An interdisciplinary seminar at the Folger Institute examines terrorism — historical and contemporary — on the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot
When scholars gathered in the basement of the Folger Shakespeare Library on November 4 for a workshop examining the Gunpowder Plot, many of them were alert to the ironies of the occasion.
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 is those discussions that pique the interests of a broader public fixated on issues such as terrorism, torture, and religious violence. But scholars often fear that making such connections sacrifices academic rigor.
So if the plotters of 400 years ago who piled gunpowder in a basement failed, would Mr. Kyle and Ms. Lynch’s plot to widen the scholarly discussion into combustible contemporaneity succeed?
Explosive Parallels
The Gunpowder Plot invites easy comparisons to terrorist acts such as 9/11. It was an audacious and violent plan to strike at a literal (and symbolic) center of national power. It was rooted in deep religious discontent and turmoil.
Over the years, Guy Fawkes, the conspirator discovered lurking near the gunpowder barrels, has become the plot’s talismanic figure. It is Fawkes who has been burned in effigy in Britain’s colorful and riotous annual celebrations of the plot’s failure over the past four centuries.
The discovery of Fawkes prevented the explosion and squashed a half-baked scheme to start an uprising in its wake. Some conspirators were killed in a skirmish, while others directly involved in the plot (including Fawkes) faced torture, trial, and a gruesome execution by hanging and dismemberment.
“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).
English Catholics hoped that the ascension of King James I to the throne in 1603 would improve their position. Yet though James took steps to ease the persecutions, he did not lift them entirely. The king also signed a peace treaty with Spain, which largely deprived English Catholics of any hope of outside help to better their lot.
So Catesby decided to act. And though he was killed before he could be interrogated, a confession obtained from a fellow plotter, Thomas Winter, lays out Catesby’s reasoning for choosing his target:
“He said that he had bethought him of a way in one instant to deliver us from all our bonds ... and withal told me in a word it was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder; for, said he, in that place have they done us all the mischief, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.”
One doesn’t have to look hard to find Osama bin Laden employing a similar rationale for his target selection. In an October 21, 2001, interview with the television network Al Jazeera reprinted in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso), the Al Qaeda leader discussed the World Trade Center in astonishingly similar terms:
“As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked and who died in it were a financial power. It wasn’t a children’s school! Neither was it a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in the towers were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world, which spreads mischief throughout the world.”
Tortured Definitions
Catesby and bin Laden share a penchant for cataclysmic violence and a justificatory rhetoric. Such striking juxtapositions (often dubbed “presentism”) intrigue a general public that seeks to connect past to present. They tend to give historians the willies, however. Historians would hasten to point out that, from their point of view, Catesby and bin Laden have little in common but grandiose violent impulses and a self-righteous grammar to justify them.
But can scholars harness the energy of “presentism” without weakening the scholarly enterprise? For this particular workshop, Mr. Kyle’s strategy was to focus on definitions. Among the speakers at the first panel discussion was Charles H. Tilly, a professor of sociology at Columbia University.
Mr. Tilly dispensed almost entirely with the Gunpowder Plot itself, plunging his listeners directly into questions about the definition of terror (which he also discussed in a March 2004 paper, “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists,” published in the journal Sociological Theory).
After demonstrating the elasticity of the definition (the state, as well as individuals and groups, can practice terrorism), Mr. Tilly snapped it back to some questions at play in the Gunpowder Plot and in contemporary terrorism: How does the state use the threat of terror to justify torture, which was used to extract confessions from some Gunpowder plotters? Do public rituals, such as the annual bonfires to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot, demonstrate the unity or the vulnerability of the state?
“I thought his presentation was quite superb,” said Mr. Kyle. “I really wanted a sociologist’s perspective. It’s easy to get derailed by words such as ‘terrorist,’ ‘terror,’ and ‘terrorism.’”
Mr. Tilly’s talk sparked a wide-ranging, intriguing discussion that oscillated between past and present. Some participants groped for a tighter definition of terrorism. Others talked about the symbolism of a terrorist’s choice of weapon — past and present. Why gunpowder in 1605? And does the use of advanced technology — be it in the 17th century or the 21st century — somehow heighten the symbolic effect of the terrorist act?
That same spirit carried over into ensuing panels. Paul E.J. Hammer, a lecturer in modern history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, focused on conspiracy theories as an animating force for Catholic and Protestant propaganda. Frances E. Dolan, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, examined how information about the Gunpowder Plot was disseminated to the public in ever more elaborate and extensive editions.
Ms. Dolan placed a special emphasis on editorial interventions made in the text of confessions and other transcripts, along with elaborate language about the use of torture. And the subsequent discussion raised questions not only about the reliability of the texts that chronicle the Gunpowder Plot investigation, but also about how the victors write that history, and the suggestive narrative gaps that beckon to conspiracy theorists.
Hearkening back to Mr. Tilly’s talk of definitions, Ms. Dolan remarked that much of the friction in the texts involving the Gunpowder Plot — or any terrorism investigation — revolves around the question of “who is [a terrorist], and who gets to name one?”
Plotting Past and Present
Though the discussions were serious, there was also a relaxed air to the workshop, which expressed itself in numerous jokes and puns. Albert R. Braunmuller, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Jonathan Gil Harris, a professor of English at George Washington University, tackled the intersection of the Gunpowder Plot and Macbeth, which dates roughly from the time of the plot, with a mix of humor and seriousness.
Mr. Harris’s talk dealt with the odor and explosion of the Shakespearean stage, noting that the recipe for “squibs,” or small firecrackers, in that era called for “the dunge of beasts ... and above all other, of the same that cometh from hogges.”
But perhaps the relaxed air also came from a general feeling that Mr. Kyle and Ms. Lynch’s efforts to broaden the discussion had worked, and had not been so threatening to scholarship after all. Barbara A. Mowat, chair of the Folger Institute, noted that the event achieved its primary objective, a serious discussion of scholarship about the Gunpowder Plot. “Just after the workshop,” she said, “I read the Times Literary Supplement review of four new books on the Gunpowder Plot, and I noticed immediately that some of the questions ... which the reviewer wished had been asked in these books had in fact been seriously addressed in the workshop.”
Others cited the quality of interdisciplinary exchange in the workshop. “It was much more satisfactory than I thought it was going to be,” said Mr. Cressy, of Ohio State. “I thought we might be talking past each other. We weren’t. We were having the same conversation.”
Ms. Dolan said that the event proved that scholars can harness “presentism” to broaden the audience for the humanities. She acknowledged a “skittishness” among scholars to do so, but argued that if they “are willing to make this bold move, it’s a way to reach a new, large, audience.” Ms. Dolan pointed to the “tortured formulations” that governments past and present “come up with to describe torture ... it’s enormously provocative to think both ways about that.”
Mr. Kyle and Ms. Lynch also believe that they scored a success.
“Even though it wasn’t always explicit,” said Mr. Kyle, “events today played an important role in the discussion.”
Ms. Lynch observed that “it may be the case that the ‘results’ of the weekend’s conversations will build slowly through changes in teachers’ syllabi and redirections of their research project.” While many of the Folger Institute’s programs “are not so directly connected” to contemporary events, she said, “I’m glad to break that ground.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 52, Issue 16, Page A12