College communities in exile addresses the histories of colleges established abroad by Catholics from Protestant and Muslim jurisdictions in the early modern period. The colleges are considered in a transnational framework for the first time, with up-to-date research on different national groups presented in one volume.

Irish, English and Scots Catholics founded more than fifty colleges in France, Flanders, Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and the Habsburg Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Meanwhile Catholics in the Dutch Republic, the Scandinavian states and the Ottoman Empire faced comparable challenges and created similar institutions. Until their decline in the late eighteenth century, tens of thousands of students passed through the colleges. Drawing together a group of established scholars and new voices, this collection of essays highlights the similarities between colleges which developed in familiar patterns, faced similar challenges and served analogous functions. Different national groups, it emerges, established colleges following parallel models. The essays illustrate that the colleges were significant not only in the formation of clergy destined to return to the challenges of their home missions (the emphasis in traditional accounts), but in the education of the Catholic laity, the facilitation of social mobility, the overseas extension of domestic networks, the development of migrant communities and the encouragement of cultural transfer.

College communities in exile will be essential reading for academics and researchers in early modern European history but will also appeal to the general reader interested in the history of Catholicism.