Looking for the Secular in Religious Archives — a Cross-Channel Perspective

Written from the perspective of a social historian trained in the French tradition, this article investigates how the study of nineteenth-century Irish migrations to Britain contributes to the study of the nature of “religious archives.” In France, the writing of social history during the twentieth century was heavily influenced by sociologists and their view that religious facts were cultural and social phenomena. This outtake was also encouraged by the classification of ecclesiastical archives which were transferred to State repositories and organised according to lay and secular categories after the French Revolution. This article explores nineteenth-century Roman Catholic schooling in Scotland as a case study. Since 1918, Scottish Catholic school records have been transferred to public repositories and categorised in “secular” fashion. Investigating the case of religious schools means looking for secular matters in ecclesiastical school records and clerical notes (the diaries of Father Michael Condon, d. 1902, are an exceptional source on that matter). In the end, this article argues that there can be no strict separation in the historical exploration of the past between the use of “religious” and “secular” archives. Ecclesiastical preoccupations never excluded worldly concerns, and down-to-earth considerations were an integral part of parish and school lives.