Colleges and their alternatives in the educational strategy of early modern Dutch Catholics

Like other Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions, the Dutch had their own early modern collegial network. The early modern Dutch state is commonly known as a Protestant bulwark from which the Catholics were by and large expelled. However, due to the efforts of the Catholic Reformation and the reluctance of many Dutch to embrace Calvinism in its orthodox variety, Dutch Catholicism managed to survive on a rather large scale, though often with a particular colour marked by lay power and imbued with Jansenism, a rigid variety of Catholic theology rather similar to orthodox Calvinism. Whereas Catholic elementary education continued to be provided in private schools, Catholic colleges and universities, as public institutions, were not allowed in the Dutch Republic. During two centuries Dutch Catholics, at least the militant among them, had to go abroad for their secondary and higher education. Foreign colleges played a major role in their education and intellectual debates: the Dutch colleges of Cologne, Dole, Douai and Rome remained faithful to the Old Church, whereas those of close-by Louvain were the breeding-ground of Jansenism. Significant numbers of Dutch students went to other Catholic universities, at Reims in France, at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, or at different German universities. The Jansenist schism of 1723 led to the creation of the Old Catholic Church with its own college at home, at Amersfoort, tolerated by the Dutch authorities. The scale of the Catholic communities posed a multi-confessional challenge for the Dutch. This was overcome by a high level of official connivance, permitting the tacit creation of Catholic teaching institutions on a private basis, including some small colleges, and the organization of Catholic confraternities at the public universities. Similarly, the Calvinist ‘regents’ mostly closed their eyes to the stream of Catholic students towards foreign colleges in spite of their repeated interdiction by the States-General. This essay will look at four educational strategies adopted by Dutch Catholics to ensure their survival as a confessional community.

The Society of Jesus and the early history of the Collegium Germanicum, 1552–1584

The formation of a pastorally effective clergy was a central concern of early modern Catholic reformers. Thanks to the specialist training demands imposed by their foundational interest in the Catholic overseas mission, the Jesuits developed a formation programme for their members that drew heavily on both Christian humanism and Ignatius’ distinctive vision of community life, the latter designed to prepare students for active pastoral ministry and community leadership. In the 1550s, as the reforming papacy, local hierarchies and Catholic monarchs were beset by the challenges and successes of the Protestant reformation, they looked to the Jesuits not only to provide a model for training more pastorally effective clergy but also to accept responsibility for managing new institutions dedicated to their formation. One of the earliest of these was the Germanicum, established in Rome 1552 to cater for clergy from the German lands. The early years of the Germanicum were marked not only by the zeal of its Jesuit and secular founders but also by poverty, papal neglect and secular indifference. Within the college itself there were even deeper tensions between, on the one side, the traditional clerical careerism of the student body and their patrons, and, on the other, the communitarian, pastoral and intellectual priorities of its Jesuit and secular clerical patrons. As the Germanicum came, in time, to act as a model for at least some other ‘abroad colleges’ in Rome and further afield, these institutions faced similar challenges and contradictions.

Seminary colleges, converts and religious change in post-Reformation England, 1568–1688

This essay will look at one of the principal functions of the seminary colleges founded by English exiles and the place they occupy in debates about what happened to Catholicism in England after the Reformation, i.e. after 1559, currently still in something of a deadlock between those who argue for a slow-decline thesis and, on the other hand, those who want to say that there was, across the British Isles, a surge in and after the 1570s of Counter-Reformation zeal. It will ask: what were those who enrolled at these colleges supposed to do once they returned to their native country and started to minister to the faithful? In particular, in the context of the powerful rhetoric of conversion which framed the founding of the seminaries at Douai and Rome, how far were ordained clergy supposed to evangelise outside the confines of the separated Catholic community? And if they did so, to what end? How seriously were they supposed to take the rhetoric of national conversion that some Catholics in this period used? We might imagine that individual conversions to Catholicism, in the sense of explicit, overt and public changes of “religion”, were rather limited in number, not least because of the development of a statutory legal code which inflicted severe penalties on those who decided to go into separation from the national Church. However, this paper will also look at what conversion means more generally in this context, in other words – not just as a transfer from one confession or Church to another but also as the understanding of the purpose of the Catholic clerical estate in the English national Church. Finally, it will attempt to do this with an eye to the conflicting approaches and interpretations in the current historiography of the post-Reformation Catholic community in England and Britain in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.

