John Frymire

Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Arizona
area: early modern European history
office: 311 Read Hall
phone: 573-882-4658
email: frymirej@missouri.edu

B.A., Augustana College (Illinois), 1988
Ph.D., University of Arizona, 2001

Professor Frymire received his Ph.D. in History in the Program of Late Medieval & Reformation Studies under the supervision of Heiko Oberman (2001). There he also studied medieval and early modern European history with Alan Bernstein, Donald Weinstein, Hermann Rebel, and Susan Karant-Nunn. Frymire also spent seven years as a student and researcher in Europe, primarily at the University of Tübingen, where he studied history, theology, and languages. For several years in Tübingen he was an Assistant to Peter Godman in the Division for Medieval and Renaissance Latin in the German Language and Literature Department. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a fellow at the Institut für europäische Geschichte (Mainz), and lived and conducted research in Germany, Italy, and Austria.

Professor Frymire teaches courses in late medieval, renaissance, and reformation Europe (ca. 1350-1700) including an introductory survey of the era (Hist 112), advanced courses on the Renaissance (Hist 327) and Reformation (Hist 328), and undergraduate and graduate seminars pertaining to specific issues in early modern European history.

Frymire’s research focuses on Germany and Italy during the eras of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He is particularly interested in Martin Luther and the Catholic response to Protestantism as recorded in sermons and pastoral literature. A tremendous fan of control and repression, he also works in the area of censorship and inquisition, particularly the re-writing and/or banning of German Catholic works carried out by censors of the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has published several translations and is now working on a new series of translations of Martin Luther’s writings.

Professor Frymire is currently finishing Pestilence and Reformation: Preaching and Crisis in Early Modern Germany, a study of Catholic and Protestant preachers and how they interpreted the crises and disasters of the era in confessionally-specific religious contexts. In the works are also Catholic Preaching and the German Reformation: Pulpits and Presses, 1500-1555 (a study of the Catholic response to Luther made from pulpits across Germany) and German Books and Roman Censorship (a study of the censorship of German Catholic books in Counter-Reformation Rome). He has presented articles and lectures on all of these topics.

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