College communities abroad

Education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe

Liam Chambers, Thomas O'Connor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

A comparative study of the colleges established by Irish, English and Scots Catholics across Europe through the early modern period.

1

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 centur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Map
• 1 Introduction – college communities abroad: education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe Liam Chambers
• 2 The Society of Jesus and the early history of the Collegium Germanicum, 1552–1584 Urban Fink
• 3 Colleges and their alternatives in the educational strategy of early modern Dutch Catholics Willem Frijhoff
• 4 The domestic and international roles of Irish overseas colleges, 1590–1800 Thomas O’Connor
• 5 The Scots colleges and international politics, 1600–1750 Adam Marks
• 6 Seminary colleges, converts and religious change in post-Reformation England, 1568–1688 Michael Questier
• 7 The Maronite college in early modern Rome: Between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Letters Aurélien Girard and Giovanni Pizzorusso
• 8 English women religious, the exile male colleges and national identities in Counter-Reformation Europe James E. Kelly
• Index