As provincial of the English Jesuits, Henry Garnet was a person of interest to the Jacobean state. But he became the target of an urgent and extended manhunt when Guy Fawkes, during interrogation, claimed the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had met in his house. When he was finally discovered hiding in a cramped priest hole on January 27, 1606, an intensive process of interrogation and evidence collection began. He was arraigned and tried on March 28, 1606—almost five months after the plot was discovered and two months after the condemnations of the six major conspirators. James I himself attended the...

We have seen that, at moments of heightened anxiety about Catholic treason, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot and then again in the wake of the Popish Plot, Catholics provoked evidentiary crises because it was feared that they might equivocate on the stand and might even plead innocence on the scaffold—and believe it—if they had confessed their sins. Witchcraft too posed an extended evidentiary crisis, with periods of heightened intensity, sometimes intersecting with anxiety about Catholic superstition, treachery, and unreliability. Like Catholics, witches were considered to be both credulous and incredible. The problem of witchcraft, like the...

There is little disagreement about the timing or extent of the “Great Fire,” which was distinguished from the many other, smaller fires that plagued London by its scale.¹ It began on September 2, 1666; by some accounts, debris was still smoking in March 1667. Although it is possible to quibble about the precise tallies of damage, the fire laid waste to about 400 streets, 89 parish churches, and 13,200 houses, covering as much as 436 acres in ash.² The fire does not, however, seem to have caused many deaths.³ It finally burned itself out after the houses in its path...

As we have seen, the Parliamentary Committee’s report on its investigation of the London Fire offered its readers a collection of witnesses’ statements. While its polemical purpose was clear, its deponents elusive, and its leads dead ends, the committee’s report draws attention to the key role witnesses’ statements played in legal proceedings with more conclusive outcomes. Felony trials in common law courts, such as Henry Garnet’s trial for treason before the King’s Bench and witchcraft trials in assize courts, relied on witnesses’ statements transcribed and edited in advance. These documents, both produced and performed in court, formed the backbone of...

In the anonymous play A Pleasant Conceited Comedie, Wherein is shewed how a man may chuse a good Wife from a bad (1602), young Master Arthur physically and verbally abuses his wife, advising her that the best thing she can do for him is to “die sodainly.” To hasten this outcome so that he can marry a prostitute, he gives her what he thinks is rat poison. It is, instead, a narcotic, made of poppy and mandrake, which only makes her appear dead. Arthur promptly marries his mistress but soon realizes his mistake: she spends freely, suits herself, defies him,...

I have shown that the official account of Fr. Henry Garnet’s trial, Thomas Potts’s account of the trials of the Lancashire witches, and the “true and faithful account” of the parliamentary inquiry into the London Fire obscure the processes by which they were composed and the complex interests they served. I have argued that depositions are collaborative compositions and that even advice literature was far less univocal than it might at first appear. Crises of evidence and the texts they generated called on readers to be relators, grasping and creating relationships between one situation and another, one social relation and...