To what extent might John Bunyan be viewed as an author of lasting value? What kind of position does he occupy in the established English canon? From one point of view he is a writer of his own age, part of whose authorial task was to provide for a mode of Nonconformist churchmanship adapted to the needs of post-Restoration English society and dealing with practical, if relatively ephemeral, issues such as believers' baptism as a condition of church membership.

Bunyan's other function as an author focused heavily on polemical and didactic works which expressed his impeccably Calvinist orthodoxy. As a disputant, in works such as Some Gospel-truths opened (1656) and A vindication of the book called, Some Gospel truths opened (1657), Bunyan set out to defend the high doctrines of the Reformation, centring upon justification by faith alone, without the works of the law, through the merits of Christ crucified, against all manner of unorthodox revisionists, including Quakers. Then, as an instructor in faith, Bunyan extended his homiletic activity, already well-established before the Restoration, into published pedagogic authorship designed for the needs of his religious community, in its and his day. So, for example in The doctrine of the law and grace unfolded (1659), he produced a technically intricate classic in the Anglo-Calvinist expository tradition going back to William Perkins.

Such tightly ratio cinative work of course belies the account Bunyan liked to give of his own education: ‘I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, and so on’. But if Bunyan was no simpleton, part of his brief as a teacher to his Church was to produce those same unalloyed Reformed dogmas in simplified forms. Instruction for the ignorant (1675), for example, was ‘Prepared, and presented … in a plain and easie Dialogue, fitted to the capacity of the weakest’. Even more boldly, in A book for boys and girls (1686), Bunyan used nursery verse and light verse to convey doctrine.

Precisely because they were so effective for the requirements of their day, central items in Bunyan's didactic oeuvre were not necessarily guaranteed a vast popular readership beyond their immediate period, even though A book for boys and girls was to begin appearing in an illustrated format from 1707 onwards. The three-volume Glasgow edition, by George Offor, of the Works of John Bunyan – and its modern reprint by The Banner of Truth Trust of Edinburgh – clearly had and has meaning and inspiration for all those for whom the intact Reformed doctrine remains authentic. The more recent, and splendid, Oxford University Press edition of Bunyan's works, completed in 1994, confirms by its very nature, the limited appeal of the Bunyan omnia opera for scholars in the fields of literature, religion and history: Bunyan is no author for all seasons but a man of his age, to be studied as such Indeed, the work on which the collection of essays under review focuses also belongs in that subgenre in which, as we have been seeing, Bunyan so much specialised as an English Calvinist of the seventeenth century, no more, no less – the simplification of a doctrinal schema: The pilgrim's progress lies firmly within an authentic godly tradition of schematic exposition, going back to Perkins's A survey or table declaring the order of the causes of salvation and damnation, drawn up in 1590, or Arthur Dent's The plaine mans path-way to heaven (1601).

Even so, The pilgrim's progress has had and has a durable following outside its age; why, even Huckleberry Finn read it, finding it ‘interesting but tough’. And the achieved aim of the Owens-Sim collection is to explain that lasting appeal. Much of it would appear to lie in the very flexibility of allegory as a literary form: if Macaulay wanted The pilgrim's progress's Greatheart to be a ‘politicized fire and brimstone army chaplain’ of the Civil War, Greatheart can surely be made to fit that bill (David Walker, ‘Bunyan's reception in the romantic period’). If the Chartists could see ‘passionate social concern’ in The pilgrim's progress (Norman Vance, ‘Pilgrims abounding: Bunyan and the Victorian novel’) then the necessary ambiguities of allegory would allow for such a reading, its protean nature permitting its readers to appropriate it to their own varied needs.

Indeed, some of the appeal of The pilgrim's progress may lie in even more radical distortions of its meaning. Its author was certainly recycled as an icon of ‘English spirit’, even for purposes of World War II propaganda (‘The relevant pilgrim: John Bunyan in A matter of life and death’); Christopher Hill famously made him an English working-class hero (Stuart Sim, ‘Bunyan and his fundamentalist readers’), and his evolution as quintessential Englishman has required him to be thoroughly at home in an English – in fact, a Bedfordshire – ‘landscape’: as Isabel Hofmeyr shows in ‘Evangelical realism: the transnational making of genre in The pilgrim's progress’, Bedfordshire has been turned by several inventors into the ‘scenery’ for The pilgrim's progress. The fact that the dream-like stage-set for this work is not a south Midland terrain but a Calvinist diagram of salvation and damnation is neither here nor there when one is in the business of forging a Bunyan for all seasons, one of the central themes of this lively and engaging compendium.