College communities abroad: Education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe

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Introduction – college communities abroad: education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe

Liam Chambers

College communities abroad

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 colleges¹ played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic ecclesiastical structures and practices by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. Indeed, the colleges have been viewed as important agents for the spread of a new, Counter-Reformation Catholicism through the clergy formed within their walls. This has ensured that the Irish, English, Scots and German colleges in particular have a rich historiography. Until recently, however, their histories were considered largely within isolating confessional and national frameworks, with a firm focus on institutional history and surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections across the colleges. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges and their students. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges more firmly within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. One obvious path for the study of the Irish, English and Scots colleges is to adopt a ‘three kingdoms’ approach and while this would have undoubted merits, the purpose of this book is to point to a wider comparative canvas.² The argument presented here is that the abroad college phenomenon must be viewed within a broader European context. The Irish, English and Scots colleges should be examined alongside the experiences of Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Swiss, Balkan and Middle Eastern Catholics who established parallel structures in precisely the same period.³ To further research, the book begins the process by presenting a series of essays on Irish, English, Scots, German, Dutch and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic. This introductory chapter offers the first substantial survey of the abroad colleges as a whole, it then assesses briefly their historiographies before making a case for further research along comparative and transnational lines.

Foundations

The abroad colleges established in the sixteenth century had significant medieval roots in academic and religious mobility. Peregrinatio academica was a familiar feature of higher education in late medieval and Renaissance Europe.⁴ In the main centres of migration, students from abroad banded together to form corporate structures for their security and advancement. The resulting ‘nations’ and ‘colleges’ were quickly subsumed into the complex configurations of medieval universities from as early as the twelfth century. The University of Bologna provides a striking example, with faculties divided into universitas citramontanorum and universitas ultramontanorum, the latter consisting of students from outside Italy grouped in turn into a series of ‘nations’. At Paris, the English (later German) Nation of the Faculty of Arts provided a corporate home for many students from outside France.⁵ Colleges eclipsed nations in importance in the course of the Middle Ages. In Paris, for example, which attracted a substantial number of foreign students, the first half of the fourteenth century witnessed an expansion of college foundations, including one college for Scottish students, drawn on revenues from land purchased by David, bishop of Moray, at Grisy-Suines outside Paris.⁶ Moray’s investment was intended to fund four students and it allowed a small, elite group to attend the university over the following two centuries. Indeed, the funding endured and provided the basis for a new kind of abroad college in the sixteenth century. In 1556 Patrick Hepburn, the bishop of Moray, nominated Thomas Wynterhop to a vacant bursary. Following litigation with rival claimants, Wynterhop set about reforming the revenues and generating new income. He was operating, of course, in the shadow of the Scottish Reformation, which transformed the modest Grisy foundation into a lifeline for Scottish Catholics who found themselves excluded from home universities in the 1560s.⁷ To celebrate his achievement and underline its significance, Wynterhop had a number of detailed vellum documents drawn up, with elaborate drawings, and later bound them together in a cartulary known as the ‘Book of Grisy’. These paid particular attention to the benefactions emanating from Mary, Queen of Scots, but one document was an address from the University of Paris to King Charles IX of France. Among the images on this document is one of a group of international students at the university, with their origins specifically marked out: Scots, Irish, English, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles and Norwegians among others.⁸ The inference was clear: for Wynterhop the universities of Catholic Europe would play a crucial role for those Catholics who found themselves under pressure in Protestant and even Ottoman Europe. And, ultimately, the college structures which had emerged in the universities in the medieval and Renaissance periods would provide a vital means by which they could reorganise.⁹

