ABSTRACT
From religious nonconformists to kings and princes, exiles in the early modern period included people from various faiths, professions, and positions in society. The exile was defined by their metaphorical closeness to, and physical distance from, their homeland. Exiles carried with them the etymological memory of classical Latin exilium or exsilium, which signified not only the fact or condition of banishment, but in post-classical Latin stood also for ruin, waste, and destruction. From its earliest uses, the exile's separation from the local and familiar highlighted the precariousness of their identity. 1 As one fourteenth-century author described, an individual was ‘in gret peril / To lese his londes and ben exil’. 2 Writers recognised that exile involved physical as well as legal and emotional isolation through separation, with the ‘solitary place of myn exile’ being away from ‘native soil’ and ‘homeland’. 3
