Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day (Profiles in History)
The potent symbiosis-and ultimate disentangling-of religion and politics in the modern era is explored in this study of a very British holiday. Historian Sharpe gives a sprightly recap of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a narrowly foiled conspiracy by English Catholics to blow up Parliament and the King, and its subsequent November 5th commemoration through the centuries. The original Gunpowder Treason Day, he notes, was a festival of militant Protestantism, celebrated with bonfires, processions and the reading of anti-Papist screeds from pulpits across the kingdom. As anti-Catholic vitriol waned with the Enlightenment, burning effigies of the Pope gave way to effigies of leading conspirator Guy Fawkes, who became a romantic icon and a radical champion of the downtrodden poor. In Victorian times, November 5th added the sobriquet of Bonfire Night, giving incendiary vent to an unfocused working-class anti-authoritarianism which met with crackdowns by urban police forces. In recent days, Sharpe laments, the holiday has been preempted and eclipsed by the imported juggernaut of American-style Halloween, a celebration of an entirely depoliticized ur-religion of spirits and spells that is the virtual antithesis of Guy Fawkes Day. Sharpe analyzes the role of Guy Fawkes Day in defining an emerging British Protestant nationalism against the "Evil Empire" of Catholicism and, somewhat weakly, draws parallels with the West's contemporary ideological battle against radical Islam. Although one gets the feeling that the first Guy Fawkes Day was the most exciting, Sharpe's erudite but light-handed account makes for an intriguing cultural history. Photos.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.