When the courtier Venetia Stanley, wife of the pirate, alchemist, and virtuoso Kenelm Digby, died suddenly in 1633 (to be mourned by her cosmopolitan Catholic husband with baroque extravagance), there were persistent rumours that her husband had (intentionally or unintentionally) killed her by administering a dubious medicine called viper wine. This chapter traces recipes for viper wine, concluding that it was probably harmless, but that the hostile discourse surrounding Kenelm Digby, as collected and documented later in the century by John Aubrey, is an indication of the unpopularity of the queen’s court and the English Catholics who were its courtiers.

The book’s introduction provides a historical and methodological overview of the bunker fantasy from the Cold War through to the present day in a global and transnational context. It addresses the bunker fantasy’s borderline between military reality and pure fantasy. The first section (‘The bunker fantasy, then and now’) rehearses the book’s key concepts and claims and their use for analyzing the ways Cold War culture has permeated the twenty-first century. The second section (‘The bunker fantasy, here and there’) lays out the theoretical and practical grounds for the book’s global focus and other ways in which the bunker fantasies of the twenty-first century differ from those of the Cold War years around 1962 and 1983. It explores the meanings accrued by the ideas of the past misplaced in the fulcrum of the neoliberal, explicitly globalized, and digitized present day. The final section provides an overview of the book’s six chapters on the bunker fantasy as they have circulated the globe since the Cold War.

This chapter advances a simple and radically different reading of Orazio Gentileschi’s painting The Finding of Moses (now National Gallery), painted in the early 1630s for Henrietta Maria’s Queen’s House at Greenwich. It identifies the true focus of the painting as the daughter of Pharaoh, held by traditional Scottish historiography to be the ancestor of the Stuarts, and thus the ancestor of the newborn Charles II. This trope is traced in detail from the Middle Ages. The conclusion is that the iconography of the room is of a Stuart golden age, and also that the message of Gentileschi’s ceiling of The Arts of Peace, related to contemporary masques.

After his successful part in the political assassination of Count Wallenstein in the 1630s, the soldier of fortune and minor Aberdeenshire landowner Walter Leslie was rapidly ennobled and given estates in two parts of the Holy Roman Empire (now Moravia and Slovenia). This chapter considers the crude but ambitious cycle of baroque ceilings at the Moravian castle as embodying the rapid transformation of a soldier of fortune into a warrior-statesman. This status within the Empire is further asserted by the extraordinary vestments which were transported from the Slovenian castle of Ptui to the Leslie house of Fetternear in Aberdeenshire. These are extraordinary hybrid works: European baroque in design, but incorporating Turkish gold embroidery from captured banners from the Siege of Vienna.

This is a detailed study of the complex ceremonial and iconography with which the exiled English Catholic College of St Alban in the Spanish city of Valladolid installed in its chapel a wooden statue of the Virgin which had been ritually vandalised by the Elizabethan soldiers of the Earl of Essex’s raid on Cadiz in 1596. This is the single occasion on which the most starkly oppositional views of the Elizabethan settlement were articulated, framing Elizabeth as a sterile usurper whose whole regime was illegitimate. In propounding this subversive message, many of the genres and techniques of the baroque arts were brought into play.

This chapter considers an early modern cultural exchange which seems largely to have been forgotten: the large number of Scots who took one or more degrees at the universities of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. This chapter explores the essentially Dutch nature of the fictional (but historically accurate) garden of Monkbarns in Scott’s novel The Antiquary, the influences of Dutch gardens and garden poems in Scotland, and a little-known Scottish garden poem in the Dutch style: Mackenzie’s Celia’s Country House and Closet. By contrast, it also examines the French-style gardens at Edzell laid out by Sir David Lindsay at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Fascination with this built environment has taken three primary forms since the end of the Cold War: the continuance of the bunker fantasy and its emblematic spaces in a putatively postwar world; the appropriation and adaptive reuse of already existing spaces; and the transference of the bunker fantasy to new and often oppositional modes of the postapocalyptic in the twenty-first century. By making visible similar forms existing already back within the confines of the Cold War, these misplaced spaces also open up alternate ways of thinking through the stark and unequal choices to which those confines continue to limit thought and action today. By showing how to read differently the spatial practices of the twenty-first century, the manifold legacies of the Cold War suggest the epistemological bunker can at times function as a critical and speculative tool rather than solely offering an ironic or nostalgic gaze into a simpler past. The first section documents responses to the periodic emergence of new threats of nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The second section examines revisionist history uniing counternarratives during the Cold War period in Nevada, Arizona, and elsewhere. The third section studies nuclear tourism in Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and elsewhere. The following sections revisit civil defense infrastructure in Taiwan’s Kinmen and Matsu archipelagos, in Switzerland, and in Albania as they have been repurposed for a new millennium.

Alexander Seton, first Earl of Dunfermline, is a figure of great cultural significance in early modern Britain. Apart from his political standing in Scotland, and his care of the future Charles I, he is important as the first alumnus of the elite Collegio Romano to return to Britain with a complete baroque/humanist education. His building projects, his extraordinary painted gallery at Musselburgh, and his cosmopolitan library all bear witness to the importation of a full contemporary cultural system from continental Europe. At the turn of the seventeenth century, when England was increasingly isolated from the Continent, and Scotland had severed ties with Catholic Europe but had not yet developed the later symbiosis with the new academies of the United Provinces, Seton and his activities offer an extraordinary case of a Scottish cosmopolitan cultural polity.

The shelter society that coalesced around 1962 has, in the many ways encompassed by dystopian visions of biosecurity and siloing, been realized ontologically in the twenty-first century. Security constitutes, dominates, and segregates the American and many other ways of life to a degree that it perhaps has not done since prehistoric times. The first section of the conclusion examines the bunker fantasy in figurative applications of the wall’s Cold War form: walls against climate crisis and unpredictable nature imagined by biosecurity, seed vaults, and sea walls. The second section takes a concluding glance at the physical and metaphorical self-enclosures of siloing, the vertical pilings enabling and enabled by the horizontal spread of the wall. Because, it concludes, the premise of the nuclear condition is counterfactual, not only did realist modes prove inadequate for capturing its workings but ‘reality’ as defined by the enslaving, imperial, colonialist, and capitalist West was inadequate as a description of reality. The speculative, fantastic, and unreal fictions that capture the bunker fantasy afford a broader spectrum of understanding, even as that spectrum ranges wildly from the worst nightmares of ‘reality’ to utopian imaginings beyond its wildest dreams.

This short chapter considers a rare survivor from the early modern persecution of the Japanese Christians: a reliquary crucifix in the Victoria and Albert Museum, conjectured to have been made in the craft workshops which the Jesuits ran in Nagasaki until the suppression of Christians in 1610. This leads to considerations of stylistic and iconographic hybridity.

The tenebrous 1561 engraving by Giorgio Ghisi known traditionally as The Dream of Raphael offers a whole cluster of enigmas, not least the decoding of its complex and allusive iconography and its mysterious and still elusive inscriptions, especially the one which attributes some crucial part of the ‘invention’ to Raphael. This attempt at a reading relates the iconography to the state of the widowed Catherine de Medici and the political condition of France in 1561, a reading confirmed by a nearly hidden detail in the engraving, which has gone hitherto unobserved.