Religious Exiles Research Articles

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile, and Emotions in Early Modern Europe. Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019. xiv + 296 pp. $150.

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile, and Emotions in Early Modern Europe. Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019. xiv + 296 pp. $150.

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Protestanci w regionie kaliskim w XVI-XVIII wieku i ich budownictwo kościelne. Zarys problematyki

Protestants in the Region of Kalisz from 16th to 18th Century and Their Sacral Architecture: an Outline The aim of this study is to offer a brief outline of protestant sacral architecture in the region of Kalisz, comprised of historic counties of Kalisz, Pyzdry and Konin from the 16th to 18th Century. Author tries to trace foundations of new parish churches for the United Brotherhood and lutheran communities. The general research question posed in this study targets different typologies of protestant church architecture in the region, including analysis of architecture and arrangements of interior, with focus on longevity of some typological units. Those issues were backgrounded in the historical framework of protestantism in the region of Kalisz, including situation of different waves of immigration or religious exile from other countries, affecting local confessions (to mention imigrants from Bohemia, Silesia or German-speaking rural colonists, called “Olędry”) from the outbreak of protestantism, counterreformation in Poland and introduction of religious tolerance in the mid-18th Century. The last factor affected protestant sacral architecture in many ways, allowing many new interesting and monumental churches of lutheran confessions to be constructed, often showing innovation in form and spatial arrangement.

“Hangd for the True Faith”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters

The annals of the English Carmelites of Antwerp document religious devotions which were intensely corporeal. Biographical sketches of individual sisters describe spiritual practices in which prayer and meditation, often enhanced by visual or bodily contact with devotional objects, fostered mystical encounters with Christ, saints, and martyrs. The Passion and the physical torment of holy figures who died for their faith infused the cloister's spirituality. At Antwerp, nuns encountered stories of suffering in devotional books and in hagiographical accounts of both the early Christian, and the more recent English, martyrs. They might also engage physically with Christ and saints through the cloister's relic collection and other objects of devotion. This article explores the religious milieu at Antwerp, considering the nuns' spiritual proclivity for suffering, which was inspired in part by their religious exile from England. It argues that a culture of martyrdom infused private devotional practices and shaped the convent's corporate identity.

Feeling Exclusion. Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, by Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (Eds.)

Feeling Exclusion. Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, by Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (Eds.)

Establishing a constitutional ‘right of asylum’ in early nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT For several generations before the First World War, the idea that the British constitution contained a ‘right of asylum' for foreign nationals was commonplace. Though this belief had profound consequences for Britain's treatment of political and religious exiles, its relations with foreign states, and the drafting of its extradition and immigration laws, there has been little enquiry into its origins. This article delineates the emergence of the idea of a constitutional ‘right of asylum', locating it in a series of political clashes over the ‘Alien Act' that took place during the decade after the Napoleonic Wars. This legislation, which established controls over foreigners during the French Revolution and the quarter-century of war that followed, was increasingly challenged by the Whig and radical oppositions after Waterloo, both for its specific arbitrary provisions and as a more fundamental violation of the rights of aliens guaranteed by key constitutional documents like Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act. By the mid-1820s these objections cohered into a conviction that asylum itself could be claimed as a right. This conviction and the arguments that spawned it were repeated for many subsequent decades, forming the basis of the widespread Victorian belief in the ‘right of asylum’.

Exile and Linguistic Encounter: Early Modern English Convents in the Low Countries and France

The history of religious migration and experience of exile in the early modern period has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Neglected within this scholarship, however, is sustained discussion of linguistic encounter within these often fraught transcultural and transnational interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring the linguistic experiences of religious exiles in English convents founded in the Low Countries. Most women within English communities in exile were linguistically challenged; focusing on the creative ways these women subsequently negotiated language barriers sheds new light on female language acquisition and encounter during this period.

On the Idea of a National Church: Reassessing Congregationalism in Revolutionary England

In 1641, the Congregational minister Thomas Goodwin delivered a series of sermons to his independent church in London, expounding the letter to the Ephesians in characteristically meticulous detail. Goodwin had recently returned to England after a brief but formative period of religious exile in the Netherlands, and as the Sundays passed, his auditors were surely moved by the oratory of a speaker so “blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment.” The minister's breadth was equally impressive. The sermons opened up a cornucopia of Christian themes, flowing from one topic to the next as Goodwin's capacious mind found stimulus in the scriptural text. Seemingly eager to follow every possible digression, application, and excursus, Goodwin's unhurried pace required thirty-six sermons simply to exhaust the epistle's first chapter. And yet, amid this abundance of subject matter, one issue in particular arrested Goodwin's attention. While delivering his thirty-fifth discourse on Ephesians, Goodwin paused to consider what he described as “the Great question of these times” and, alternatively, “the great Controversy of the times.” By the middle of 1641, Goodwin's world was experiencing an unprecedented upheaval—England had been invaded by Scottish covenanters, the archbishop of Canterbury had been arrested and imprisoned, and the king had been forced to call a parliament he would be unable to dissolve. Yet Goodwin's “great Controversy” turned not upon political or cultural convulsion but rather upon a seemingly obscure point of ecclesiastical polity, a question not often considered by modern historians and even less often fully appreciated: “the great Question of these times,” said Goodwin, was “whether yea or no . . . many congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” What did this strangely worded question mean to Goodwin and his hearers, and why did the future president of Magdalen College and religious adviser to the Lord Protector deem this rather specific query the very hinge upon which the nation's future turned? To answer these questions, we must consider how the early modern English mind understood the idea of a “national church”—for though he does not explicitly invoke the term, it was, as we will see, a concept embedded at the very center of Goodwin's “great Controversy.”

