As Anne James reminds us, the Gunpowder Plot created resonances which went wider and deeper than might have been expected from a failed conspiracy. In this well-crafted and meticulously referenced book she sets out to investigate those resonances, and how they changed over time, through a variety of literary sources, including the relatively familiar corpus of 5 November sermons but also taking in the fashioning of the official narrative of the Gunpowder Plot in the immediate aftermath of its discovery, its ramifications for a hitherto neglected body of Latin poetry produced in the Jacobean court, the reworking of the plot's significance in its mobilisation by an increasingly disillusioned English Protestantism, references to the plot in contemporary drama, and its impact on a wide range of authors, John Milton among them. As this suggests, James demonstrates how the cultural, religious and political meaning of the Gunpowder Plot changed over time, touching on the Exclusion Crisis and the Sacheverell affair, but also tracing a host of less known, and often unexpected, points of reference. One of her major objectives is to demonstrate how the plot became enmeshed with a spectrum of literary materials as a counterpoint to the research that has been conducted on the practices surrounding the commemoration of the plot during the seventeenth century. In this she is eminently successful. There are many original findings here, one of the most intriguing being how the early Gunpowder Plot narratives were constructed in the wake of official accounts of treasons in Elizabeth i’s England and James vi’s Scotland, with the Gowrie Plot figuring prominently among the latter. Not everyone will agree with the claims that Anne James makes concerning the plot's significance – that it represented ‘a kind of microcosm of English history’ for what James describes as ‘seventeenth-century Englishpersons’. Nevertheless, the plot, coming as it did shortly after a new and foreign king had come to the English throne, and when religious affairs were in considerable flux, rapidly assumed a profound significance which constantly transmuted over the seventeenth century and which, as James reminds us, continued to resonate in English culture long after that century. Poets, players and preachers is an excellent demonstration of the dimensions of that significance.