Gunpowder Percy: Merging Fact with Fantasy

Document Type

Poster

Presentation Date

4-5-2013

Department

English

Abstract

This historical novel is based on the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. It’s a tale of early-modern intrigue, religious obsession, and Machiavellian statecraft. It is set in the seventeenth century rather than the over-written-about sixteenth-century Elizabethan period. Late-Renaissance or Jacobean London was an even more fascinating place than the Elizabethan world, rife as King James’s England was with religious conflict, artistic repression and the jailing of poets, and political tragedy off-stage and on. The Gunpowder Plot, perpetrated by a group of doomed Catholic aristocrats whose dreams I engage, was one of the oddest English Jacobean happenings. In my reading and writing of it, the plot constituted the last, dying gasp of a Catholic world, animated by saints and mysteries, in a Protestant age of dawning capitalism and Enlightenment. The novel explores these themes.

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