Projects

Confessional Mobility

I develop cross-border research in my first book, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe. This monograph questions the assumed territoriality of most studies of pre-modern Europe and straddles national boundaries in historiography. It proposes a new interpretative model of ‘confessional mobility’. Using the case of the English Catholic dispersed community, Confessional Mobility encourages scholarship on travel, migration, and exile to adopt a more flexible interpretation of movement and its implications for belonging to communities. Furthermore, my attention to movement and mission in the self-understanding of Catholics incorporates minority Catholics alongside extra-European missions and reinforces current moves to decentre Counter-Reformation scholarship. By bringing minority Catholics from the margins to the centre of our analysis, our broader understanding of the Counter-Reformation changes.

 

 

Counter-Archives

My current project further develops the approach to Catholic minorities by comparing Dutch and English Catholics. I investigate these minorities’ communal belonging through a focus on the role of commemoration. Studying minorities adds a crucial qualifier to our understanding of the past. The monopolisation of archives and commemoration by a dominant group has flattened the record and created the impression that this one group is the standard. Moreover, comparing allows me to study commemoration not as an abstract ideal but concretely rooted in their social, cultural, and legal lives. The differences and similarities in commemoration between these two Catholic minorities shed light on the ways in which commemoration and the resulting narratives and sources were shaped by and in turn shaped the lives of Catholics. By consequence, the collections upon which historians rely to study the past were not an abstract reflection of their recent past, but historical practices which played an active part in constructing these communities.