Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 231. Hb, £80.00.

This collection, the fruit of the “Irish in Europe Project” conference convened at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, in June 2014, moves beyond the English, Scots, and Irish colleges of the Atlantic archipelago into the wider Catholic, early-modern collegiate network. The editors rightly argue that we understand these colleges better when they are considered along with the German, Dutch, and Maronite colleges.

The German College, the prototype for other national colleges, was established in Rome in 1552. According to Ignatius of Loyola, Pope Julius iii proclaimed this college “not only the best but practically the only way to preserve what remains and restore what is lost of the Catholic religion” (Letters and Instructions, ed. Martin E. Palmer, S.J., John W. Padberg, S.J., and John L. McCarthy, S.J. [St. Louis, mo: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006], 464). Initially enthusiasm outpaced financial resources. Pope Gregory xiii provided the German College with more secure financial foundations as well as endowing other national colleges throughout Europe. In “The Society of Jesus and the Early History of the Collegium Germanicum, 1552–1584,” Urban Fink highlights some of the college’s financial challenges. Indeed financial matters recur in several of the contributions as the authors address the perennial question: “who funded the Catholic Reformation?”

A second national college, and one often overlooked, is the subject of Aurélien Girard and Giovanni Pizzorusso’s “The Maronite College in Early Modern Rome: Between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Letters.” Founded in 1584 by Pope Gregory xiii, the college trained missionaries for the Maronites then suffering under the Turks. More than the other essays in the collection, this one looks at the daily life and the spirituality of the college.

Willem Frijhoff explores the educational opportunities for Dutch Catholics in “Colleges and Their Alternatives in the Educational Strategy of Early Modern Dutch Catholics.” His analysis reveals once again fascinating parallels between the Dutch and English missions. In a comparable manner Thomas O’Connor investigates the non-educational roles played by Irish colleges on the continent. The activities of these colleges, Jesuit or non-Jesuit, should not be reduced to the simple preparation of seminarians for missionary work as novel as that was for a church more familiar with an apprenticeship system of clerical formation. National colleges “emerge as multi-functional institutions” (108) where exiles and migrants learned to sing the Lord’s song in foreign lands. As opposed to some scholars who still seek a corporate strategy behind the establishment of individual colleges, O’Connor shows the importance, indeed the necessity, of local, Irish initiatives. I would add one caveat: Robert Persons’s resistance to an Irish college in Valladolid played no small role in its relocation to Salamanca. Adam Marks follows a similar path in “The Scots Colleges and International Politics, 1600–1750.” Of the three kingdoms, Scotland and its Catholicism and the Scottish collegiate network are the least explored by the academy. Let us hope that Marks lingers longer in this field.

James E. Kelly leads us out of the masculine, ivy-walled colleges into the mysterious world of convents in “English Women Religious, the Exile Male Colleges and National Identities in Counter-Reformation Europe.” Most English convents were enclosed with cloister; nonetheless, the nuns established wide-spread networks that intersected with the colleges. Many convents had Jesuit confessors despite the constitutional prohibition against their being regular confessors. But that depends on what one means by “regular.” Kelly stresses a point that could easily be lost lest we imagine a transnational love fest among the exile communities. Despite a common faith and a common exile, “there was little effort at rapprochement between the different nationalities” (212). Indeed Jesuit brothers and English and Irish seminarians occasionally fought in the streets of Seville in their quest for alms.

Michael Questier revisits many of the themes that established his reputation as a preeminent scholar of early modern English Catholicism in “Seminary Colleges, Converts and Religious Change in Post-Reformation England, 1568–1688”: fluidity of conversions, intra-Catholic strife, conformity and orthodoxy; and the John Bossy–Christopher Haigh debate. Conflict within the English Roman Church was more intense and more bitter than within the other two national communities as Jesuits and seculars slugged it out over church order and episcopal government. Questier’s contribution again highlights the need for scholarly treatment of Jacobean Catholicism.

The inclusion of essays on the German and Maronite colleges, and the Dutch Catholic network should attract wider readership. As the administrators of, and in many cases the founding inspiration for, these colleges, the Society of Jesus, its personnel and spirit permeate the contributions even if its spirituality and pedagogy are more taken for granted than explored. I point out a few typos and errors: Liège is missing from the map of collegiate establishments (x); the Collegio dei Neofiti is the College of the Neophytes (5, 37, 176); and the Illyrian college is the Collegio Illirico in Loreto (5). The English College at St. Omer was not voluntarily transferred to the secular clergy (15). With the Society’s expulsion from France in 1762, the Jesuit faculty and their students, along with many possessions, migrated to Bruges. The secular clergy inherited the buildings, a cadaver without a soul, a college without students despite its elevation to the status of a collège royal in 1764. Among possessions abandoned by the Jesuits in their hasty departure was a First Folio of Shakespeare.

2018 was a good year for Chambers and O’Connor. This is their second collection of proceedings and articles with a similar theme. The first, Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), was reviewed by Clare L. Carroll in this journal (5, no. 3 [2018]: 487–89). May we hope for a hat trick?

DOI:10.1163/22141332-00601012-02