Henry Piers's Continental Travels, 1595-1598

Description

The text, published here for the first time, is a significant addition to Elizabethan travel writing and religious autobiography. It describes a journey in 1595 to Rome through the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. The author describes life in Rome (he was based in the English College, 1595-97), including an encounter with the Inquisition, and an account of the ghetto; his work is unusual among contemporary memoirs because it includes a narration of his subsequent sojourn in Spain in 1598. The book affords a rare lay perspective on conversion to Catholicism and its value is heightened by the author's origins in Ireland and connections in England, thus illuminating a recusant community which straddled both realms. As an eye-witness, the author offers fresh and individual insights on the Elizabethan Catholic diaspora in Rome and Spain during the turbulent decade of the 1590s.

Brian Mac Cuarta SJ has served as director, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome, since 2010. An Irish Jesuit, he previously spent ten years in Northern Ireland. He has taught at Queen's University Belfast and was a visiting professor at St Joseph's University, Philadelphia. He has published on the Catholic community, and on recent settlers, in early modern Ireland, including Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland (2007), and, as editor, Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (1993), and Reshaping Ireland 1550-1700: Colonization and its Consequences (2011).

'... this volume will undoubtedly make a major contribution to knowledge of Irish and English recusant communities and continental travel during the last decade of Queen Elizabeth's reign.' Michael G. Brennan, Notes and Queries 'Brian Mac Cuarta is to be warmly congratulated on preparing this edition of Henry Piers's Discourse from the one extant manuscript ... His carefully crafted introduction teases out the various components of Piers's multifaceted identity ... This volume is indeed a handsome contribution to our understanding of the complex place that was early modern Ireland.' Micheal Mac Craith, Renaissance Quarterly 'Brian Mac Quarta has provided a brilliantly edited resource for early modernists with considerable potential to enhance our understanding of a range of different topics.' Frederick E. Smith, British Catholic History