A ‘fownde patrone and second father’ of the Marian Church: Antonio Buonvisi, religious exile and mid-Tudor Catholicism

AbstractDespite receiving particular praise from a range of early modern commentators, from Nicholas Sander to Pedro de Ribadeneyra, most historians have seen the Italian merchant Antonio Buonvisi playing a fairly negligible role in the history of mid-Tudor Catholicism. This article challenges this interpretation. After reassessing some rather simplistic assessments of Buonvisi’s religious beliefs, this article explores his actions and activities following his self-imposed exile from England in 1549. Using research conducted in both the State Archives of Lucca and the Vatican City, it suggests that Buonvisi played a far more significant role in ensuring the survival of English Catholicism over the first decades of the Reformation than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, it argues that Buonvisi may have helped lay core foundations for the Catholic restoration of Mary I’s reign, the success of which has recently been highlighted by historians such as Eamon Duffy.

‘Satan's bludy clawses’: how religious persecution, exile and radicalisation moulded British Protestant identities

AbstractThe study examines the radicalisation experienced by one group of religious exiles in the middle of the sixteenth century. The English-speaking congregation in Geneva formed in 1555 produced a Bible, metrical psalter and order of worship that shaped the Anglophone Reformed tradition. Study of the congregation's output shows how watching the martyrdoms in England generated a dynamic anger and fresh interpretations of persecution, tyranny and resistance. Conveyed by the worship texts, this radical legacy passed into the identities of Reformed Protestants in the British Isles, the Atlantic world and subsequently across the globe.

Offering hospitality to strangers: Hugo Grotius’s draft regulations for the Jews

In 1615, the States of Holland and West-Vriesland commissioned Hugo Grotius to draft a set of legal regulations for the Jews in their province. This article analyzes Grotius’s draft, entitled Remonstrance. It examines how Grotius understood and justified the rights of Jews and to what extent his approach was novel. More particularly, it shows how Grotius developed the concept of a natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers to advocate admission and toleration of Jews. He borrowed this concept from the sixteenth-century jurist and theologian Francisco de Vitoria, who had used it to justify the Spanish colonization of the Americas. While Vitoria had suggested that the Indians had violated their natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers by refusing to admit the Spanish merchants to their lands, Grotius argued that the provinces of Holland and West-Vriesland had a natural duty to offer hospitality to the Jews who had been expelled from their communities for religious reasons. Unlike Vitoria, Grotius recognized the natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers as the natural foundation of the right to asylum, which applied irrespective of religion. This enabled him to argue that these Jews, as religious exiles, had to be admitted to the provinces of Holland and West-Vriesland, and granted particular rights, including the freedom of (private) worship.

Exile and Displacement in the Spiritual Poetry of Sigmund von Birken

This article examines religious interpretations of exile and forced migration in the poetry of Sigmund von Birken (1626–1681). Birken, who experienced exile as a child, when his parents were expelled from Bohemia, addresses the episode of the Holy Family's flight to Egypt in the context of the doctrine of incarnation. Based on Johann Michael Dilherr's and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's exegeses of Matthew 2, Birken depicts Christ's incarnation as an act of participation in human exile from paradise. This article situates Birken's poems on “Jesus the refugee” in the context of his autobiographical writings and his self‐fashioning as a religious exile. In doing so, it shows how migrant identities were cultivated in urban literary cultures of early modern Germany. Birken played a central in Nuremberg's cultural life, and his case illustrates that belonging to the heart of the urban community was not incompatible with his self‐fashioning as a newcomer and his identification with a persecuted (Lutheran) minority.

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

THE REPUBLIC OF THE REFUGEES: EARLY MODERN MIGRATIONS AND THE DUTCH EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACTThis essay surveys the wave of new literature on early modern migration and assesses its impact on the Dutch golden age. From the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands developed into an international hub of religious refugees, displaced minorities, and labour migrants. While migration to the Dutch Republic has often been studied in socio-economic terms, recent historiography has turned the focus of attention to its many cultural resonances. More specifically, it has been noted that the arrival of thousands of newcomers generated the construction of new patriotic narratives and cultural codes in Dutch society. The experience of civil war and forced migration during the Dutch revolt had already fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it shaped and justified Dutch interventions abroad.