Wynterhop’s ‘Book of Grisy’ reveals the impact of religious change on university life and on the peregrinatio academica occurring in the sixteenth century. As Hilde de Ridder-Symoens has commented: ‘[The existing] pattern of student mobility was shattered and remoulded towards the mid-sixteenth century by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which besides changing the character of universities profoundly affected the choice of universities and disciplines.’¹⁰ Confessionalisation was an important stimulant to further university foundation, which peaked between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, with the creation of forty-seven new universities between 1551 and 1600 alone.¹¹ The Society of Jesus played an increasingly prominent role in university education in this period, as new universities emerged ‘on the fringe areas threatened by Protestantism’.¹² Although the number of universities grew, this did not necessarily mean greater choice for students. Increasingly in the second half of the sixteenth century, European states and universities themselves imposed confessional restrictions on higher education.¹³ This produced new patterns of student mobility as thousands of young men sought out confessionally congenial university education, frequently in defiance of state regulations regarding student movement. Among the more important Counter-Reformation universities in the west were pre-Reformation centres like Paris, Cologne and Louvain, as well as newer foundations like Douai and Pont-à-Mousson. Vienna, Graz, Dillingen and Würzburg were important focuses for student mobility in central Europe. To the south, Rome attracted thousands of Catholics students, while movement to Iberian universities like Salamanca and Lisbon occurred on a smaller scale.¹⁴

From the mid-sixteenth century, a complex network of abroad colleges for migrant Catholic students slowly emerged. Far from an orderly development, this occurred in a piecemeal, even haphazard, manner over more than half a century. Central planning, individual endeavour and organic developments within existing migrant communities all played a part. The earliest initiative was proposed and executed from the heart of Counter-Reformation Rome and it proved one of the most enduring. On the initiative of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, the Society of Jesus established the Collegium Germanicum, with the foundation confirmed by Pope Julius III’s bull Dum sollicita in 1552. The college was envisaged for the formation of elite German students who would return to leadership positions in the Protestant territories of the north. The college quickly accommodated students from a wide geographical range, including Swiss, Hungarians, Dutch, Irish, Scots and Scandinavians.¹⁵ The college did not provide classes. Rather students attended another even more significant educational foundation of the early 1550s, the Jesuit Collegio Romano.¹⁶ The Collegium Germanicum, in collaboration with the Collegio Romano, provided one means of training clergy for the re-evangelisation of territory lost to Rome, but outside the Eternal City the initiative for the creation of colleges fell to the migrants themselves. For English and Irish Catholics, the reign of Mary I witnessed the re-establishment of the formal connection with Rome and it was only in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth that the need to form colleges overseas was felt. The centralising tendency evident in the foundation of the Collegium Germanicum contrasted sharply with the manner in which the first English college on the continent was established. Elizabeth’s accession propelled a substantial number of Marian partisans to the continent, particularly as the new monarch’s supporters purged England’s two universities at Oxford and Cambridge of those deemed too closely aligned with Rome.¹⁷ Many of the displaced removed themselves to Flanders, attracted by the Counter-Reformation educational centres and the prospect of Spanish patronage in the university towns of Louvain and Douai (the latter founded in 1559 and inaugurated three years later). In 1568 William Allen, a former Oxford don, gathered some of the dispersed English students together in a college founded at Douai.¹⁸ There has been some debate about Allen’s intentions for the college. John Bossy suggested that he envisaged Douai as an orthodox Catholic alternative to the heretical universities of Oxford and Cambridge, while awaiting a change of fortune at home.¹⁹ Eamon Duffy, by contrast, points to evidence for the intended missionary function of the college from the start, with the English college envisaged more as a Collegium Germanicum for the west.²⁰ In any event, Douai quickly became central to the English Catholic mission, though financing the college was a constant challenge and the ongoing conflict in Flanders forced it to move to Reims in 1578 before returning to Douai in 1593.²¹

