In the monastery of San Gregorio Magno al Cielo in Rome, there is a simple funerary monument to Robert Peckham, an English Catholic who fled to Italy in the wake of Elizabeth I's Protestant religious settlement. The inscription reads:

Here lies Robert Peckham, English and Catholic, who, after England's break with the Church, left England, not being able to live without the Faith, and who, coming to Rome, died, not being able to live without his country.

For historians of early modern exile, such sentiments are familiar. The religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the displacement of tens of thousands of men, women and children throughout Europe. Recent research has foregrounded the extent to which these displaced peoples grappled with senses of alienation and separation from home, their lives dominated by feelings of loss and longing. In this sense, the concept of ‘nostalgia’ as first coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 might appear particularly pertinent to the study of early modern exile: the homesickness described in Peckham's poignant epitaph corresponds well with what Hofer defined as ‘the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one's native land’. Indeed, the suggestion that Peckham ‘died not being able to live without his country’ even evokes Hofer's original definition of nostalgia as a physical illness.

However, since its original definition by Hofer, ‘nostalgia’ has largely shed its spatial connotations of ‘homesickness’ and has come instead to refer to a longing for a lost time. With this lexical shift has come the suggestion that ‘nostalgia’ in its temporal form is both a symptom and a marker of modernity. A number of influential scholars of memory have argued that, while ‘pre-modern’ men and women perceived the relationship between past and present as one defined by continuity, with the present conforming to models established by history, a feature of ‘modern’ understandings of time is a ‘sense of change’ in which people have a stronger awareness of how their lives differ from those of their predecessors.