On Sunday 23 January 1972 the chronicler at the Irish Franciscan house in Louvain made this entry:

The previous day Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Patrick Hillery had signed Ireland’s accession to the EEC at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels. St Anthony’s Louvain was founded as a house of formation and studies for Irish Franciscans in 1607. Interrupted in the nineteenth century, its refoundation in 1927 was a priority for the friars in the new Free State. Read one way, Lynch and Hillery’s lunch and press conference can be viewed as yet another mark of the cosy relationship between Irish church and Irish state for much of the twentieth century, but there is something about this piece of PR which is relevant to this review. Since the nineteenth century Irish colleges have belonged to a national narrative of exile, of diaspora, of gallant allies abroad and a claim to patient persistence of identity in continental exclaves. Even had the Douai College still existed, it is most unlikely that the UK delegation, which signed up on the same day in 1972, would have made a visit or that Prime Minister Edward Heath would have read the lesson. ‘Recusant’ historians apart, English colleges have been on the outer darkness of historical narratives until their recent retrieval in a broadly secular or even post-Christian environment. The Scots colleges found themselves part of a history submerged under a Red Sea of Presbyterian normativity which closed over the heads of the Catholic past. As far as Scotland’s national story went for a long time, Catholics were Irish and labouring, immigrant incomers of the nineteenth or twentieth century vintage or they were Jacobites. It is noticeable that Scottish experience features only once in the two volumes being reviewed here. Even if there had been a Welsh College it would have tumbled into the same oblivion just as the wider history of post-Reformation Catholicism there has done until the welcome work of recent times.

The gravitational pull exercised by the studied remembering and forgetting of English, Irish, Scots and Welsh Catholic histories is still very real. There is no map showing all the foundations made by subjects of the Tudor and Stewart/Stuart monarchs after their respective breaks with Rome. You can have maps of all English houses, or maps of all Irish ones, or maps of all female houses, or maps of all the houses of a particular order, or of all colleges overseen by the Jesuits, for example. But you cannot have one of the whole lot. That says something. That studies of exile religious houses, colleges and the expatriate communities that supported them have blossomed in the past twenty years is also to say something. Something good. Maybe because of the interest of literary scholars the study of British and Irish nuns on the continent has already broken free of the legacies of national narratives and has begun to reconstruct the inner lives of convent dwellers, that is, the very thing that those enclosed women would probably have considered the most important. There is still a great deal more work to be done on religiously motivated migration, and in this instance the male world of the exile colleges and cloisters lags behind in the historiography. Here are two books that go some good way in playing catch-up.

These volumes appeared consecutively in Brill’s Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700 series but their origins are distinct. Forming Catholic Communities, along with its fellow traveller College Communities Abroad,which is also edited by Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor, springs from the very rich involvement of the editorial pair in researching Irish clerical and lay élites over many years.Footnote ² Clare Carroll’s monograph is, as she explains herself, an edifice built on the labours of a decade and a half. The two books are, as it happens, of similar length. Both books consider expatriate experiences over several centuries. There the resemblances end. Chambers and O’Connor along with their eleven companion contributors are all about one type of institution: the colleges with their many exigencies, oddities and power struggles. As they put it: ‘This volume places a strong emphasis on the social and financial histories of the colleges, aspects frequently overlooked in more traditional accounts’ (p. 9). Carroll’s work is all about one place – Rome – and all about the experience of one group, that is, people from Ireland. Her thesis is that ‘dislocation and consequent exile pressured the creation of a national [Irish] culture in exile. It is that process, and the role of Rome in it, that this book takes as its central subject’ (p. 6). Her eight chapters are best understood as chronologically organised case studies which are then used to explicate an overall theme. Both volumes do declare that they wish to slip the traces of earlier ‘traditional’ accounts which had the constructive aim of establishing as far as possible the narratives of English or Irish or Scots or Welsh Catholics abroad but which also had the more instrumental or even spiritual aim of celebrating confessional endurance in adversity. It is interesting that they felt the need to say so, since historians of early modern exiles from both of these islands have been moving beyond the ‘more traditional’ for quite some time. Maybe that backward glance is because there is still something emotional, something intense, about what happened between 1568 when William Allen made his foundation at Douai, and 1789, 1829 and 1918.

