Christopher P. Gillett

Dr. Gillett is Assistant Professor of Reformation and Early Modern Histories at Union Theological Seminary. He teaches a broad range of courses about Protestant and Catholic Reformations in early modernity (roughly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries), and he focuses on the interaction of Christian and non-Christian traditions globally in this period.

He is a historian of seventeenth-century religion and politics. His current research examines the political activism of Catholics living in England and its empire and the unintended but politically disruptive consequences these projects had. Catholics of various ethnicities in the “English world” tried to liberate their consciences from the interference of the English state through two interrelated and usually discreet projects: they experimented with alternative legal systems for accommodating religious pluralism in an imperial context, and they lobbied to revise the explicitly anti-papal Oath of Allegiance. As details of these clandestine endeavors emerged, those in England who opposed Catholic toleration became increasingly suspicious of the Protestant authorities with whom Catholics had negotiated, mobilizing against the Protestant state in increasingly revolutionary ways.

Related to these themes, Dr. Gillett is the author of several essays concerning religious pluralism, Catholic political thought and activism, and political crisis, including “Probabilism, Pluralism, and Papalism: Jesuit Allegiance Politics in the British Atlantic and Continental Europe, 1644–50,” which appeared in James E. Kelly and Hannah Thomas, eds., Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789 (Brill, 2018), and a chapter about “Political Theology” in the second volume of the recently published, five-volume Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism (OUP, 2023).

Dr. Gillett received his Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University before earning his Master’s and Ph.D. in History at Brown University. Prior to his appointment at Union, he was Assistant Professor of Britain and Its Empire at The University of Scranton and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.