. Translated into more than 200 languages, there was a time when almost every household in Britain was more likely to have a copy than the Bible. This classic biography of Bunyan by one of the leading historians of the 17th century offers a reassessment of the man in the context of his times. He is usually studied and remembered as the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress and other Christian literature, but his own consideration of himself would most probably have been as a preacher first and foremost—a man whose nonconformist religion led him into conflict with the Quakers and into years of imprisonment. It was in the service of this religion that his writings were produced, many of them during the nearly twelve years spent in Bedford jail between 1660 and 1672. An extraordinary insight into John Bunyan, one of the towering figures of English literature, this remains the definitive biography.

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What lessons can we learn from the defeat of the seventeenth century English revolution? The failure of the English Revolution in 1660 provoked a variety of responses among radical clergy, intellectuals and writers, as they struggled to accept and account for their defeat in the light of divine providence. Christopher Hill’s close analysis of the writings of the Levellers and Diggers, of Fox and other important early Quakers suggests that the revolutionary beliefs and savage social judgments and disillusionments that Milton expressed in his writings at the time were shared by many of his contemporaries. Hill makes a provocative case, as well, that Milton’s three great poems—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—came directly out of his painful reassessment of man and his society, and of society’s relation to moral order.

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In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime’s study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and religious thinker. The result is a Milton very different from most popular representations: instead of a gloomy, sexless “Puritan”, we have a dashingly thinker, branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine.

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