First lines matter. Both volumes start in a high register. Here are Chambers and O’Connor in their introduction: ‘the early modern British state, with its centralising administration, predatory army and confessionalising church, relied on a range of educated clerical and lay élites for its maintenance and expansion’ (p. 1). To this they add the argument that continental colleges provided an alternative for the proscribed and locked out Catholic population. Carroll begins: ‘Impelled by the wars, land expropriation, religious persecution and economic hardships of the long early modern period, the Irish left their homes to seek patronage, political advantage, education and livelihood abroad’ (pp. 1-2). She then goes on, quoting Ciaran O’Scea, to propose a ‘conservative’ estimated outflow from the island of at least 175,000 persons during the seventeenth century. It’s never any harm to begin with brio. Indeed much of this intensity is warranted by the dramatic subject matter. When they come to sketch out the matter of their volumes it becomes clear that the framers of Forming Catholic Communities and Exiles in a Global City are again walking off in two different directions. About two thirds of the way into her introduction, Clare Carroll switches into the first person: ‘When I first started working on this book I had no idea that I would be writing about Irish history in terms of a major theory of Caribbean cultural studies – the justifiably famous theory of transculturation coined by Fernando Ortiz in his book Cuban Counterpoint’. She explains that part of her reasoning in adopting Ortiz was to essay a move from ‘a thoroughgoing celebration of Irish culture’. So the decision to adopt the transculturation model along with its helpmeets ‘acculturation’, ‘deculturation’ and ‘neoculturation’ was designed to break celebration down into complexity. Yet when applied across the eight assiduously researched case studies which make up the chapters of this important book the Ortiz model itself becomes a bridle to writing more paradox, contradiction and even fracture into her conclusions. Luke Wadding is a case in point – the author knows all about his Anglophone Old English identity but it becomes swamped by the need to write about ‘the Irish’ in Rome. She has read up on medieval antecedents for the strategies of ‘nations’ in the Urbs and she is a skilful navigator of language politics but the implications of her findings more than once become secondary to the model. There are a number of instances where the discourse of acculturation - tantalisingly - holds back articulation of important statements on performance of multiple simultaneous identities by groups and individuals or on the role of selected forgettings by exiles. This is not to say that transculturation is an unhelpful concept. It does help. But sometimes, like an over-zealous housekeeper, it helps just a bit too much.

The first half of Exiles offers the most sustained single study of the Irish Roman Franciscan milieu in many years. It begins with Tadhg Ó Cianáin’s unique Irish language manuscript account of the journey from Ireland to Rome of the Ulster Earls, moves on to Luke Wadding’s shelf-sagging Annales Minorum and then goes off the page onto the walls of the Aula Maxima of St. Isidore’s College, which are stained and soaked with a fresco cycle redolent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Iberian peninsula and the Observant movement. Carroll then shifts back to the printed page in her close reading of the 1677 Grammatica Latino-Hibernica. Whether penned, painted or printed each of these case study texts has generated its own large outworks of scholarship. Carroll has absorbed it all and absorbed it impressively before crowning it with her own analysis in keeping with the overarching theme of the book.

Tadhg Ó Cianáin followed the Ulster Earls on their many hued journey from Rathmullan Co. Donegal to Rome. As their secretary, Ó Cianáin wrote it all up after their arrival in the Eternal City. His account survives in a solitary manuscript – UCD-OFM Ms A21. It is an iconic text. It is also a slippery text. Who was it written for? Is it a diary? A travelogue? A princely progress to foreign parts? Beyond the more eye-catching neologisms – the first instance in Irish of ‘tennis’ for example – there are semantic issues. What did he mean by the word ‘naisión’? Is it ‘nation’? Or is it the Latin ‘natio’? Or is it the Spanish ‘nación’? Here Carroll maintains that when paired with the post-ethnic formulation ‘Éireannaigh’ or ‘the Irish’ we are witnessing ‘an emerging early modern sense of a cultural identity’ (p. 38). She carefully maps uses of ‘naisión’ through the manuscript and in doing so unveils a consciousness moulded by a specifically Roman exile. This was exile in a city that was as much Spanish as it was a compendium of the world, a place to display and to be displayed. A place where Luke Wadding of Waterford wrote his simultaneously empiricist and providentialist history of the Franciscan movement from its Umbrian cradle to its New World missions. Wadding, founder of two Irish Roman colleges, with his Iberian education, erudition, personable political skills and fund-raising acumen is a dauntingly tricky figure to approach. Carroll’s decision to swivel away from the temptation of biography in order to pore minutely over how he places Ireland’s friars and friaries in his giant annals is both refreshing and wise. She observes the play between Wadding’s manuscript sources for Irish matters and his printed history. She notes that he, drawing on the work of his confrère Donatus Mooney, posits an organic connection between the friars and the terroir of the island of Ireland itself. It was surely ‘a history being written for those in the present who need to remember a certain past in order to imagine a certain kind of future’ (p. 82). Attempts here, though, to link Wadding through his retelling of specific miracles at Irish sites with seanchas or Gaelic learning are somewhat strained. The genre of the retributive miracle – where heretics who mess with old convent sites suffer grisly punishment or grotesque bad luck – was common to all Catholics in Ireland, and a gleeful staple of sermons and mission reports.

