In 1649, the English people suffered a tremendous wound, a psychic lesion, as they both instigated and endured the killing of their king. John Bunyan came of age in the shadow of this rupture in the political, social, and religious order of the nation; his life and works follow the contours of the Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. Yet when compared with such contemporaries as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or Samuel Pepys, Bunyan is strikingly silent about the political events of those tumultuous years. In his single-minded spirituality, Bunyan endures as an intriguing...