News of the English Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 quickly reached continental Europe. In German lands accounts appeared in news booklets by the end of the year, and soon the event was so notorious that it merited whole publications dedicated to it. But as the English government’s construction of events began to shift, so the German accounts soon became embedded in a strongly anti-Jesuit narrative, the flames of which were fanned across Europe by the assassination of Henri IV of France in 1610. The paper will trace this development in German seventeenth-century texts, from the early news booklets through confessionally motivated polemical texts to travelogues, and will place the interest in the Powder Treason within the context of a German fascination with Stuart Britain as a whole.

Joint Seminar with the Centre for Early Modern Studies. 

Anna Linton, King’s College London.