The useful meditation on Wadding’s often overlooked historical work does lay a foundation for what is the richest chapter of the entire book. It is on Fra Emmanule da Como’s giant 1672 fresco composition, the first ever group depiction of Irish Catholic subjects. In it Wadding appears twice, where his joltingly razorlike gaze is still disconcerting for the viewer. All four walls of the Aula Maxima at St. Isidore’s, modelled on a Salamancan original, are crammed with friars, prelates, professors, bound books, habits, sandals, mitres, manuscripts, papers, quills, chairs, desks, speech bubbles, scriptural tags and lapidary inscriptions. It is a huge statement about exile eminence. The walls can be, and have been, read in many ways. Ample attention is given here to artist, genre, patronage and timing but the main weight of interpretation rests on what is written on the walls. And there is lots written on the walls. Most of it concerns the Immaculate Conception. For the friars at St. Isidore’s, Duns Scotus was the chief intellectual acolyte of the Immaculata. He was also, they claimed, Irish. Over the pages gathered between some gorgeous reproductions of these frescoes, Carroll coaxes out the ramifications of their theological boast, showing how this exile college community placed their scholarly compatriot hero at the fulcrum of salvation history itself. It is worth saying here as an aside that anyone who studies the querulous world of exiles will not be surprised to hear that the English Observants had plenty of things to say about Scotus’ birthplace. Apart from Scotus himself and his fellow doctor Bonaventure, the only other non-contemporary figure depicted in the fresco cycle is the fifteenth century Scotist Mauritius de Portu or Maurice O’Fihely. A conventual, he has been silently borrowed by these Observants for a work that carefully depicts sandals poking out from underneath hems, subtleties of cincture and clasp, unusual grey cassocks for the friar bishops. This designedly Observant visual vocabulary is a reminder that the international squabbles and rhythms of all religious orders were at least, if not often more important, to vowed Irish, English, Scots or Welsh people living abroad as those in their homelands.

Phroinsias Ó Maolmhuaidh or in English Francis O’Molloy entered St Isadore’s, Rome, in 1632. Ten years later he was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Klosterneuberg near Vienna in an assignment typical of the highly trained friars of St. Isidore’s. Publication of his famous devotional treatise Lucerna Fidelium in 1676 was followed the next year by Grammatica Latino-Hibernica which makes up this case study. These were the first forays into an occidental language by the Propaganda Fide press which had previously chosen to print in Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Ethiopian and Armenian. In this way, Irish found itself grouped, with mildly worrying exoticism, alongside languages from outside the world of Latin Christendom. Yet, as Carroll demonstrates, the text was actually used by priests returning home after training in Rome. O’Molloy had more than mission on his mind, though, as he was very concerned about the sustainability of a language whose higher registers were under threat from the recent destruction of the native élite whose patronage had sustained specialist poets and scholars. It is important to bear in mind here that it would take the Great Famine of the 1840s to displace Irish as by far the largest vernacular of the island, so O’Molloy’s anxiety is best interpreted as one engendered by his formation in an order that was closely bound up with and recruited from the learned classes of the Gaelic world. In this respect, as this book and the Gaelic manuscript records show, the continental houses became repositories of both cultural memory and cultural anxiety.

