Looking at reading culture beyond the geographical boundaries of Ireland, this chapter examines interpretations of contemporary and historical Ireland through the eyes of Irish students resident at the Irish College in Paris, c. 1870-1900. It interrogates the extensive print holdings of the Old Library, in addition to select items in the Irish College Archives, to illuminate student perceptions of Ireland’s past and present. This study locates the experience of ‘reading’ Ireland in the Irish College, Paris, at the intersection of seminal political changes in Ireland and France, the epicentre of European debate between religion and secularism and along the frontier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Students of the Irish College, Salamanca
