Forming Catholic Communities

The early-modern British state relied on a range of educated clerical and lay elites for its maintenance and expansion, and provision for their development was a crucial state responsibility resulting in a proliferation of universities, colleges and schools. From the 1560s, the Protestant education monopoly made domestic provision for the education of Catholic clerical and lay elites impossible, forcing alternatives to be sought abroad. Dealing comparatively with the histories of the resulting Irish, English and Scots colleges, this book explores the disproportionately important role these institutions played in the lives of early British and Irish Catholics. Bringing together original research on the colleges and their networks written by established and emerging scholars, the collection provides important new perspectives on college networks and individual institutions drawing on pioneering research. In particular, the collection addresses three central features of the colleges' histories, assessing their social and financial histories and examining their funding and how this influenced their development. It also looks at the cultural and intellectual contributions of the colleges to the development of Irish, English and Scots Catholicism, particularly through histories of early modern print culture. The book deliberately brings together work on the Irish, English and Scots Colleges in in a comparative and consciously interdisciplinary framework that draws on historical philosophical, literary and cultural perspectives. In so doing the volume not only provides an exciting collection of the most up-to-date work on the subject, but suggests further avenues of research on the Irish, English and Scots Colleges.