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The great trilogy of early modern English writers—Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan—would be unthinkable without the educational and religious reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The late fifteenth-century printing revolution and the rise of Protestantism, with its shift of emphasis from the liturgy to the spoken and written word, made this the age of the book in England. Literacy rates jumped dramatically and opportunities for schooling mushroomed. The extent of the educational revolution is mirrored in the lives of the three authors: Milton, son of a prosperous London scribe, was educated at Cambridge University, whereas Shakespeare, son of a Stratford-on-Avon glover, almost certainly attended a grammar school, roughly the equivalent of a modern college-preparatory school. Bunyan, however, came from a much humbler social background and probably never attended a grammar school, for he expressly denied studying Plato or Aristotle. Far from letting his modest formal education hinder his career, Bunyan capitalized on his lack of academic credentials, thereby winning a following among commoners that Milton never enjoyed.

In truth, Bunyan was largely a self-educated man who was far more learned than he would admit. When he first espoused millenarian views in 1663, he disarmingly informed his readers that he was “empty of the language of the learned,” whose books he had not read. The Bible, he insisted, was the source of his knowledge—a rather extreme extension of the Protestant tenet that Scripture alone is authoritative in religious matters. At the end of his career he was still insisting that his Bible and his concordance were the “only library in my writings.” In the strictest literal sense he was perhaps telling the truth, though he was in fact an avid learner, both from books and undoubtedly from conversations with such prominent Nonconformist ministers as John Owen, George Cokayne, and William Dell. Such men were, after all, highly educated: Owen had been Vice-Chancellor of Oxford in the 1650s, Dell was Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, when he allowed the young Bunyan to share a pulpit at Yelden, and Cokayne was a Cambridge graduate. Bunyan may never have set foot in a college classroom, but he obviously learned from men who had. Moreover, he was intimately acquainted with John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments—“The Book of Martyrs”—a work which, in a sense, was the early modern Protestant’s introduction to the history of western civilization. Bunyan’s long years in prison also brought him some education in the law, knowledge he used to great effect in depicting Christ as an attorney: The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate.

Within a short time after Bunyan joined John Gifford’s church in Bedford, which was then part of the Cromwellian state church, he began reading—and attacking—Quaker pamphlets. His first two books set out to refute the Quaker views of Edward Burrough, who subsequently died in prison for his beliefs. Later in his career Bunyan repudiated works by the Latitudinarian Edward Fowler and the Quaker William Penn. If Bunyan was reading Anglican and Quaker works, he certainly read books by fellow Nonconformists. Why, then, profess an intellectual naiveté of which he was surely innocent? Nonconformist leaders such as Richard Baxter and John Owen made no efforts to conceal their learning. On the contrary, Baxter gloried in education as “God’s ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace.” Bunyan, however, was a product of that sectarian tradition which juxtaposed the spiritual and the rational. As the sectaries insisted, the dictates of carnal reason did not govern spiritual considerations. For Bunyan the inner workings of the Holy Spirit were fully sufficient to plumb the deepest mysteries of God, secrets which were hidden from even the greatest intellects unless their minds were enlightened by the Spirit. Bunyan, then, was in no sense an “uneducated tinker,” but one who deliberately underplayed his learning so that his audience would credit his insights to the Holy Spirit rather than human wit.

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