Impious Itineraries: routes between the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula | Session 2
'Impious Itineraries' is a seminar series retracing the routes of people and objects between the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the early modern period. Organised by the Warburg Institute with the support of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España.
Session 2: 'Itineraries of the faith'
Chair: Glyn Redworth (University of Oxford)
'Texts and nuns on the run: itinerant texts for itinerant persecuted communities' - Ana Sáez-Hidalgo (University of Valladolid)
If there is something that defines the early modern period, it is doubtlessly an increase in mobility: people, material objects, news, information, travelled around the globe. This presentation will explore the interaction between the female exiled communities and the texts disseminated by them as part of a strategy to preserve, memorialize, and protect their religious and national identities. My subject is the first-person accounts of persecution, exile, and travel by English religious women, keystones for the early establishment of the channels of news dissemination and of print culture related to the English Mission.
'Choice, necessity and laissez-faire in the conversion narratives of early modern Irish Protestant visitors to Portugal' - Thomas O’Connor (National University of Ireland Maynooth)
A brisk trading relationship existed between the southern Irish ports and Portugal from at least the late 15th century, and evidence of a permanent Irish community in Lisbon exists from the middle of the 16th century. During the Tudor conquest of Ireland Lisbon acted as a refuge for Irish political and religious exiles, mostly Catholics. However, in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries, Lisbon's trading and employment opportunities attracted numerous Protestant Irish, many of whom converted to Catholicism. Their conversion testimonies, preserved in the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, offer important insights into the meaning of religious conversion under the ancien régime.
