School of History, UCC

Dr Liam Chambers, Department of History, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

Thursday 15 April 2021, 16.00 (4 PM)

The paper will be delivered via MS Teams Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, for a Teams link: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper From the late sixteenth century, Irish Catholics, often in collaboration with European patrons, established more than forty Irish colleges on the Continent for the formation and education of Irish priests and students cut off from access to higher education in the three kingdoms. From around the middle of the seventeenth century, Paris was home to the most important Irish student and clerical community on the Continent. Despite the scale of Irish student migration to Paris, in 1660 the Irish college in the city consisted of a handful of students living with an ageing superior in rented accommodation. A quarter of a century later, the Irish had a permanent home in a university college (the Collège des Lombards), which would go on to become one of the important centres of Irish Catholicism in the eighteenth century.

The paper examines how this happened, a story which involves the ‘competing communities’ of the title. Dr Liam Chambers is senior lecturer and head of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He is joint editor of Irish Historical Studies and a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. His publications on the history of the Irish colleges include two books edited with Professor Thomas O’Connor: College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) and Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1564-1918 (Leiden: Brill, 2017).