Folger Institute examines terrorism — historical and contemporary — on the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot
Earlier that same day, the Folger had hosted the Prince of Wales and his wife, Camilla. That the heir to the British throne was perusing the library's collection as scholars prepared to talk about a foiled plot to blow up King James I and his entire government in London 400 years ago was not lost on anyone. Nor did it escape notice that more than 40 scholars were packed tightly in a basement conference room, much like the 36 barrels of gunpowder placed in a cellar under the House of Lords by the Gunpowder conspirators and discovered there on the eve of the opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605.
The workshop was organized by Chris R. Kyle, an associate professor of history at Syracuse University, as part of a continuing series of such events hosted by the Folger Institute, a center for humanities research sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and a consortium of 40 universities.
Eminent scholars specializing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, including David Cressy, a professor of history at Ohio State University at Columbus, and Ian W. Archer, a fellow in modern history at Keble College, University of Oxford, gave detailed talks on the history of the plot's commemoration and on what London was like in 1605. Historians and literary scholars batted around questions about the era's political and religious discord and about how the Gunpowder Plot may have affected the staging of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
But Mr. Kyle and Kathleen Lynch, executive director of the Folger Institute, had bigger ambitions. The organizers asked presenters to offer brief informal papers to spur discussion and brainstorming across disciplines about new approaches to the texts being studied.
"We want to intervene in people's research projects at a point when it matters," said Ms. Lynch. "We didn't want to hear polished papers."
And then there was the ambition to have the workshop push past history and into the present. The event was provocatively titled "Early Modern Terrorism?," and in an introductory e-mail message to participants, Mr. Kyle noted that "without delving into the minefield of drawing direct and ahistorical parallels between the notion of early modern terrorism, the actuality of the Plot, and the world in which we inhabit, we are presented with an opportunity to discuss the impact of religious violence on society, its reaction to this event, and what happened/happens next."...
"It was the greatest assassination attempt in history," Mr. Kyle noted during the conference. "If it had succeeded, the elites of England would have disappeared."
Those who draw contemporary parallels often fasten upon what the Gunpowder Plot's "Ground Zero" might have looked like. In 2003 physicists from the Center for Explosive Studies at the University of Wales estimated that the blast would have destroyed everything in the immediate area (goodbye, Westminster Abbey) and caused damage up to a third of a mile away. In November the British television network ITV built a full-scale replica of the Parliament and blew it up. According to an account in The Times of London, the ITV team concluded "that the blast would have been relatively contained," but that "King James I and everyone else in the chamber would have been killed."
The religious discontent and the rhetoric used by the plotters also provide intriguing contemporary parallels. Among the historical oddities of the plot is that it was not Fawkes, but a Catholic gentleman named Robert Catesby, who devised the idea to blow up the parliament and recruited other Catholics to carry it out.
Indeed, religion was the key motivation for the scheme. Though fines and penalties for practicing Catholicism in England were enforced only spottily by the time of Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the religious war between Europe's Catholics and England's Protestants had been waged for decades via words (in the form of papal pronouncements and tracts), espionage (the infiltration of England by Jesuit priests), and actual battles (most notably, the repulsion of the Spanish Armada in 1588)....