These earliest examples underline the basic point that the establishment of colleges did not guarantee their future or their efficacy. In the first twenty years of its existence, the Collegium Germanicum was under-funded and provided little more than one hundred graduates.²² A decisive shift occurred with the election of Ugo Boncompagni as Pope Gregory XIII in 1572. In the aftermath of the 1575 Jubilee, a remarkable success that brought thousands of visitors to Rome, Gregory poured resources into existing and newly established colleges for foreigners.²³ He ensured a stable annual income for the Collegium Germanicum which, along with other reforms, resulted in 800 students passing through the college by the end of the century.²⁴ Gregory’s pontificate also saw the development of new colleges in Rome for foreign students from across Europe. In 1577 Gregory approved the establishment of a Greek college, to counter the twin threats of Ottoman and Protestant expansion to the east. Similar concerns informed the creation of Collegio dei Neofiti in 1577, an Illyrian college at Lorteo (outside Rome) in 1580 and a Maronite college in 1584. A Hungarian college was established in 1579, but united to the existing German institution shortly after to create the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum.²⁵ In the 1570s, the number of English Catholics migrating to the continent intensified in the aftermath of the promulgation of Regnans in Excelsis by Gregory’s predecessor Pius V.²⁶ This increased pressure in Rome to support an English college, along the lines of the Collegium Germanicum. In 1579 the existing English hospice in Rome, a medieval foundation created like many similar institutions to cater for foreign pilgrims, was re-constituted as an English college. The hospice had been controlled by a group of Welsh students and priests since the 1560s, under the leadership of Owen Lewis and Morys Clynnog, who was elected warden for a second term in 1576. Clynnog, with the support of William Allen, lobbied successfully for the transformation of the hospice into a college. The creation of the college, however, sparked a significant quarrel among the English and Welsh priests and students, with the former aggrieved at the perceived preference given to the admission of Welsh students by Clynnog. Gregory’s bull Quoniam divinae bonitati (1579) handed authority in the college to the Society of Jesus and their takeover effectively toppled the Welsh hegemony.²⁷ Like students resident at the other nascent foreign colleges in Rome, the English attended classes at the Collegio Romano, which also developed considerably under the patronage of Gregory XIII.²⁸ The expansion of Roman colleges for foreign students during the pontificate of Gregory XIII was mirrored in similar developments to the north. At the University of Bologna, colleges were established for Hungarian and Illyrian students. Meanwhile at the University of Milan, the Collegium Helveticum was founded for students from Switzerland.²⁹

For students from the far north of Europe, the problem of second and third level education in a Catholic setting was even more pressing. The Catholic sympathies of King John III of Sweden, whose reign overlapped with the pontificate of Gregory XIII, eased some of the pressure with the establishment of the Collegium Regium Stockholmense. The college was placed under the direction of the Jesuit Laurentius Norvegus in 1576, though his room for manoeuvre was ultimately limited by the secret nature of his mission to the Swedish royal court.³⁰ By this stage, the option of foreign university education had already enticed Scandinavian students to western Germany and the Spanish Netherlands, but the numbers involved were tiny.³¹ More promising for Swedish Catholics was their control of a medieval Roman hospice, the Hospitale S. Birgittae, but this was too modest to cater for more than a handful of students.³² In Rome, the Collegium Germanicum proved more significant, attracting twenty-seven northern students up to 1622.³³ Under Gregory XIII, a new plan was hatched to provide educational opportunities in central and northern Europe for Scandinavian students using funding from the papal treasury.This plan was conceived and carried through by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, with the pope’s strong support. As new Jesuit colleges and universities opened in the second half of the sixteenth century, they provided ideal bases within which to create ‘papal seminaries’ for Scandinavian students.³⁴ They were, stresses Oskar Garstein, not separate colleges, but ‘study units within a Jesuit college’.³⁵ The most important papal seminary was established within the Jesuit college at Braniewo (Braunsberg) in modern Poland in 1578. The older college dated to 1565, part of the Counter-Reformation initiative spearheaded by Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius. Between 1578 and 1622, 131 Swedes, forty-eight Danes, twenty Norwegians, fourteen Finns and four students from Schleswig-Holstein passed through this ‘Swedish seminary’, 217 in total.³⁶ Possevino was also responsible for establishing a seminariumpontificium at the University of Olomouc in 1578, which attracted 108 Scandinavian students before 1622.³⁷ Both institutions were designed to fulfil the essential needs of Catholic students who would return home, encompassing clergy and also lay students hoping to enter the civil service of the Scandinavian states.The pontifical seminary at Vilna, created by Possevino in 1583, provided a more elevated educational experience and attracted a smaller, more specialised, range of students.³⁸ Garstein’s detailed research has illustrated that the period of heaviest student movement to the pontifical seminaries occurred between the late 1570s and the 1610s, at which point a decline was already evident.³⁹

