An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Abstract In the mid-eighteenth century, networks of Irish, Scots, and English colleges, seminaries and male religious houses extended across Catholic Europe, providing access to education, centres for the formation of priests, and communities of regular clergy. These institutions faced significant external and internal challenges in the second half of the eighteenth century and many were already under severe pressure before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Almost all of the colleges closed in the 1790s, but this coincided with a political rapprochement between Catholics and the government in Britain and Ireland which facilitated the establishment of a network of domestic institutions, notably at Maynooth College in Ireland, Ushaw and Stonyhurst Colleges in England, and Blairs College in Scotland. This did not mean the complete abandonment or disappearance of the pre-Revolutionary Continental networks: centuries of investment ensured that British and Irish Catholic interests made substantial attempts at retrieval and revival. While many of the Continental colleges never reopened, a significant number survived and even where this was not the case, some financial investments were at least partially recovered. This ensured that alongside the establishment of a domestic college network, British and Irish Catholics retained a more modest, but nonetheless significant, Continental network into the nineteenth century.

This is a book about the intersection between processes of mobility and religious identity and practice in Early Modern Ireland. The period between c.1580 and c.1685 was one of momentous importance in terms of the establishment of different confessional identities in the island, and various typesof mobility played a key role in the development, articulation, and maintenance of separate religious communities. Part I examines the dialectic between migration and religious adherence, paying particular attention to the transnational dimension of clerical formation which played a vital role in shaping the competing Catholic, Church of Ireland, and non-conformist clergies. Part II investigates how more quotidian practices of mobility such as pilgrimage and interparochial communions helped to elaborate religious identities and the central role of figurative images of movement in structuring Christians’ understanding of their lives. The final chapters of the book analyze the extraordinary importance of migratory experience in shaping the lives and writings of the authors of key confessional identity texts. Hitherto underestimated or taken for granted, the book argues that migrants and exiles were of crucial significance in forging the self-understanding of the different religious communities of the island.

From the mid-sixteenth century, Catholics from Protestant jurisdictions established colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories abroad. The Irish, English and Scots colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and the Holy Roman Empire are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders, the German lands and Poland, as well as to colleges founded in Rome and other Italian cities for a wide range of national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example from within the Ottoman Empire. The first colleges were founded in the 1550s and 1560s, and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their suppression in the 1790s. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century and a few endure today. Historians have long argued that these abroad colleges...

The closure of the Irish, English, and Scots colleges in France in the early 1790s disrupted ancien régime patterns of student mobility from Britain and Ireland to the Continent and encouraged the development of alternative educational provision for Catholics at home. As this essay shows, however, Irish, English, and Scottish Catholics regained access to the infrastructure and investments created over earlier centuries. Under the Empire, they were united into the 'British Establishments' which re-opened the Irish college in Paris in 1805. This article addresses the conflict which ensued during the Restoration period as competing interests in France, Britain, and Ireland struggled for control of what remained of the colleges and their finances. The essay argues that Paul Long, a Dublin priest sent to Paris by the Irish bishops in 1814, played a key role in asserting their claims over the Irish college. The essay traces the means by which Irish, English, and Scottish Catholic interests assumed control of infrastructure (at least in the Irish case) and finances during the Restoration period by drawing on a wealth of new archival material.

Review by Liam Chambers (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) of John Kirk, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble, eds., Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland . London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp 249. £60. ISBN 9781848933446.

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

William Conolly was not only “the most remarkable case of social mobility in eighteenth century Ireland” (p. 61), but he also served as “de facto prime minister of Ireland” (p. 1) in the early eighteenth century. By the time of his death in 1729, he was speaker of the Irish House of Commons, a lord justice, a revenue commissioner, and, moreover, the first great “undertaker” in Irish politics. It is therefore surprising that Patrick Walsh's excellent study is the first major attempt to tell his story and place it in its various contexts. Walsh suggests that the imbalance in eighteenth‐century Irish history writing toward the action‐packed later period has resulted in the neglect of figures like Conolly. While there is clearly much truth in this, in Conolly's case the technical and sometimes scattered nature of the surviving archival evidence offered a further barrier. Indeed, one of the obvious strengths...