Henry Piers’s Continental Travels, 1595-1598

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.