While neither the Scots nor Irish established a Roman college under Gregory XIII’s pontificate, he did provide funding for the Scots college which moved from Paris to Pont-à-Mousson in 1581 and increased the amount three years later on the condition that it also admit Irish students.⁴⁰ The decision to fund a Scots college at Pont-à-Mousson temporarily ended the plans for one in Rome, but the proposal re-emerged in the later 1590s as part of Rome’s interest in James VI of Scotland’s possible (ultimately unrealistic) Catholic sympathies. Like its English counterpart the college was established from the existing medieval Scots hospice in Rome, with a papal endowment, and opened in the Jubilee year of 1600. Like their English, German and other colleagues, Scots students also attended class at the Collegio Romano and the Jesuits formally took charge in 1615.⁴¹ While the Irish had no hospice in Rome, leading Irish clergy resident there, including archbishops of Armagh, Richard Creagh in the 1540s and Peter Lombard after 1599, had assisted individual students.⁴² Indeed, an early historian of the college went out of his way to explain why Gregory XIII ‘pass[ed] over the Irish nation’ during the foundation of so many exile colleges. He noted that the pope had in fact allocated funding for an Irish college, but re-directed it to support the ill-fated military effort of James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald.⁴³ The appointment of Ludovico Ludovisi as Cardinal Protector of Ireland in 1623 led to renewed activity towards the foundation of an Irish college for secular students. Initially, Ludovisi provided funding for Irish students who were to reside at the existing English and Maronite colleges. Inevitably, this created problems and Luke Wadding, a prominent and well-connected Irish Franciscan, persuaded him to establish a separate college, which opened in 1628 and, much to Wadding’s dismay, was taken under Jesuit administration like so many of the other colleges, in 1635.⁴⁴

The early history of the Scots college at Pont-à-Mousson illustrates just how fragile the nascent colleges actually were. Funded from the French estate of Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as papal resources, the monarch’s execution in 1587 resulted in the collapse of revenue and it closed by the end of the decade. In 1593 the Jesuit priest William Crichton oversaw the transfer of the defunct Scots college to Douai, though a brief period in Louvain followed until the college finally settled permanently back in Douai in 1597.⁴⁵ The 1590s were, in fact, a crucial decade for the foundation of abroad colleges in Spanish Flanders. One of those to assist Crichton was the pivotal English Jesuit figure Robert Persons. The setbacks suffered by the Jesuit mission to England in which Persons participated in the early 1580s convinced him that continental education was essential to the future of the English mission. In 1582 he arranged for the opening of a small school for lay students at Eu in northern France. Later plans to transfer the Eu foundation were abandoned and a new project was initiated, resulting in the establishment of a college at St Omer.⁴⁶ Irish migration to Spanish Flanders was more pronounced in the later sixteenth century, so it is unsurprising that Irish students associated with the English and Scots colleges at Douai. In 1594, Christopher Cusack, an Irish priest, established an Irish college in Douai, mainly for students from Leinster, which established itself over the next two decades. An influential cohort of reforming students with strong connections to other Irish colleges in Flanders and France passed through its doors, among them David Rothe,Thomas Dease,Thomas Messingham and Henry Fitzsimon. Cusack was also instrumental in establishing three smaller, inter-related Irish colleges at Antwerp, Tournai and Lille in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Unusually, the Irish college at Lille accepted both secular and Capuchin students and operated under the aegis of the Irish Capuchin Francis Nugent. With the exception of the Irish college at Douai, these colleges did not expand, but they worked successfully together as a network. As with many similar ventures, the founder’s role was significant and Cusack’s move back to Ireland in 1619 unleashed latent tensions, which threatened their administrative and financial futures.⁴⁷ This seems to have encouraged Eugene Matthews, archbishop of Dublin, to pursue the establishment of a new Irish college in Louvain, which had been attracting a steady stream of Irish students since the mid-sixteenth century. As the remarkable work of Jeroen Nilis has shown that flow had dwindled to almost nothing as a result of the conflict raging in Flanders in the late 1570s and 1580s, but the number of students grew again from the 1590s, reaching new levels in the late 1610s. The college was, therefore, an organic development and Matthews provided funding along with local monies and support from the newly established Congregation of Propaganda Fide.⁴⁸

