Who is John Owen?

John Owen (1616-83) is the most important English puritan theologian. With his eighty published works of poetry, political intervention, biblical commentary, and theology extending to almost 8 million words in English and Latin, he might also be one of the most voluminous authors of the seventeenth century.

We’re currently in a golden age of John Owen studies, with recent volumes by Tim Cooper, John Tweeddale, Martyn Cowan, and Ryan McGraw being published by Ashgate, T&T Clark, Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. I‘ve written a 170,000-word biographical study, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016), and An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020), a 40,000-word primer, which should be a more accessible entry point into his life and thought. This has been translated into Portuguese and should shortly appear in Korean. With John Tweeddale, I co-edited The T&T Clark companion to John Owen (T&T Clark, 2022), a 250,000-word readers’ companion that pulls together work by many of those who have made the most significant contribution to Owen studies in recent years.

I am currently writing John Owen’s social network: Friends, rivals, and the literary culture of nonconformity, Routledge Studies in Early Modern Authorship (London: Routledge, contracted for 2024), which looks at the significance of his complex relationships with writers including John Milton, Richard Baxter, Lucy Hutchinson, Andrew Marvell and John Bunyan. The first fruits of this project are available as “John Owen’s Milton,” Milton Quarterly (2021); “Lucy Hutchinson’s theological writings,” Review of English Studies (2020); “The experience of dissent: John Owen and congregational life in revolutionary and Restoration London,” in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcombe (eds), Church life in seventeenth-century England: Pastors, congregations, and the experience of dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 119-35; “John Owen, Lucy Hutchinson, and the experience of defeat,” The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015), pp. 179-90; and “John Owen, Renaissance man? The evidence of Edward Millington’s Bibliotheca Oweniana (1684),” Westminster Theological Journal72:2 (2010), pp. 321-32.

Presentations on John Owen