Former Fellows

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the phenomenon of religious exile played a crucial role in defining responses to persecution, forging confessional identities, and shaping the trajectories of both Catholic and Protestant Churches. My research adopts a wide geographical perspective in order to analyse both theoretical discussions about the legitimacy of flight from persecution and the lived realities of the exile experience across the continent. A central theme of my research is that the phenomenon of religious exile had a profound impact on broader cultural debates about exile in its non-religious variants. The topic therefore has tremendous interdisciplinary potential. My contention is that a fuller, more nuanced study of how religious exile was conceptualised and practised will provide fresh insights into how early-modern Europeans, in all their idiosyncratic variety, negotiated the religious, intellectual, political and cultural challenges of their era.