Karl Gunther

Karl Gunther is Associate Professor of Humanities at the Civitas Institute and a fellow in the Program on Humanities and the Western Tradition.

Before joining the Civitas Institute, he was Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, where he also served as Assistant Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Earlier, he was an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami, where he taught for fifteen years. He has also taught in the Department of History at Rice University.

Dr. Gunther’s research focuses on the English Reformation. His first book, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525-1590 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize and the Runner-up for the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize. His articles have appeared in Past & Present, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Reformation, History Compass, and in volumes on Freedom of Speech, 1550-1850 and Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Reformation.

He is in the final stages of completing his second book, My Simple Opinion: Interpreting the Bible in the Reign of Henry VIII, which sheds new light on lay biblical interpretation and theological belief in the earliest years of the English Reformation. He is also working on a third book, Wrong! Responding to Error in the English Reformation, which examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English writers made sense of their deeply polarized world.

Dr. Gunther earned his B.A. in philosophy and history from Wheaton College (IL) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University.

Book

Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525-1590 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
-Finalist, Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize
-Runner-up, American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize

Articles & Chapters

“Pearls before swine: limiting godly speech in early seventeenth-century England” in Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey, and Alex W. Barber (eds.), Freedom of Speech, 1550-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 47-62.

“‘Not revenged, nor repented of’: Martyrs and England’s Long Reformation” Reformation 24.2 (Fall 2019), pp. 138-150.
-Republished in David Loewenstein and Alison Shell (eds.), Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (Routledge, 2021), pp. 138-150.

“The Marian Persecution and Early Elizabethan Protestants: Persecutors, Apostates, and the Wages of Sin” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 107:1 (October 2016), pp. 137-164.

“Rebuilding the Temple: James Pilkington, Aggeus, and early Elizabethan Puritanism” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60:4 (October 2009), pp. 689-707.

“Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII” (co-authored with Ethan H. Shagan) Past & Present 194 (February 2007), pp. 35-76.

“The Origins of English Puritanism” History Compass 4:2 (March 2006), pp. 235-240.

Work in Progress

“The Bible and Elizabethan Political Thought” in Alexandra Gajda and Rory Rapple (eds.), Illuminating Elizabethan Political Thought (Manchester University Press, forthcoming)

“Hume and the Tudors,” chapter to appear in Max Skjönsberg and Felix Waldmann (eds.), Hume’s History of England: A Critical Guide (in progress)

My Simple Opinion: Interpreting the Bible in the Reign of Henry VIII (book manuscript in progress)

Wrong! Responding to Error in the English Reformation (book manuscript in progress)

Reviews

Arnold Hunt, Protestant Bodies: Gesture in the English Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2025) in The American Historical Review (forthcoming)

Henry A. Jeffries and Richard Rex (eds.), Reformations Compared: Religious Transformations across Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2024) in Reformation 29:2 (2024), pp. 133-134.

Lucy Moffat Kaufman, A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) in Fides et Historia 56:1 (Summer 2024), 115-117.

David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) in Church History 91:1 (March 2022), 147-148.

Ceri Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, 1535–1584 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018) in The Catholic Historical Review 107:3 (Summer 2021), pp. 434-435.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Penguin Random House, 2018) in The Historian 82:1 (2020), pp. 97-98.

Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2018) in The English Historical Review 134:571 (December 2019), pp. 1535-1537.

Ulinka Rublack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford University Press, 2016) in The English Historical Review 134:568 (June 2019), pp. 696-698.

Jonathan Willis, The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c. 1485-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) in Renaissance Quarterly 72:2 (Summer 2019), pp. 719-720.

Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (eds.), Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70:2 (April 2019), pp. 378-380.

Gergely M. Juhász, Translating Resurrection: The Debate between William Tyndale and George Joye in Its Historical and Theological Context (Brill, 2014) in Reformation 22:1 (May 2017), pp. 64-66.

Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Ashgate, 2015) in The Journal of British Studies 55:4 (October 2016), pp. 829-831.

Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (eds.), Biblical women in early modern literary culture 1550-1700 (Manchester University Press, 2015) in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11:1 (Fall 2016), pp. 245-248.

Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church (Cambridge University Press, 2010) in The Journal of Modern History 84:1 (March 2012), pp. 180-181.

Scott Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) in The Journal of Modern History 83:2 (June 2011), pp. 407-409.

Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2009) in The Journal of Modern History 83:1 (March 2011), pp. 158-160.

Daniel Eppley, Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God’s Will in Tudor England (Ashgate, 2007) in The Historian 72:3 (Fall 2010), pp. 685-686.

Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007) in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40:3 (Winter 2010), pp. 447-448.

Christopher Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2004) in Histoire Sociale — Social History 38:76 (November 2005), pp. 524-525.