Identification by the friars with the traditional and immemorial became a casus belli between themselves and Oliver Plunkett, reforming Archbishop of Armagh, a product of the Irish College and Propaganda Fide College in Rome. Caught between the Stuart court, the tastes and prejudices of two and half decades of Roman life, a precarious pastorate in Ireland, and executed at Tyburn in July 1681, ‘perhaps no life so fully embodies the triumph and tragedy of the Irish relationship with Rome as that of Oliver Plunkett’ (p. 173). In contrast, another kind of Roman resident, attested in the 150 Irish names in the records of the Ospizio del Convertendi between 1677 and 1745, has generally passed unnoticed: the converts from Protestantism Caught up in a bureaucratization of faith, these mainly Protestant craftsmen and workers were seeking to simplify their expatriate lives by changing confession. However, as the ledgers give no real indication of internal disposition, this part of the study rewards by revealing rich sociological detail about the lives of a group of people in Rome who are at once very niche and very amorphous.

Carroll’s exploration of Charles Wogan’s accounts of his rescue of Princess Clementina Sobieska from Innsbruck in 1719 is a fine piece of textual sleuthing. In reading both printed and manuscript sources, Carroll slices deep into the confection that was the court of James III at Rome. Wogan reacted to his own rejection, and those of Irish Jacobites, by James, with further romanticisation of the old cause. Carroll points out that Wogan’s enrolment as a senator of Rome was itself caught up in a process by which any Irishness was being subsumed into a broader ‘British’ identity in the minds of the Curial authorities. This theme crops up again in the very last chapter which takes up a memorial on the Irish College composed in early 1783. That document contended the superiority of ‘local’ leadership to ‘national’ leadership: ‘therefore in all centuries it has been recognised even by foreigners that the Italians understand best of all the genius and the character of other nations, and they know best of all how to guide them’ (p. 257). When read in conjunction with the articles by Binasco and Korten on the same college, reviewed below, it is easy to discern another motion of a long-turning worm in Rome’s secular seminary. However as Carroll points out, during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, papal policy-makers stepped away from the Stuarts and towards engagement with Britain’s government to the extent that ‘some in Rome did not think of the Irish as a separate nation’.

All of the contributors to Forming Catholic Communities are adept in stepping away from narratives of heroic starts and long declines. Keeping with his editorial reminder that ‘the colleges were facilitative of migration as much as mission’, Tom O’Connor’s examination of Irish collegians in Spanish service moves frictionlessly across the long times and vast spaces of the Monarquía. His nimble way with even the most massy archives points again and again to a bald transaction of the heart of Spanish munificence: we train you both for your mission and for our empire. He shrewdly observes that here was a good lesson for the British government who began funding Maynooth just as the effects of Catholic Relief in 1782 coincided with a swathe of continental closures during the tumult of the 1790s. Mícheál Mac Craith writes with characteristic joie de vivre and an eye for the interpersonal in his ‘Seraphic sparks: Irish Franciscan and Capuchin colleges on the Continent’. Pushing back against the Observant solipsism found in the St. Isidore’s frescoes, Mac Craith considers them alongside the new Franciscans on the block, the Capuchins, and finds that both groups exported imps of ethnic and provincial rivalries intact from Ireland. He is especially astute in examining the long shadows thrown by founders such as Lavalin Nugent and Luke Wadding. He also lays his finger on an old Franciscan sore, that of higher learning, as the Capuchins made a point of rejecting scholarly enterprise. That finger points to many new avenues. Why did early Observant enthusiasm for the Capuchins segue into hostility? And then why did both groups seemingly lurch into the religious equivalent of childhood parallel play, carrying out their missions as if the other party did not exist at all? No-one has thought of considering the Franciscan familia as a whole up to now. More can be built on this promising opener.

