The experience of the Irish abroad has been a vibrant and exciting area of scholarly research in recent years. Most of that work has chronicled the political, military and religious experience of those Irish men and women who left Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book complements that work by focusing on the experience of meeting new cultures as the emigrants ventured across Europe. Included in the themes covered are the impact of this new world on their language, their ways of practising scholarship, the impact of print on a predominantly oral culture and their encounter with towns by those who came from an overwhelmingly rural background. Deploying a wide range of new evidence, these essays open up questions of cultural encounter that have not been explored hitherto. This is the fifth in the Irish in Europe series and, like its predecessors, it opens new perspectives on the experience of the Irish abroad in the early modern world.--Publisher's website.