Blood groups and human groups: Collecting and calibrating genetic data after World War Two

Arthur Mourant's The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups (1954) was an “indispensable” reference book on the “anthropology of blood groups” containing a vast collection of human genetic data. It was based on the results of blood-grouping tests carried out on half-a-million people and drew together studies on diverse populations around the world: from rural communities, to religious exiles, to volunteer transfusion donors. This paper pieces together sequential stages in the production of a small fraction of the blood-group data in Mourant's book, to examine how he and his colleagues made genetic data from people. Using sources from several collecting projects, I follow how blood was encountered, how it was inscribed, and how it was turned into a laboratory resource. I trace Mourant's analytical and representational strategies to make blood groups both credibly ‘genetic’ and understood as relevant to human ancestry, race and history. In this story, ‘populations’ were not simply given, but were produced through public health, colonial and post-colonial institutions, and by the labour and expertise of subjects, assistants and mediators. Genetic data were not self-evidently ‘biological’, but were shaped by existing historical and geographical identities, by political relationships, and by notions of kinship and belonging.

Calvinism and Religious Exile During the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568–1609)

This article examines the Calvinist refugee community in the German city of Wesel during the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568–1609) as a test case to understand how refugees lived out their Calvinist ideology of exile in practice. It argues that while they understood their trials in terms of established Christian models of suffering and redemption, what it meant to live up to those models changed significantly according to the historical context. In this case, a dramatic shift in the war encouraged social elites among the exiles to alter their behaviour as they realised that they may never return home. They increasingly engaged in civil society and with their hosts, while at the same time heightening their regulation of moral behaviour among ordinary members of their community.

The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses

In 1557, William Peryn, an Oxford graduate and a Dominican, published his Spirituall Exercyses. A notable conservative preacher, he had left England, probably after the Act of Supremacy in 1534. The two nuns to whom he dedicated the book, Katherine Palmer of Syon and Dorothy Clement, a Poor Clare, were among the first English members of the Louvain diaspora. Peryn’s book was heavily influenced both by Ignatian and by Low Countries spirituality. The opportunity to make such ideas available in English, for English nuns, was the fruit of religious exile with its consequent direct exposure to Continental writing and thought. Peryn’s book, intended to provide spiritual direction for exiled English nuns, then subsequently published at home in England under Queen Mary, continued to be read in the seventeenth century, as the institution of female religious life moved permanently out of England.

Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Immigrants, The U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico's Cristero War, 1926-29

The author examines the connections between Mexico's Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that raged across west-central Mexico from 1926 to 1929, and the great wave of Mexican emigration to the United States that occurred during the same period. Although historians have generally treated the Cristero War and Mexican emigration as two distinct and unrelated subjects, a rich array of archival evidence from both sides of the border demonstrates that thousands of Mexican immigrants during the late 1920s supported the Cristero cause from the United States. By elucidating the geographical and political interconnections between the Cristero War and Mexican emigration and exploring the instrumental role played by the U.S. Catholic Church in placing religious exiles from Mexico within immigrant communities, the author demonstrates the development of a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters across cities and regions in the United States.

English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (review)

English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris. By Katy Gibbons. [Studies in History, New Series.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, for the Royal Historical Society. 2011. Pp.x, 206. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-861-93313-6.) This engaging and stimulating book focuses on the English Catholic lay in Paris in the 1580s and 1590s. It is composed of five chapters. The first gives a brief overview of the English and French political and religious context. The second chapter contains fascinating pages on the different circumstances that prompted some English Catholics leave England and move Paris, as well as on the social and economic challenges they faced in a city that had an urban and juridical structure different from that of London and other English towns. Notwithstanding the difficulties, however, Paris offered important opportunities the exiles, who were free practice their religion publicly and take advantage of the city's printing houses, colleges, and universities, which became venues for English Catholics to interact with their hosts, appeal their continental coreligionists, and articulate their identity as Catholic exiles (p. 75). In the third chapter Gibbons insightfully shows how French polemical works in the 1580s exploited the English Catholic cause and how, conversely, the French polemical atmosphere contributed radicalize the political and religious positions of some members of the English Catholic community in Paris. The fourth chapter discusses how English Catholics articulated their condition of exile. Although in the rest of her work Gibbons persuasively argues for the specificity and the importance of the Paris community, in this chapter she mainly relates common tropes of Catholic that scholars such as Anne Dillon and Alison Shell have already analyzed. Moreover, when Gibbons examines how the English in Paris grappled with the relationship between religious exile and political loyalty, she neglects important questions. For instance, a fuller discussion of how the English in Paris related Gallicanism (especially the political Gallicanism of the Parlement and a part of the Sorbonne) would have been useful, especially given the fact that, as Gibbons shows, the English did not leave Paris with the League, but they remained a significant presence even after the accession of King Henri IV The final chapter contains a lucid and rich analysis of the nature of the English Catholic community in Paris and of what the Parisian case can teach us on the nature of early-modern English Catholicism. …

Christopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century LiteratureExile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

<i>Christopher D'Addario,</i> Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature<i>Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature</i>. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.