Declan Downey comes at the Irish colleges as viewed from Habsburg thrones: ‘Philip’s decision [was] to establish and sponsor the Irish College at Salamanca simultaneously with the English and Scottish Colleges at Valladolid and so support the recently founded English College in Seville’ (p. 74). In recovering the symbolic significance and juridical realities of what it was to licence a Collegium Regum, Downey swivels the viewfinder about so that the reader gazes out at the colleges through the eyes of their patron. Here the Irish houses are tools of a Counter-Reformation trade plied by Europe’s largest multiple monarchy. This piece pairs very well with O’Connor’s. Indeed, one of the reasons the volume works so well is that cross-hatching effect created by reading all thirteen articles together lends a depth and tone to what, given its span of time and place, could have easily been a flat series of separate sketches.

In Ireland, Jesuits were small in number and the Benedictines vestigial, but those two orders were at the heart of the English mission. Jan Graffius scrutinises the Jesuit College at St. Omer (a feeder school for the English College at Rome) through the lens of a ‘customs book’ composed mainly by Fr Giles Schoondonck third rector. The descriptive tone of the article evokes a house whose Anglocentric life was punctuated by memories of its protomartyr Thomas Garnet and all his fellow sufferers. In doffing of caps at the names of the glorious dead, in use of everyday surroundings of house and garden, in plays, in sodality exercises, the students were well primed for the pleasures, pains and shifting exigencies of the home mission. It evokes an immersive reality but does not – and cannot – assess how much Schoondonck’s aspirations became real. It would also be worth thinking about how Schoondonck’s admiration for what he perceived to be good English qualities affected the students. Something similar could be teased out about the influential affection of Nicholas Vernulaeus, Louvain Professor, for the Irish. How much did the sympathies of foreign patrons for the declared victimhood of the strangers in their midst affect the self-understanding of those very strangers?

Frédéric Richard-Maupillier’s attempt to recover ‘the overlooked social history’ of the English Benedictine College of St. Laurence at Dieulouard is a gem. Dieulouard was certainly worth its weight in vocations as about half of all the boys went on to become religious. Richard-Maupillier sweats the archives to consider everything from finance to religious exercises. He underscores, importantly, its northern English clientele. This is a good reminder of the part that recusant chain migration played both in sustaining but also in periodically shaking the overseas institutions. Because of its small size (rarely more than ten students) the foundation was intimate with local parish life yet at the same time they spoke English in the house. They did their reckoning in sterling and their weighing and measuring in ounces and inches. Dieulouard English beer moved from being an in-house tipple to a money-making favourite across Lorraine and surrounding areas. The food and drink culture of colleges has to be a coming field!

Money, another staple of life, makes up the third section of this volume. Ciaran O’Scea opens his study of Santiago de Compostela with the petitionary grandiloquence of two Irish students in 1610. Speaking of exile ‘from our sweet homeland’, they declared their intent to go back and shed ‘our blood at the request and defence of this very holy faith’ as ‘an enterprise without doubt more agreeable to God and more glorious for Spain than the conquest of the extensive Indies’ (p. 143). This astonishingly self-serving historical rewrite opens out into a story of Old English Jesuit cultural condescension towards speakers of the Irish language and of Spanish frustration and faction. Factional push and pull among the Irish clung fast to the contours of political cliques at the Iberian court and took flesh in a minutely complex property dispute. This study shows that a kind of perennial precariousness was a default setting for so many exile colleges. Aspiration to the salvation of souls at home could, and often did, lead to bare-knuckle fights over income because the lofty end so justified the lowly means.

Ways and means dominate the story of the Irish College at Rome told by Matteo Binasco (covering 1628-78) and Christopher Korten (1772-98). Both trace the fortunes and morale of the college in the shifting sands of Papal curial policy. One question which was particularly acute in Rome was whether rectors should be ‘nationals’ or ‘locals’. It was so endemic that it even straddled the great fissure of the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. When Wadding co-founded the secular college with Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi in 1628, the latter had simply wanted to bankroll Irish students at other institutions. This created a lasting instability, especially as the Ludovisi grant was the college’s sole income for its first fifty years of life. Financial straits were the sure breeding grounds for disciplinary derelictions of which there were plenty. An anonymous 1661 report channelled the dead Ludovisi by suggesting that the enterprise be folded into the Propaganda Fide College. In 1798, when French forces entered Rome there were only two students. At this point it was an institution presided over by a series of Italian rectors who treated it as a sinecure, deploying its meagre resources for pet projects. A month before Napoleon’s troops showed up, Rector Cuccagni had purchased 97 barrels of wine for 332 scudi, and was thus unable to supply viaticum to the last two Irish inmates when the axe did fall. These two articles do deft and necessary work in synchronising the college stories with those of their host societies. It makes it much easier to see how Maynooth was a solution to Irish episcopal problems in more than one way.

