This collection of essays, developed from a conference in 2014, seeks to put the histories of expatriate Catholic educational institutions of various nations alongside one another, and to make the case for a transnational and comparative history of these institutions. Seven chapters are dedicated to the ‘abroad colleges’ (the umbrella term used in the volume) of different nations in which Catholics formed a more or less proscribed minority.
Urban Fink focusses on the first three decades of the Collegium Germanicum (founded in 1552), detailing its struggles to become financially secure and the establishment of its Jesuit administration. Willem Frijhoff’s chapter on Dutch Catholic higher education gives an expansive overview and highlights the competing educational options open to Dutch Catholics as well as the impact of Jansenism and then the ‘Old Catholic’ schism, successively. Thomas O’Connor, writing on the Irish colleges, and Adam Marks, writing on the Scottish ones, both deal with a large number of institutions, of varying size and some founded serendipitously rather than as part of any grand design; in both cases, the various colleges were certainly connected, but their connections were hardly formal enough to constitute a ‘network’. Marks explicitly links the Scots colleges to ‘politics’, especially Jacobite politics, while O’Connor addresses the mutual impact of the Irish Colleges and the religious situation in Ireland. Michael Questier writes on the English Colleges; his chapter explores how the colleges/seminaries linked into the religious politics of English Catholicism, in which he has great expertise, although there is rather less material here on the colleges themselves. Aurèlien Girard and Giovanni Pizzorusso provide a chapter on the Maronite College, the only ‘abroad college’ created for a community of Catholics living under a non-Christian (rather than Protestant) regime (the Ottoman Empire). James Kelly takes a new angle by looking at connections and relationships between the various English Colleges and the diaspora of English (female) convents abroad: both linking the history of the colleges with that of women religious, and showing how the colleges can be studied in relation to other fields.
Although the essays certainly show that there is potential for comparative history of various sorts, and Liam Chambers suggests several comparative/transnational approaches that future research might pursue, the collection is not itself comparative. Each chapter concentrates on the college(s) of a particular national group, and pursues a different theme, structure and timeframe; chapters on the Germanicum and Maronite Colleges are both quite closely focused on the colleges’ institutional history, while the chapters on English and Scottish colleges set out to explore the colleges’ and their alumni’s role in wider political contexts; but these chapters are each self-contained. Most of the comparison, therefore, is done by the reader.
The sources drawn upon vary. Some ‘abroad colleges’ have left large surviving archives, others have not. Fink’s work draws on research published in the Germanicum’s own magazine (Korrespondenzblatt Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum), as well as on volumes of documents published in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, many of the diverse sources O’Connor draws on are available through the published volumes of Archivium Hibernicum. Frijhoff’s chapter draws especially on sources in the Utrechts Archief to shed light on both institutions and individuals involved in Dutch Catholic education. Perhaps the most closely based on archives relating to a college per se, Giraud and Pizzorusso have mined the archives of Propaganda Fide for documents on the Maronite College. Skimming the footnotes to all the chapters indicates the potential breadth and depth of the field: almost all indicate that there are many primary sources available in published editions as well as in archives, and all are situated within a wide range of secondary literature indicating the overlapping historiographies the ‘abroad colleges’ impinge on.
Although it is difficult for a collection of this type to engage in comparative history as such, the chapters in this volume suggest some avenues for comparative/transnational research. James Kelly’s chapter does open the boundary of a national college group by discussing the English colleges’ interaction with another ‘network’, that unique English Catholic development of female convents abroad, taking a comparative although not transnational approach. The chapter on the Germanicum discusses the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, and of Gregory XIII, who were also both important to the English College; further research exploring as a single subject the papal and curial patronage of multiple national colleges could be fruitful. Likewise, the political roles of English and Scottish colleges could be studied together in a ‘British’ approach. O’Connor’s chapter draws out the emerging competition between Irish ‘abroad colleges’ and Catholic educational opportunities at home, something which invites comparison with the Dutch experience, where, as Frijhoff shows, options were multiple. Another issue raised in several chapters, as Chambers observes, is that of their alumni’s subsequent careers: while it has long been an assumption that the colleges existed to train priests for the ‘home’ mission, the proportion of ordained students who actually went home could be remarkably low. A transnational survey comparing those outcomes and the careers of those who did not go home could be revealing.
This is a collection which demonstrates the potential richness of this field of study, and which suggests several approaches which could lift the study of Catholic minorities out of their familiar national templates and help to create a historiography which paints a much wider picture, deepening our understanding of early modern Catholicism, and simultaneously of those national histories.