The Scots colleges and international politics, 1600–1750

The nature of the Scottish reformation and the Presbyterian settlement that followed meant that from the very onset of Protestantism in Scotland Catholics were forced to look elsewhere for their education. Historians have largely focused on the resulting Scots colleges as individual entities, producing capable and detailed accounts of their educational achievements. This chapter will move beyond this by analyzing how they operated together to pursue the common goal of restoring Catholicism to Scotland and the rest of the Stuart Kingdoms. The conflicts that engulfed Europe from 1618 onwards provided ample opportunity for this newly developed network to lay out an alternative and Catholic vision of the recently formed British-Stuart state. Developing from the Thirty Years’ War the outbreak of the British Civil Wars in 1638 changed this and increasingly emphasised the Stuart outlook of the college network. The politics of the colleges became increasingly bound to the dynasty over the latter part of the century as they became associated with the Jacobite cause. Crucially, the activities of the colleges need to be understood not just from the perspective of individual episodes, or indeed from narrative collegial histories but within an arc that spans both chronologically and geographically the rise and fall of the Stuarts to the British monarchies. The confirmation that domestic Catholic life could continue through the use of missionaries provided a base from which Scots college alumni could build, allowing them to influence not only the piety of Scots Catholics but also, in an indirect way, the government of Scotland. Through an analysis of these networks it becomes apparent that the colleges had a British rather than an exclusively Scots context. The Colleges were undeniably Scottish in terms of personnel and patronage but their outlook was thoroughly British and Irish as their policies were not confined to their home nation but considered also the other Stuart Kingdoms. This chapter will analyse the political activities of the colleges from their beginnings to the mid eighteenth century. It will emphasise their broad British outlook. Throughout their existence the specific aims of those associated with the colleges evolved but the institutions themselves never lost their international perspective. By looking beyond the religious education provided by the colleges it is possible to re-integrate the Scots collegial networks into a broader understanding of the historical experience of Scots, English and Irish Catholics and their relationship with the Stuart dynasty.

The domestic and international roles of Irish overseas colleges, 1590–1800

Like other Catholic communities under Protestant jurisdiction, the Irish, initially with Spanish assistance, provided itself with the means of educating at least some of its clergy and a small number of laity. Traditionally, the resulting Irish colleges’ network has been understood almost exclusively as the product of the religious reform of the sixteenth century and of the phased English conquest of the island. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a narrow view of their significance. It concentrated largely on the priest-producing aspect of their activities, to the neglect of their social, economic and cultural roles. This narrowness of approach has been a concern for a new generation of historians. Conscious of the social function of these institutions, some have tried to reintegrate the colleges into comprehensive, source-based explorations of their originating and target communities. This is now yielding more satisfactory accounts of their significance. Of particular importance has been work on the various roles played by the colleges in facilitating Catholic migration to the continent and in maintaining a Catholic pastoral infrastructure in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More recent studies have revealed how the colleges’ role changed over time and varied geographically and socially. It is now becoming clear how much their continued existence depended on their capacity to respond to alterations in the geo-political contexts that originally brought them into being. The relative decline of Spain in the early seventeenth century, the dominance of France from the 1660s and, perhaps most importantly, the growth of the British Empire after the 1690s crucially influenced the nature and role of the colleges. So too did directives from continental hierarchies and from Rome, frequently issued in response to endless collegial infighting. Even more significant, however, was the rapidly changing economic and political status of the Catholic communities in Ireland, to which the colleges had been providing clergy, and other services, since the 1590s. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demands, needs and aspirations of the emergent Catholic interest in Ireland posed a challenge that eventually overawed college administrations. Although European secularization and the French Revolutionary Wars were the occasion for their closure, it was the altered relationship between Irish Catholics and the imperial government that rendered the traditional role of continental colleges redundant. With growing opportunities in the imperial armies, the European connection in general was relatively less important for Irish Catholics. At the same time, the freedom to establish domestic seminaries provided the Irish hierarchy with convenient alternatives to the continental colleges, which, even in their heyday, had often seemed more trouble that they were worth. Few continental colleges re-established themselves in the nineteenth century. Those that did were only shadows of their former selves.