Catholic printing abroad has always been well read by historians. Working out from her expertise on St. Gregory’s Valladolid, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo examines the means by which print was used to familiarise hispanophone audiences with the fortunes of their Catholic co-religionists in England. The presence of English Colleges in Spain stimulated both the ‘historia’ and ‘relación’ genre in printings about the far-off northern kingdom. These works concerned themselves with recusant controversial works as a proper prelude to Protestant conversion and with martyrdom as the spiritual fruit of Catholic constancy. Growing local appetite for the cheap ‘aviso’ news format pushed the twin messages of argument and martyrdom into popular consciousness. Print technology created a space in which an English Catholic identity could be impressed on a wide cohort of Spanish subjects. The technology involved in creating bespoke insular fonts for printing in Irish has been much studied. Marc Caball’s point, that the Franciscan press in Louvain was located in what was just one of the forty-four colleges of the university, prises the printing project out of a patriotic setting created for it by cultural nationalists and onto a wider canvas. The college was positioned in a Flanders city to which perhaps as many as 10,000 Irish people, overwhelmingly hibernophone, migrated between 1586 and 1622. Here was an exceptionally robust hinterland for an exile house. The translation there of texts of the devotio moderna along with culturally appropriate catechisms and explications of Tridentine teaching for Gaelic Ireland was, in part, a response to the shock of sporadic Protestant printing at Dublin. Yet, as Caball shows so very well, it became much more than reaction when the friars and others began to articulate claims about the underlying harmony of language and creed, a mutated strain of which O’Molloy would pick up in the 1670s.

The fifth and final part of this collection is entitled ‘Afterlives – surviving the nineteenth century’. As it happens it is all set in post-Revolution France around the time that institutional Catholicism was regrowing at home. The longer trajectory of Catholicism in the nineteenth century tended to devotional elaboration and an extensive social provision which increased the demand for clergy and religious. This in turn made the historic overseas houses much more significant assets than they might have been otherwise. As Liam Chambers shows in his intricate and assured article, the old ‘fondations’ of the Irish College in Paris had a renewed valency, especially when the stop-start aggregation and disaggregation of exile bodies into ‘British’ units led to the emergence of a reorganised, reclericalised and repopulated Irish seminary from 1830 onwards. In the most modern of all the articles, Justin Dolan Stover traces the same college from the Franco-Prussian war to World War One. Just as with Chambers, successful analysis rests in closely correlating French national politics with those of the expatriates of the Irish church. Stover has very rich sources at his command and offers compelling detail on everything from student reading habits to the college’s role as a bomb shelter in 1918. In the only piece on the Scottish experience in the volume, Iida Saarinen covers those priests formed in France between 1818 and 1878. The numbers were impressive and reflective of that demand for clergy experienced elsewhere – a total of 225 students were sent to France in those sixty years by the French mission. Saarinen, showcasing here a wealth of archival material, is careful to reject generalisations about their experience but is masterly in charting the perceptions of austerity, fractiousness and affection that clustered about the French experience and those who participated in it. The bias she detects on the part of Roman alumni against their French trained counterparts is an excellent example of how the overseas experience could wash back to create new ‘provincial’ biases inside the body of clergy in the home country.

It is unlikely that either of these volumes could have been achieved ten years ago. They do two apparently contradictory things at once. They increase appreciation of the specificity of individual communities and houses. Yet they also increase awareness of the things that affected all of the colleges and their residents. Hosts and patrons are especially apparent in these works not just as donors but as co-equal actors in shaping so many institutions. Heroic accounts of exile favoured the early modern and grew nervous of the alleged decay or decadence of later periods. More, comparative, work on the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries will, in turn, actually rescue the seventeenth century from simplistic stories of success or failure. Not everything works in all the writing reviewed here, not everything will work out and not everything can be built upon. That does not matter so much, because if these two books do anything they break so much ground that there is room for abundant future plantings. That is good news. Oh, and who will make the all-inclusive map please? I want it.