This book repositions early modern Catholic abroad colleges in their interconnected regional, national and transnational contexts. From the sixteenth century, Irish, English and Scots Catholics founded more than fifty colleges in France, Flanders, Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, Catholics in the Dutch Republic, the Scandinavian states and the Ottoman Empire faced comparable challenges and created similar institutions. Until their decline in the late-eighteenth century, tens of thousands of students passed through the colleges. Traditionally, these institutions were treated within limiting denominational and national contexts. This collection, at once building on and transcending inherited historiographies, explores the colleges' institutional interconnectivity and their interlocking roles as instruments of regional communities, dynastic interests and international Catholicism.

Reviews

'This is a collection which demonstrates the potential richness of this field of study, and which suggests several approaches which could lift the study of Catholic minorities out of their familiar national templates and help to create a historiography which paints a much wider picture, deepening our understanding of early modern Catholicism, and simultaneously of those national histories.'
Lucy Underwood, University of Warwick

'College Communities Abroad offers an impressive collection of essays that provide new insight into the nature of Catholic colleges founded by migrants from Protestant states.'
History of Education

'This handsomely produced collection of eight essays by established and new scholars based in Ireland, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland and Switzerland makes a very important contribution towards advancing our understanding of these college communities. The editors are to be credited with producing a publication that eschews particularism and instead, for the first time, reflects on the history of Irish, English and Scots colleges alongside that of Dutch, Scandinavian and Maronite institutions.'
Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu

1 Introduction - college communities abroad: education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe - Liam Chambers
2 The Society of Jesus and the early history of the Collegium Germanicum, 1552-84 - Urban Fink
3 Colleges and their alternatives in the educational strategy of early modern Dutch Catholics - Willem Frijhoff
4 The domestic and international roles of Irish overseas colleges, 1590-1800 - Thomas O'Connor
5 The Scots colleges and international politics, 1600-1750 - Adam Marks
6 Seminary colleges, converts and religious change in post-Reformation England, 1568-1688 - Michael Questier
7 The Maronite college in early modern Rome: between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Letters - Aurélien Girard and Giovanni Pizzorusso
8 English women religious, the exile male colleges and national identities in Counter-Reformation Europe - James E. Kelly
Index

Editors

Liam Chambers is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

Thomas O'Connor is Professor of History at Maynooth University