Early modern religious displacement and transnational catholic subjects

This chapter attempts to focus on a historical aspect of religious displacement, in which members of the Church relocated for reasons of religious persecution, thus facing the rigors of exile, discrimination, and transculturation. With the Tudor Protestant State’s active takeover of Ireland in 1534, and with institutional Catholic oppression in England being reasserted through the settlement of 1559, the Act of Uniformity, and Parliament’s declaration that being a Jesuit or a seminarian constituted an act of treason, many Irish and English sought refuge in continental Europe, fleeing political, economic, and religious repression and, in the case of the Irish, the chaos and upheaval of war. A network of colleges quickly formed to address the educational needs of both potential clergy and the laity. These colleges also helped incorporate Irish and English exiles into the burgeoning global Catholic nation of the seventeenth century, expanding their boundaries beyond the limits of their heretical homelands.