Dr Christophe Gillain

Dr Christophe Gillain

Research Assistant

Researcher profile

Email
cmfg1@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

Christophe is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant working on the project Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750 (ERC-Selected, UKRI Frontier Research Grant, 2024-2028). 

He was awarded his PhD in 2023 from the University of Cambridge for a thesis entitled 'Cardinal de Retz, French Noble Exile, and Political Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Europe’. His research examined how rebellious elites organised transnational networks of resistance to the French crown and its ministers, playing a central role in shaping the absolutist state. 

Before beginning his doctoral studies, he completed an MA thesis at the University of Auckland on violence and affection in seventeenth-century French memoirs. 

Research areas

Christophe's research focuses on the political culture of early modern France and Europe more broadly. He is particularly interested in forms of communication and mobility, and what they can tell us about how political authority and state power developed in this period. 

He has recently co-edited a Special Issue of the journal Renaissance Studies on 'Innovation and Exile in the Early Modern World', with Dr Annalisa Nicholson at King's College London. He is currently working on his first monograph, tentatively entitled Transnational Rebellion in Bourbon France: Exile, Mobility, and the Making of the Absolutist State, 1630-1661. 

Selected publications

 

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