Bunyan died in August 1688 from a fever contracted while riding to London in heavy rain. He had made the journey to deliver the manuscript of his latest work, The Acceptable Sacrifice to the press, and to preach to a Dissenting congregation in Whitechapel. Perhaps surprisingly, in view of his enormous popularity as a writer, Bunyan left unpublished a considerable number of manuscripts. These eventually passed into the hands of his close friend and disciple, Charles Doe, a comb-maker from Southwark who, in 1692, published twelve of them, together with ten other works, in a folio volume.

Apart from The Acceptable Sacrifice and the Last Sermon, which are edited from first editions of 1689, texts of the other six works in the present volume are based on those in Doe's 1692 Folio. The most ambitious of these is a lengthy commentary on the first ten chapters of Genesis. No book of the Bible had attracted more attention from learned exegates, and the middle of the seventeenth century saw fierce controversies over its interpretation. Bunyan, though clearly aware of these great debates, seldom enters into them. Instead he offers a typological reading, enabling him to draw out the contemporary significance of the Genesis story for persecuted Dissenters.

General editor: Roger Sharrock