The Educational Traveller

Abstract

This chapter foregrounds the diversity and dynamics of the expatriate community and writes the history of expatriate English Catholics into a much older tradition of educational travel. Recognizing that continuity alerts us to read the expatriate houses neither as a purely new phenomenon, nor as exclusively defined by flight from repression. Rather, without prioritization, it integrates retreat from persecution and preparation for the future, but still recognizing the two-way interaction. Children and youngsters were sent to colleges on the Continent to ensure that they were safe from Protestant influence and to prepare them for an active apostolate. Highlighting these dynamics helps to move beyond a static understanding of expatriates which limits the understanding of movement to the moment of migration, and instead discloses an expatriate life that was much more dynamic and in flux than these images suggest. Going abroad was a transformative experience.