Prof Thomas O’Connor is director of the Maynooth University Arts and Humanities Institute. He is a member of the Maynooth University History department and holds a PhD from the Sorbonne. His research interests are in early modern European migration and religion, especially Jansenism, Inquisitions, censorship, ideological controls, social discipline and religious conversion. He is co-director of the Irish in Europe Project and editor of the history sources journal, Archivium Hibernicum. He is a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and of the Fondation Irlandaise (Paris). He has published several monographs in early modern European history, the most recent on the Iberian Inquisition with Palgrave in 2016. He has edited and co-edited four volumes in the Irish in Europe series, and contributed to numerous scholarly periodicals and essay collections. He has edited a collection of essays on abroad colleges in early modern Europe, which appeared with Manchester University Press in late 2017. Most recently, he has co-edited, for Brill, an essay collection presenting new archival research on individual Catholic colleges in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.

Abstract

From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the ancien régime, the city of Lisbon played a significant role in the shaping and maintenance of Ireland’s early modern diaspora and in the internationalisation of its ecclesiastical relations. The roots of this agency lie in human and mercantile exchanges, particularly the lively commerce between Munster ports and the Portuguese capital. Access to Lisbon facilitated mobility, not just between Irish ecclesiastics and Lisbon but also from Ireland, through Lisbon to Madrid, Rome and beyond. From the mid sixteenth century, there was a small, Irish group in Lisbon, one that grew over the following two centuries to support several religious institutions and a web of social and commercial networks that stretched over most of Ireland and the Portuguese empire. This chapter looks at the Irish presence in the mid-sixteenth century Lisbon; it sketches the city’s role in the maintenance of the Irish mission after 1560 and concludes with a look at how Irish institutions emerged in the city after 1590.