The Paradoxes of Puritan Allegory in John Milton and John Bunyan

Abstract

This chapter explores the paradoxes surrounding the practice of allegory by two prominent Puritan writers, John Bunyan and John Milton. Bunyan is the author of one of the best-known and most influential allegorical narratives, The Pilgrim’s Progress (as well as lesser-known but still influential allegorical texts). It is harder to classify any of Milton’s works as fully allegorical in genre, yet allegorical elements are pervasive in Milton’s writings throughout his career from his schoolboy poems to his celebrated biblical epic Paradise Lost. This chapter traces how Milton and Bunyan’s writing was shaped by allegory-adjacent modes of writing such as fable, parable, and emblem poem. It then explores three key paradoxes in their deployment of allegory: the interrelationship of Christian with secular or classical pagan elements, the tension between the aesthetic mode and the didactic aims of allegorical writing, and the blurred boundary between allegory and typology. It concludes with case studies of episodes in Milton’s and Bunyan’s writing that exemplify these paradoxes: the figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost and the episode of the burning mountain in The Pilgrim’s Progress.