Demonstrates how, far from being peripheral, the stable communities of conventual religious in mainland Europe acted as important centres of religious and secular activity in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation.This collection aims to explore new perspectives on the British and Irish conventual, mendicant and monastic movements in mainland Europe and rediscover their roles and wider impact within early modern European Catholicism. Building on recent scholarship, the book addresses a historiographical imbalance, which has led to an over-emphasis being placed on the role of the Society of Jesus in the development of British and Irish Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation. The stable communities of religious in mainland Europe also acted as important centres of religious and secular activity. This volume explores the ways in which British and Irish conventuals and monastics, both men and women, engaged with the seismic religious and philosophical developments of the early modern period, such as the Catholic Reformation and the Enlightenment in mainland Europe, as well as important political developments at 'home', exploring the connections between centres and peripheries. Building on recent movements within the field to 'decentralise' the Catholic Reformation and recognize the international nature of Catholicism, the volume aims to change the perception that the activities of British and Irish religious were 'peripheral', bringing the islands' experience in line with work on their European confreres and the broader global network of the religious orders.

IntroductionCormac Begadon and James E. Kelly Part 1: Creating and Maintaining Identities1. Cloistered yet Militant: Commitment to Englishness in Seventeenth-Century Convents in Exile on the ContinentLaurence Lux-Sterritt2. The Regular Clergy and the Episcopate in Ireland, 1600-1650Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin3. Recycling an Island's Past for a Global Catholicism: Irish Franciscans in the Seventeenth CenturyJohn McCaffertyPart 2: The Relationship between Home and Exile4. Surviving in Exile: Strategies and Supporters of the English Convents in Exile, c.1600-c.1800 Caroline Bowden5. 'A mixt life'? English Benedictines and European Catholic Reform Movements: Monasticism and Apostolic MissionJames E. Kelly6. Cloistered Politics: English Benedictine Nuns and the Stuarts, 1600-1700Jaime GoodrichPart 3: Space and Place7. I am all good and fill all places': Mystical Space and the Affective Atmosphere in a Seventeenth-Century Convent Jessica McCandless8. The Exiled English Religious Orders and their Continental Gardens from Exile to EmancipationGeoffrey Scott9. The Irish Regulars in Early-Modern Paris: a re-examinationLiam ChambersPart 4: Intellectual Movements10. A Scottish Enlightenment in GermanyThomas McInally11. The 'Fifth Vial': Charles Walmesley's Ultramontane ApocalypticismShaun Blanchard12. Meandering Towards an Inevitable Death? English Benedictine Monasteries and their Responses to Enlightenment and RevolutionCormac BegadonIndex