History
From the mid-sixteenth century, Catholics from Protestant jurisdictions established colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories abroad. This book draws attention to similarities between colleges which developed in familiar patterns, faced parallel challenges and served analogous functions. One of the more significant developments in university historiography since the 1960s has been the increasing attention devoted to the student experience, an elaboration of the 'history from below' approach which has been so influential in social history. The Collegium Germanicum in Rome was the first abroad college established for the formation of Catholic students from territories under the authority of Protestant reformers. The college opened in the late summer of 1552, the result of an initiative spearheaded by Cardinal Giovanni Morone and the Society of Jesus. The book examines the educational strategies employed by Dutch Catholics, who faced challenges closely related to those of their confessional colleagues across the North Sea. It argues that through the colleges specific Catholic communities in Ireland preserved and sometimes strengthened not only their domestic position but also their transnational and international interests. The book inspects a central issue for all abroad colleges: the role of the college-trained clergy who returned to the domestic churches. Overviewing the Scots, the book addresses the political significance of the colleges, in particular through their relationships to the Stuart monarchy. A study of the Maronite college in Rome uncovers the decisive role played by papal politics, curial interests and, later, Propaganda Fide.
The common image of the Dutch Republic is that of a Protestant bulwark from which Catholics were by and large excluded so that they had to look for refuge, including education, abroad. The creation of a semi-national church conflicted with the prevailing option of Catholic education abroad, because the foreign educational institutions attended by Dutch Catholics were always under the final supervision of the Holy See. Catholics could fund scholarships or grants for study abroad, and occasionally even for schools or boarding houses inside the Netherlands. For this funding, it was needed they did not infringe upon the educational monopoly of the cities and provinces with regard to grammar schools, colleges and universities. Although toleration is a key dimension of the historical image of the Dutch Republic, in accurate sense of the word it had to wait for the Batavian Revolution of 1795 to be formally granted and implemented.
It is unfortunate that the emergence of the Irish college network in Europe followed the council of Trent and its 1563 decree on clerical education, Cum adolescentium aetas. In line with recent developments in the history of migration, this chapter highlights the agency of specific migrant groups. The chapter describes the domestic as well as international factors that shaped their actions, plumbing the motivation and tracing the activities of groups most involved in the colleges' origins. A decade after the first Irish student names begin to appear in European university registers, a small number of Irish bishops start to feature in contemporary European records. These were papal bishops displaced by Anglican appointees who began to pass through Portuguese and Spanish ports, initially in transit to or from Rome. After 1560, the appointment of Anglican bishops in Ireland gradually deprived papal bishops of their sees and associated incomes.
In 1568, William Allen capitalised on the sizeable English Catholic diaspora following the Elizabethan 'purges' at Oxford and Cambridge to found Douai college. By 1598, English women had finally found a nationally specific outlet for their religious life having previously entered local 'foreign' convents, such as the Flemish Augustinian convent of St Ursula's in Louvain. It was not just as potential ideological partners that the convents were viewed by the male colleges; the convents also offered official outlets to college hierarchies. Notionally, the English convents should have been united with not just English, but also Scottish and Irish exile institutions in a spirit of Counter-Reformation zeal. The members of these various institutions were all theoretically excluded to varying degrees by the same Protestant authorities. The exile institutions became focal points for expatriate communities, fulfilling various social, educational and political functions not normally associated with religious foundations.
This chapter offers the first substantial survey of the abroad colleges as a whole and then assesses their historiographies before making a case for further research along comparative and transnational lines. Peregrinatio academica was a familiar feature of higher education in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. In the main centres of migration, students from abroad banded together to form corporate structures for their security and advancement. From the mid-sixteenth century, a complex network of abroad colleges for migrant Catholic students slowly emerged. By widening the historical lens from the Irish, English and Scots colleges, to take in Dutch, German, Scandinavian and eastern colleges, historians will be able to re-consider the development of administrative structures. The greater accessibility to and use of continental archives has permitted Irish and Scottish historians to re-write the history of modern migration and, in so doing, to re-interpret the place of student mobility and college foundations.
The Maronite college, founded by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584, was one of a number of 'national' colleges created in Rome in the early modern period. It was intended to accommodate young Maronite Christians, who were near-eastern Catholics of the ancient patriarchate of Antioch, and lived in Arabic provinces of the Ottoman Empire, under Islamic jurisdictions. After the Council of Trent, and especially during the pontificate of Gregory XIII, the Roman Catholic Church, partly in response to the reformers, mounted a remarkable world-wide missionary operation. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV created the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, a ministry of the Roman curia charged with the jurisdiction of missionary activities in non-Catholic jurisdictions. The educative project of the Maronite college, explained in a memorandum of the eighteenth century, had two objectives: students were to practise Christian piety and learn the soundest human sciences.
This chapter aims to reposition the Catholic colleges, and specifically the Scots colleges, in their political context. The early modern Scots college in Paris emerged from a set of pre-existing institutions, one of which originated in a foundation made by David Innes. Scotland's colleges did not exist in a vacuum but rather within a larger network that included the colleges of English and Irish Catholics. The outbreak of the Thirty Years' War marked a key turning point in the history of both the colleges and the Stuart dynasty. The chapter describes the development of the colleges from the ascent of James VI to the British thrones in 1603 to the end of the 1745 Jacobite uprising, with particular reference to the Thirty Years' War and the Jacobite era. The political significance of the colleges to Jacobitism needs to be recognised and placed into the wider context of diplomatic history.
The English college network on the continent, like its Irish, Scots and Dutch counterparts, had its origins in the sixteenth century. Under the leadership of William Allen, Oxford Catholic exiles set up a seminary for English clergy in Douai in 1568. The claim of contemporary Catholics was that the clergymen were simply continuing in the tradition established by previous missionaries sent from Rome. True religion, it was frequently averred, had always come to England from the Holy City. Even if the Reformation in England clearly succeeded in a way that it never did in Ireland, there were plenty of Protestants who thought that it had not succeeded anything like enough. In 1603-1604 there was an extensive seminarist-led Catholic toleration campaign, via manuscript and print, mirroring the better known puritan one at this point and saying more noisily what was implicit in so much of the appellant pamphleteering.
This chapter assesses the history of the Collegium Germanicum, particularly focusing on the formative early period from the college's foundation until the amalgamation of the Collegium Hungaricum in 1580 and the creation of new regulations for the college in 1584. It examines the challenges encountered by the Society of Jesus as it accepted responsibility for a novel and uncertain undertaking. The initial impetus to establish the Collegium Germanicum came from Cardinal Giovanni Morone, who visited the German-speaking lands in the 1540s and recognised the general crisis among the local clergy, particularly with regard to clerical recruitment. Immediately following the passing of Father Ignatius, Diego Lainez assumed responsibility for the overall supervision of the Germanicum. Laniez assumed position from August 1556 as vicar general of the order and, from 1558, until his death in 1565, as Superior General of the Society of Jesus.
Francis Hutchinson had aligned politically with the Whig party, an allegiance shared by members of his immediate family and which proved an invaluable asset during his slow ascent up the clerical ladder. From 1689 to 1714, Tory and Whig was the standing political division in Parliament and in the political identities assumed by most MPs. Hutchinson's overtly political sermons, along with his voting behaviour, gives us a relatively rare insight into the political views of a parish minister in the reign of Queen Anne. Hutchinson used these sermons to voice support for the Whig party's stance on some of the great issues of the day: the 1707 Union with Scotland, the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession and the toleration of Protestant Dissent. Unlike the majority of Church of England lower clergy, Hutchinson voted consistently for the Whig party in parliamentary elections.