The Irish, English and Scots arrived in Habsburg Flanders along with migrants from the Northern Netherlands, the subject of recent reassessment by Geert Janssen.⁴⁹ Dutch Catholics too established colleges to the south and the parallels with migrant students from across the North Sea are striking. The Dutch, like the Irish, had a long history of student mobility before the establishment of Leiden University in 1575 as an intellectual rival to the southern, Catholic powerhouse at Louvain. Dutch and Irish college structures arose out of similar refugee and episcopal coteries, against the backdrop of intermittent domestic military conflict.The Dutch college at Louvain was formally established in Cologne in 1603, but moved first to Huissen in 1675 and then to Louvain in 1680. Louvain had, of course, long attracted students from the north and two colleges for Dutch students already existed when the Cologne college eventually settled there. The Pope college, established by Adrian VI in 1523, developed into a significant centre for Catholic students as confessional divisions widened, while the Collegium Pulcheriae Mariae Virginis was a much later foundation, created in 1617 under the leadership of Cornelius Jansen. As Willem Frijhoff makes clear in his contribution to this volume the Dutch colleges in Cologne and Louvain functioned alongside extensive student mobility directed at Catholic universities and seminaries to the south as well as a broader series of strategies aimed at consolidating Catholicism in the Protestant-dominated Northern Netherlands.⁵⁰

The dense network of exile colleges in Spanish Flanders and its hinterland reflected proximity to home, the growth of migrant communities and, of key significance, the inter-relationship between Dutch, English, Irish and Scots Catholics and the Spanish Empire of Philip II. It was therefore understandable that a substantial network of colleges would also emerge in Iberia at the same time. As in Rome, the Jesuit influence was paramount among the English, Irish and Scots colleges in Spain and Portugal. Trading and migration links between Ireland and Portugal ensured that a small but dynamic Irish Catholic community emerged in the sixteenth century.The Irish college in Lisbon probably pre-dated Salamanca by at least two years, established as a result of the work of an Irish Jesuit, John Howling, and the support of local Jesuits and patrons.⁵¹ Spain was an even more important destination for migrants from the three kingdoms since the mid-sixteenth century, with growing numbers of clergy and students present in Spanish university cities by the 1580s and 1590s. The crucial figure in turning the loosely affiliated student groups into more weighty institutional centres was the English Jesuit Robert Persons. His mission to Philip II on behalf of the Society of Jesus provided an ideal platform from which to arrange for the establishment of an English college at Valladolid in 1589 extending the Spanish funding which already applied to the colleges in Philip’s Flanders territories.⁵² As Thomas McCoog has commented the foundation was ‘an accidental, almost chaotic establishment’.⁵³ Like other early English and Scots foundations, it also housed some Irish students and when Philip II visited Valladolid in 1592, the Irish priest Thomas White petitioned him for the establishment of a separate Irish college in the city. This was greeted positively and funding was promised, but the Irish students were relocated to Salamanca and placed under Jesuit stewardship.⁵⁴ From these early foundations, a number of other colleges emerged. Persons quickly looked to extend his Iberian network, establishing a second English college at Seville in 1592 and negotiating local financial support.⁵⁵ When a second Irish college opened in Santiago de Compostella in 1605, which catered to both lay students and clerics, particularly those who had followed Domnall Cam O’Sullivan Beare to Spain after defeat at Kinsale, Philip III placed it initially under the leadership of Eugene McCarthy, a secular priest. The Spanish monarchy transferred it, however, to Jesuit control in 1612 much to the annoyance of some of the local Irish migrant community.⁵⁶ In the same year Thomas Stapleton established a small college in Seville, which also came under Jesuit control in 1619.⁵⁷ Stapleton was also central to the foundation of a college at Madrid in 1629, though it failed to develop into a substantial institution, something it had in common with the English (1610) and Scots (1627) colleges in the same city.⁵⁸ Two further colleges remained free from Jesuit control: the small Irish college at Alcalá de Henares and the English college established at Lisbon in 1622 (despite its roots in a Jesuit English residence in the city stretching back to 1594).⁵⁹

