When I first worked on religious exile thirty-five years ago this was not a fashionable subject. I received a vivid reminder of this when consulting the core source texts for the study of the London Dutch and French churches: in several libraries, including the Bodleian and the British Library, I had to ask for the pages to be cut. Now persecution and the ensuing religious diaspora is regarded as one of the critical formative experiences of European society in the centuries following the Reformation, and the focus of scholarly work has expanded considerably. Along with studies of all the major Calvinist refugee communities, Jews, Catholics, Protestant dissidents and even voluntarily self-exiling missionaries have been brought into the frame of the debate. These two volumes, both emanating from papers given at the same Toronto conference in 2012, showcase a great deal of this recent work, with contributions from twenty-five different scholars.

The focus of the volumes is subtly different. While Religious diaspora deals mostly with the consequence of the larger movement of peoples, Exile and religious identity places the focus more on the experience of individuals. This has its dangers: as with all microhistory, the subjects often led colourful, but distinctly eccentric lives. Dirck Volckertz Coornheert spent six years in the duchy of Cleves, returning a determined critic of the Dutch Reformed Church. In this case time abroad had not strengthened confessional solidarity, but how far exile shaped this truculent and contrary personality is hard to say. Anne Percy, duchess of Northumberland, was disavowed even by her exasperated family for her refusal to acknowledge Queen Elizabeth. The life of Isaac Nabrusch, discussed here by Tomás Mantecón, was equally singular. Successively a rabbi in Poland, a galley slave in Turkey, an orthodox monk in Corfu and a soldier in Otranto, Nabrusch lived a colourful life in the multi-cultural societies in Eastern Europe before seeking reconciliation before the Roman Inquisition. It is hard to see this as exile in any recognisable sense, more a life turned upside down by enslavement, and a remarkable story of adaptation and reconstruction. As for Justus Velsius Hagenus, the ‘erudite but rambling prophet’ of Hans de Waardt's description, a restless need for confrontation was the principal cause of a lifetime of dislocation. Calvin and Beza both thought that he was mad. As with Dirck Volckertz Coornheert, one is struck more by the patience and restraint of those who faced his persistent goading. Was this really exile? But, as we know from Luther, the exile experience is very much a matter of degrees. There is no doubt that Martin Luther himself felt a profound sense of dislocation when despatched from the sophisticated metropolis of Erfurt to Wittenberg, perched (to his jaundiced eye) on the very edge of civilisation. Ultimately, as Hans Leaman explains, in his writings Luther refused to distinguish physical dislocation or persecution from other forms of suffering. ‘Inner exile’ is the subject of several essays in this volume, including Gary Waite's interesting discussion of conversos and spirituality in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. The cautious welcome afforded the Portuguese in Amsterdam was motivated partly by fear of losing their business to nearby Haarlem; the sort of pragmatic consideration that often underpinned the celebrated Dutch tolerance.

With Françoise Moreil's discussion of the French Huguenot community's transfer from Orange to Brandenburg we are back on more familiar territory. Despite the inhospitable terrain – grimmer and more northerly than Luther's Wittenberg experience certainly – the Orange community accepted the settlement in Brandenburg as permanent, adopting the classic Genevan model of constructing institutions of internal community support to ease the process of gradual assimilation. The Italian exiles from the Valtellina in 1620, discussed by Alessandro Pastore, settled in Geneva itself, where they found support among the established Italian community. For the Huguenots of Orange later in the same century Calvin's city was more of a way station. In one of the best contributions to the book, the editor Jesse Spohnholz considers the gendered experience of exile in two Calvinist communities. While for men resettling abroad offered the opportunity of re-invention, women were far more likely to be the victims of these strategies.

A considerable part of Religious diaspora is devoted to the Iberian Peninsula. A useful scene-setting chapter by Jonathan Ray (though perversely placed towards the end of the volume) describes the Hispano-Jewish diaspora following the expulsion of 1492. This painful and at time chaotic process ultimately resulted in the creation of new pan-European trade networks and an enduringly influential presence in the Ottoman Empire. The reverberations were long lasting. Even at the end of the eighteenth century the attempt of a young Jewish couple to return to Spain, convert to Catholicism and marry, described here by Marina Torres Arce, caused considerable controversy and the involvement of the Inquisition. Victoria Chrisman related the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of the city authorities in Antwerp to prevent the expulsion of the Portuguese New Christians by Charles v. Their arguments were utterly pragmatic, warning that expulsion would unsettle the whole merchant community and damage trade. Unlike in Amsterdam a century later, they ultimately had to bow to Habsburg concepts of religious purity. The beneficial impact of laxer controls is demonstrated in Stephanie Nadalo's study of immigration policy in Livorno, a village of five hundred souls in the late sixteenth century that grew tenfold in a decade. By the end of the seventeenth century it recruited important merchant communities from all over Europe. Michael Servetus was another caught up in the Iberian search for purity, though Maria Tausiet sees this as essentially a case of ‘internal exile’: ‘his status as a perpetual exile and fugitive was determined not so much by specific external events as by his own idiosyncrasies, his zeal and independence of mind having led him to inhabit his own surprisingly free internal world’ (p. 108). To describe Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavia, a member of a Venetian diplomatic mission in Constantinople sent back to Italy in disgrace and discussed here by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, as an exile on this basis seems more forced.

Having been for so long at the centre of studies of early modern migrations the Calvinist exile communities receive relatively little attention. Tim Fehler revisits his work on the provision of poor relief among the Dutch at Emden, and there is an unusual piece from Charles Parker, discussing the exilic character of missionary service. Dutch missionaries frequently found themselves at odds with the colonial authorities, not least when moved to criticise the corruption of the local administration, and were frequently disappointed when they turned for support to the church authorities at home. This piece can usefully be paired with the study by Berta Cano-Echevarría and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo on the little known English seminaries established in Spain to train priests for the English mission.

Three essays, finally, discuss Eastern and Central Europe. Vladimír Urbánek introduces the relatively understudied (in English at least) Protestant emigration from Bohemia after 1620. Here the author draws a clear distinction between the Utraquists, who received a relatively chilly reception in the Lutheran universities of Saxony, and members of the Unity of Brethren, able to call on the solidarity of the Calvinist International. They owed their success in this regard almost entirely to the international fame of Jan Amos Comenius, discussed here by David Parry. As was so often the case, forced departure from Bohemia won Comenius opportunities on the international stage that he would otherwise not have had to promote his vision of universal wisdom and educational reform. The Janua, the book that sealed his fame, was printed on the press brought by the Brethren with them to Poland. Emese Balint offers a survey of Anabaptist migration to Moravia and Bohemia in the long century after 1526. The peaceable acceptance of Habsburg rule in Moravia was to some extent dependent on the pragmatic acceptance of local traditions of religious liberty. Once established the Hutterites pursued an active policy of recruitment throughout central Europe, integrating the newly proselytised into existing colonies.

Both collections pay generous tribute to the Nicholas Terpstra, the guiding spirit behind the Toronto conference, and a scholar who in recent years has reflected perceptively on the theological underpinnings of exile.