This final chapter considers the artificial island in a landscape garden as an art form in and of itself, a baroque survival into the age of sensibility, surveying examples from Stowe, Ashwell, Tiefurt, Wörlitz and Little Sparta

This chapter charts changing attitudes towards nuclear apocalypse and environmental transformation in terms of different and changing approaches towards survivalism as it emerged on its own terms during the 1980s and as it has developed in sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising ways since that time. Defined by their bomb shelter or hidey-hole, the survivalist provides a limit-case of what distinguishes savage individualists from human society. Its central figure is the right-wing, libertarian, white nationalist extremist; however, the typically ironic or dismissive representation of these figures ignores the social critique afforded by survivalism’s forms. It also precludes any analysis of the ways in which the extremes of survivalism since the 1980s, despite and because of their extremism, intersect with and diverge from ideas around ‘survival’ that have infiltrated global society more broadly. Sections trace the origin of contemporary survivalism out of the countercultural left as well as the extreme right; the intersection of white nationalist survivalism with other forms; and the assimilation of prepping and survivalism into the consumer culture. Throughout, the argument balances critique of key white nationalist texts such as The Turner Diaries with analysis of their function within a broader culture of survivalism ranging from reality television to supershelters for the ultrarich.

This chapter contrasts two magnificent collections of ‘paper architecture’, one from either side of the Jacobite conflicts of the eighteenth century. The first is the series of extraordinary designs made in exile by the sixth Earl of Mar, including his projects for a redeveloped London for a restored Stuart king. In contrast, through the anxious months of the Jacobite rising of 1745/46, the Protestant circle of Samuel Chearnley, at Birr in Ireland, made a series of fantastical architectural designs, at first escapist garden buildings, but increasingly fantasies of a grand redevelopment of Birr as Hanoverian victory grew certain.

Chapter 6 explores the relationship between walls and bunkers as spatial forms whose meanings have been tightly associated since the Cold War. It studies the legacy of the bunker fantasy within the wall’s proliferation as the emblem of security and containment for the twenty-first-century nation-state and the inevitable pairing of the wall with its spatial counterpart, the tunnel. These discussions draw on fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, and on material practices; the former suggest the underlying potentialities of the latter in the twenty-first century while simultaneously addressing their actual and potential pathologies. The argument stresses the legacy of the bunker fantasy within wall and tunnel imaginaries and the consequences of that legacy for a global society ever more obsessed with security and boundaries, whether from an insider or an outsider perspective, or an ambivalent combination of the two. The first section traces the emergence of wall and tunnel as a dominant twenty-first century spatial arrangement out of imaginaries of the Berlin Wall. The following sections address cultural and political work around the dominant barrier walls of the twenty-first century: the West Bank Wall and what Donald Trump termed the ‘Great Wall’ at the border between Mexico and the United States. Each section shows that, experienced together, wall and tunnel afford a bunker epistemology able briefly to expose the knowledge production underpinning the wall’s or the tunnel’s closed ontology.

A toccata, a flourish touching on many works of art, rather than a conventional introduction. Connections globally in the baroque world, connections across the arts, the unknowability of aspects of the past. Connections, particularly through Jesuit networks; hybridity, especially in the Antwerp circles around Rubens, whose global affinities (Cuzco, Korea, India) are explored in detail. Mysteries such as the Goan poem, the Kristapurāna, of the Englishman Thomas Stephens; mysteries such as the Egyptian mummy presented by Henrietta Maria to the hermeticist Thomas Bushell; worldwide hybridity associated with popular celebration of Christmas: Goa, Mexico, Naples.

This chapter asks and answers a question so simple that it is puzzling that it does not feature regularly in studies of the poet Alexander Pope: how did his lifelong Catholicism affect his life and work, since he lived under times of legal penalty for Catholics, made more stringent by the Jacobite threat? The answer is that he suffered a great deal from the restrictions of the laws against Roman Catholics, that they influenced the imagery of retirement and seclusion throughout his work, and that (in some respects) his best-known work, The Rape of the Locke, yields its meaning most readily if considered as a poem addressed to a beleaguered Catholic coterie.

This chapter investigates one unusual instance of language learning within the British Isles and Ireland. The early seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Robert Corbie (or Corbington) learned Scottish, English, Irish, and Welsh and could write all these languages with some fluency, as is attested by the multilingual inscriptions by him installed in the Basilica of Loreto (Marche, Italy). This chapter also advances Corbie/Corbington as the most likely author of the Welsh and Irish sections in the 1620s funerary manuscript for Cardinal Farnese produced at the Venerable English College, Rome. From this comes the reflection that, by the early seventeenth century, the Jesuits were already advancing the minority languages of the archipelago.

This chapter embodies the most complex piece of primary research in the whole volume. It brings together a series of writings about gardens in theory made by early modern members of the Society of Jesus, mostly in Italy, before going on to consider the comprehensive treatise on the culture of flowers by Giovanni Ferrari SJ, De Florum Cultura, which was published in 1633. This is related to remarkable symbolic meditations on plants and gardens by the Jesuit Louis Richeôme SJ, whose La peinture spirituelle of 1611 offers a series of baroque perceptions and reflections on both notional and actual gardens.

This chapter studies a different series of English Catholic iconographies violently opposed to Elizabeth I, in this case a series of imaginary portraits of sainted Saxon monarchs which were painted in Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century for the English Syon Abbey in Lisbon. Nearly any reference to Saxon monarchs constituted an implicit challenge to Elizabeth and to the post-Reformation English Church. Moreover, the Lisbon depiction of St Ediltrudis could have been seen as yet another rebuke to the earthly monarch of England.

This is a chapter about a near-forgotten but important individual, James Byres of Tonley in Aberdeenshire, who spent most of his life as a Jacobite exile in Rome, where he worked with considerable success as architect, art dealer, and guide to the city. One of his most illustrious compatriots was the historian Edward Gibbon, who conceived his own Decline and Fall in the course of Byres’s ‘course of antiquities’. As well as considering the long historical presence of exiled British Catholics as art dealers and ‘men of taste’, this chapter also considers Byres’s own unpublished history: his history of the Etruscans and their painted tombs. It would seem that he perceived the Etruscans as forebears marginalised by the aggressive Romans, like the Jacobites marginalised by the aggressive English. From the homoerotic paintings of the Etruscan tombs, it would seem likely that Byres also considered them as ‘gay ancestors’.

The afterword makes the point that this book answers the call for a book about the shadows and exiles of the early modern world, as well as a set of further reflections on that baroque world’s mysterious reticulations and connections. The sequence of histories of exceptions and ‘shadow communities’ serves to cast light on the majorities and the mainstreams. There are also a few chapters which are simply about major continental artefacts or phenomena which are internationally important tokens or examples of their times.