ABSTRACT
On the feast of Saint Brigid in 1620, the newly-appointed bishop of Ossory, David Rothe, delivered a speech at the Irish college in the University of Paris. Drawing inspiration from the early history of Ireland's saints, he exhorted Irish students to commit themselves to the missionary endeavour to restore Catholicism in Ireland. The response to Rothe's speech within the Scottish community in Paris, where he was labelled a saint-stealer', demonstrates the contested and competing nature of corporate identities as the rival communities vied for patronage and cultural capital. Once these sources have been considered, it is possible to situate the events at the Irish college in Paris within the wider context of the developing Irish Catholic scholarly community in exile during the seventeenth century. As a result, the Irish community overseas, dominated by merchants and educational migrants deprived the possibility of Catholic education within Ireland, became swollen in size and sufficiently impoverished to constitute a burden on the surrounding community.
