1678
Pilgrim's Progress Published
The imprisoned Baptist tinker John Bunyan published an allegorical prose narrative of a pilgrim named Christian journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Plain, vivid, and theologically fierce, it became the best-selling English book after the King James Bible and shaped Protestant imagination for centuries, offering ordinary readers a story of salvation in language they could understand.
Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cleves
An anonymous novel appeared in Paris about a young noblewoman at the court of Henry II torn between marital duty and illicit passion. The Princess of Cleves, by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, invented the modern psychological novel and became an immediate sensation in French salons and courts, proving that the inner life of a woman could sustain a work of literary art.
Popish Plot Fabricated
The disgraced Anglican cleric Titus Oates concocted a tale of a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and place his brother on the throne. London panicked; fifteen innocent Catholics were hanged on Oates's perjury before the fraud was exposed. The hysteria scarred English politics for a generation and gave birth to the Whig and Tory parties that would define parliamentary life.
Bunyan in Bedford Jail
John Bunyan, imprisoned repeatedly for preaching without a license, had used his latest stint in Bedford county jail to finish Pilgrim's Progress. He had written with an iron stylus on scraps of paper and smuggled them out to printers. A book that would be read across the English-speaking world for three centuries came out of a cell.