Beth Plummer

Beth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant-Nunn Chair in Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona and Professor of History. She is an affiliated faculty member in the departments of Gender and Women Studies, German Studies, and Religious Studies and Classics. She is currently acting director of DLMRS, co-editor of the Archive for Reformation History, and the project manager and co-principal investigator of the shared churches in early modern Europe, an NEH-funded collaborative project.

Her research work focuses on the impact of the early modern religious, political, and social reform movements on marriage, family, and gender roles; tolerance, multiconfessionality, and religious diversity; and spatial, material cultural, and digital history in early modern Germany and Holy Roman Empire. Her first book, Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012), was named the 2013 Gerald L. Strauss Book Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society. Her second book, Stripping the Veil: Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2022), received the 2023 Roland H. Bainton book prize in history and theology and the 2022 Hans Rosenberg book prize in Central European History. She is co-editor of numerous volumes, including Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (2018) and Cultural Shifts and Ritual Transformations in Reformation Europe (2020). She is currently working on microhistory, Two Churches, exploring community bonds in Welver, a mixed confessional village with a shared convent and parish church during the sixteenth through the eighteenth century and a book-length exploration of mixed confessional convents during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Before coming to the University of Arizona, Prof. Plummer held positions at the College of Charleston, the University of Maryland University College in Schwäbisch Gmünd, and Western Kentucky University. She has been a James K. Cameron fellow at St. Andrews University, a Solmsen fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institutes for Research in the Humanities in Madison, a William D. Loughlin member at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, guest professor in the “Interconfessionality in Early Modern Period” research Group at the University of Hamburg, and an invited senior research fellow at the Leibnitz Institute for European History. Her research has been supported grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on the European Renaissance and Reformation, Prof. Plummer teaches undergraduate seminars and graduate courses in late medieval and early modern European cultural and social history.