The OG, or is it? Norton Library Series Pilgrim's Progress

Hot on the heels (well, in publishing terms) of Into the Pilgrimverse came the Norton Library Series edition of The Pilgrim's Progress. This project took 3 years to complete and gave me a new and deepening friendship with my co-editor, Margaret Breen of the University of Connecticut. We "zoomed" from our desks a continent apart for over 500 hours, at my best guess, before we submitted the final proofs after 3 rounds of revisions. And we only finally met in person this summer at the International John Bunyan Society Conference.

This project halted any attempt to keep up a commentary on the text in this website space. But close attention to the text has been extremely generative of new ideas, not least in being able to discuss with a senior scholar on a weekly basis.

As I've no doubt mentioned before, there is no extant manuscript for The Pilgrim's Progress. And the text was added to and tweaked throughout the eleven editions within Bunyan's lifetime. Editing for readability goes on for centuries further. But what Victorian editors like George Offor, for example, thought of as readable is not the same as we would determine it today.

This Norton Library edition has all the text that occurs across those editions in Bunyan's lifetime, but we have made small changes in syntax and punctuation to help first time readers. Where we've kept obsolete or differently used terms we've glossed them at the bottom of the page for easy reference. For anyone interested in seeing how richly biblical Bunyan's imagination is, we have, I think, provided the most extensive annotations to date of his allusions to Scripture in our endnotes, along with some historical context.

This is meant to be a (US-English) reader-friendly version of Bunyan's classic, and I'm glad that it is pretty affordable. Because it can be hard to track down a new edition of TPP online, here are the hyperlinks to the publisher and amazon US. It is not yet available in the UK, coming in March 2026, so one online retailers informs me.