The Roman and Spanish networks of colleges reflected papal concerns about Protestant territories as well as existing migration patterns to Spain and Spanish Flanders which intensified in the course of the sixteenth century.To some extent they also reflected the geopolitical concerns of Rome and Madrid, but the colleges did not emerge from a coherent diplomatic strategy and while papal and Spanish funding was rooted in both political and pastoral concerns, this was beset by frequent problems. Ultimately, the foundations cohered into networks only in the long term. Something similar may be observed in the foundation of colleges in France, where the religious conflicts of the late sixteenth century initially stunted the potential for development. Of course, the University of Paris had a long tradition of attracting international students on the peregrinatio academica, including students from what would become Protestant territory in England, Scotland, Ireland and the Northern Netherlands. As noted already, the Scots had a strong connection with the university and though the Paris resident and archbishop of Glasgow, James Beaton, had thrown his support behind the college for Scots Catholics at Pont-à-Mousson, his estate provided the basis for a new Scots college in the French capital in 1603.⁶⁰ A small English college was also established in the seventeenth century.⁶¹ Irish students may have come together as a community as early as 1578, though an actual college emerged only in the early seventeenth century. In fact, the college endured a precarious existence even after official recognition in the 1620s, especially between the 1630s and 1660s, before prominent Irish migrants acquired the vacant Collège des Lombards in 1676, which would become the centre for the most important Irish institution on the continent.⁶² Thomas O’Connor has argued that the Irish college in Paris developed as an offshoot from the Cusack network in Flanders, accommodating Meath clergy in particular.⁶³ To the south, in contrast, the Irish colleges founded in Bordeaux (1603) and Toulouse (1659) emerged from Munster interests and had strong connections to their equivalents across the Pyrenees.⁶⁴ Crucially, none of the French institutions was administered by the Jesuits, though as Laurence Brockliss has argued Jesuit educational and formation thinking permeated the creation of colleges throughout Europe in the period.⁶⁵

Alongside the colleges established primarily for the formation or education of secular clergy and lay students were those founded specifically for regular clergy, a re-grouping abroad of structures destroyed by the closure of friaries and monasteries in the three kingdoms. These colleges were, in effect, confined to Catholics from Ireland, England and, in a more unusual manner, Scotland. Of course, the regular clergy from the three kingdoms already participated in international networks, which they were able to use to create new and alternative structures on the continent, though resistance to exile colleges was also evident in many cases. The Scottish example is the least typical. In 1575, Bishop John Lesley of Ross, accompanied by the Scottish priest and scholar Ninian Winzet, undertook a mission to Rome on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots. While there, they were made aware of the group of German Benedictine monasteries known collectively as Schottenklöster, notably at Regensburg, Erfurt and Würzburg. The Schottenklöster traced their origins to Irish monastic foundations in the twelfth century but by the fifteenth century the Irish connection was increasingly precarious and the confused understanding of the collective term for the Irish founders (scoti) permitted ambitious Scots clergy (backed by the substantial Scottish merchant community in Regensburg) to move in. Scots successfully gained control of the three abbeys between 1578 and 1595.⁶⁶ Over the next two centuries at least 100 Scots entered these Benedictine communities. Few returned to Scotland and while Tom McInally is correct to point out that ‘of the regular orders only they managed to retain a clear Scottish identity as a religious community’, their connection to the wider Scottish community, either at home or abroad, was ultimately modest.⁶⁷ The revived English Benedictine congregation founded new monasteries on the continent, which took on educational work and operated not unlike the colleges for the secular clergy. A burst of activity in the early seventeenth century witnessed the establishment of new foundations at Douai, Dieulouard, St Malo and Paris between 1607 and 1615. The English Benedictine Abbey at Lamspringe, a medieval German foundation, was incorporated into the English congregation in 1643, though it had more in common with the Schottenklöster than the other English institutions.⁶⁸ Unlike the Schottenklöster, however, the English Benedictine communities maintained a strong connection with the English mission, though the relationship between them was necessarily complex and changed over the course of two centuries.⁶⁹