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

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 colleges...

The Maronite college in early modern Rome: Between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Letters

In the early modern period, Catholic communities under Protestant jurisdictions were not alone in establishing collegial networks in Catholic centres. The Maronites, a Christian Church in communion with Rome faced educational challenges similar to those of Catholic communities in western Protestant states. A Maronite College was founded in Rome in 1584, on the model of others Catholic colleges created in Rome in the second part of the sixteenth century. Until now, traditional Maronite and Lebanese historiography has tended to treat the institution in isolation from the other collegial networks and from the global perspective of the papacy on the challenge of educating national clergies in non-Catholic jurisdictions. This essay presents an overview of the Maronite College in Rome, outlining the context for its foundation (the Roman Catholic mission in the Near East) and the links with others colleges. To plot the evolution of the institution, two versions of the college rules (1585 and 1732) are compared. They were influenced by the changing attitudes of the papacy, the foundation of Propaganda Fide, the activities of the Jesuits and changes within the Maronite patriarchate itself. The second part establishes a profile of the early modern staff and students of the college. Details are available on 280 Maronite students received by the institution between 1584 and 1788. For the young Maronites, life in Rome was difficult, with changes in diet and conditions, financial worries and cultural challenges. There were frequent interventions by the Lebanese authorities with the Jesuit college managers. Special attention is paid to the course of studies in Rome and academic links with other Roman institutions, especially neighbouring Jesuit colleges. The third part discusses the links between the Roman college and changes in the middle-eastern Maronite community. The Maronite college was the main European gateway for the Maronites. Some eastern Catholics chose to remain in Europe, often to follow academic careers. Attention is also paid to the relationship between the College and the Maronite diaspora and its links with intellectual life in the West. In the latter context, the role of the College library and its manuscript collection in facilitating Western academic access to oriental languages and thought is described. Like other networks, the Maronite college fulfilled a broad range of functions that went well beyond the simple training of clergy.

English women religious, the exile male colleges and national identities in Counter-Reformation Europe

Uniquely among Catholic minority communities in Protestant Europe, the English produced a female religious network that rivalled the seminary institutions, both existing in a complex symbiosis. This gives an unrivalled opportunity of a comparative study. In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 establishments across Flanders and France with around 4,000 women entering them over the following 200 years. Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However, in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely. These contacts included other Catholic exile institutions. In some instances, there were English colleges located nearby, such as in Paris, where three communities of English women religious shared the city with a college for secular clergy. This chapter will explore how much these male and female English institutions mixed. Were they concentrated only on their own survival or were male and female expressions of the Counter-Reformation bound by national interest? In somewhere like Lisbon – where the Bridgettine community and the College of Ss Peter and Paul were geographically separated from the majority of their fellow countrymen and women in exile – was the need for collaboration and shared networks a vital means of survival? The final part of this chapter will examine whether Catholic identity overrode national interests. It will ask whether archipelagic Catholic identities were formed in the Catholic diaspora through the relationship of the English convents with the continental Irish and Scottish colleges. By addressing such questions, this chapter will investigate whether gender and national boundaries were overridden for the sake of Catholic survival.