May 19. Lecture— “Early Maryland’s Place in English and Catholic Worlds: Migration, Liberty of Conscience, and Constitutional Experimentation, 1632–1660” Christopher Gillett

7:00 p.m.

Visitor Center Auditorium, Free

Abstract:  It has long been accepted that a chief motivation of colonial Maryland’s founders was to offer a refuge to their English Catholic co-religionists. Since the 1560s, the English state had instituted legislation outlawing Catholic practices and insisting on nationwide conformity to the state church. In this context, the establishment of new colonies could provide opportunities for experimentation with constitutional forms that offered liberty of conscience to religious dissidents. Maryland is the most famous and enduring Catholic example of such an experiment in early America, but it was not the only Catholic colonial project in the English empire at this time. Moreover, the Catholic population of Maryland grew beyond British and Irish emigres to include French migrants, indigenous-American converts, and both enslaved and free African Catholics. This lecture will explore how early Maryland became a meeting-place between two of the early modern period’s chief globalizing forces: the early English Empire and the Roman Catholic Church. It will explore Maryland’s place within a larger context of Catholic colonial experimentation between 1632 and 1660 and how these projects were informed by the emergence of ethnically diverse Catholic populations within the English world.

Biography:  Christopher Gillett is Assistant Professor of the History of Britain and its Empire at The University of Scranton. He completed his Ph.D. at Brown University in 2018, where his dissertation, entitled “Catholicism and the Making of Revolutionary Ideologies in the British Atlantic, 1630-1673,” was supervised by Professor Tim Harris. He has held a number of research fellowships, including a Mellon-CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Thoits Visiting Fellowship at the Durham Residential Research Library. He is the author of an essay about “Political Theology” in the forthcoming Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism and his chapter, “Probabilism, Pluralism, and Papalism: Jesuit Allegiance Politics in the British Atlantic and Continental Europe, 1644–50,” appeared in James Kelly and Hannah Thomas’s edited volume, Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange Between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580 – c. 1773: ‘The World is Our House’? (Brill, 2019). He is currently the Ark and Dove Scholar in Residence at Historic St. Mary’s City, where he is working on his first book, Catholicism and Revolution in the British World, 1630–1673.