The Irish mendicant orders also witnessed an assault on their infrastructure from 1539–1540, but they were better positioned to resist than the monastic orders and a network of friaries continued to operate at home throughout the sixteenth century. The Irish Franciscans had an advanced system of studia in Ireland, but the lack of a studium generale meant that the most promising students had travelled regularly to England or the continent, either provided with free places by their order or funded by their Irish confreres. Oxford, Cambridge and Paris were all important destinations in the medieval period.⁷⁰ Under pressure in the second half of the sixteenth century, the number of friars travelling abroad increased, the range of their destinations expanded and the pressure to establish institutions abroad rose. Franciscan misgivings about the management and theological direction of the early Irish colleges established in Spain and Spanish Flanders led Fláithrí Ó Maol Chonaire to mount a successful campaign for the creation of St Anthony’s college, Louvain, in 1607. Ó Maol Chonaire and his colleagues ensured that the college was deeply embedded in the networks of the émigré Irish community in Spanish Flanders, as well as the theologically rigorist and anti-Jesuit circles within the university, but it struggled financially in its early years and attempts to expand south to Paris amounted to very little. The Irish Franciscan college network developed only in the 1620s, when Luke Wadding established St Isidore’s in Rome and Malachy Fallon founded the College of the Immaculate Conception in Prague. The pressure of numbers encouraged the Irish Franciscans to expand further, but despite the promising development of a friary at Weilun in 1645, it lasted less than decade.⁷¹ Like their Franciscan brothers, Irish Dominicans moved to Europe as their ecclesiastical structures diminished in the later sixteenth century. The emergence of a full college network was, however, slower than for the Franciscans. In the 1610s plans for Irish Dominican colleges were advanced with the support of Peter Lombard, the Roman-based archbishop of Armagh. Initiatives directed towards Spain and France ultimately failed, but a college did open in Lisbon in 1615, though it took more than four decades before the building of Corpo Santo solidified the position of the Irish Dominicans in the Portuguese capital. By this stage, the Irish Dominicans also had an important college at Louvain, dated to 1624, and would add a college in Rome, the church of San Clemente, in 1677.⁷² The Irish Augustinians, numerically smaller than the Franciscans and Dominicans, established their own college in Rome in 1656.⁷³

Developments

The number and complexity of abroad colleges established by the mid-seventeenth century, coupled with the current state of their historiography, ensures that it is not possible to present a coherent single narrative of their development in the succeeding century and a half. A number of important issues are, however, evident. The Irish colleges were the most numerous among the abroad colleges and, given their scale, are better thought of as a collection of networks rather than a single, unified group. As we have seen, the colleges for the education of secular clergy and lay students were concentrated in Spain, Spanish Flanders and France. Most of the colleges in Spanish territory were relatively small in scale, with finance a recurring issue.The expansion of the colleges across the border in France occurred during the seventeenth century, particularly from the 1660s. As noted already, the Irish college in Paris acquired a permanent home in the 1670s and developed over the succeeding half century into a genuine national institution, with more than 150 students packed into overcrowded accommodation by the mid-eighteenth century.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, an Irish college founded in the strategically significant migration centre of Nantes in the later seventeenth century assumed a growing importance, with around eighty students by the eighteenth century.⁷⁵ Bordeaux’s Irish college was much smaller, but it remained important for Munster students.⁷⁶ France’s importance for the Irish abroad colleges was bolstered as a result of Louis XIV’s wars, which brought the colleges at Douai and Lille inside the borders of the French state. To the north, the other Irish colleges in Flanders for secular students had always been modest institutions and they failed to expand. Among the regulars, the Franciscan and Dominican networks, in Louvain, Prague, Lisbon and Rome, retained significant numbers. Indeed, they became increasingly significant in the eighteenth century as the regulars came under sustained pressure first from penal legislation enacted in 1697 and subsequently from the Roman decision to close their Irish novitiates in 1751.⁷⁷

In the case of the Irish colleges, then, the shift of focus to France was the crucial development. The English and Scots networks also exhibited specific characteristics. The three Scots colleges under Jesuit control, at Douai, Rome and Madrid, quickly constructed an unstated but clear relationship. Douai’s geographical position meant that it became the primary destination for Scots students, catering over time as the first destination for a majority, with a small proportion of moving on to further study in Rome or Madrid.The Paris college, run by secular Scottish clergy, expanded less fully than Douai, but in 1665 a new large college opened