Many students know and love the gregarious Dr. Jonathan Reimer, chair of the History department, Templeton Honors College professor, Canadian native and Reformation history enthusiast. What students may not know, however, is that Reimer has been writing a book on and off for a decade that he estimates will be finished next spring, to be published by Princeton University Press.
As a Reformation historian who studied for years in England, Reimer was fascinated by the phenomenon of 16th century Catholic stronghold England quickly converting to Protestantism by the mid 17th century. In the past, scholars have brushed off the matter as a “bottom up” approach, wherein the common people were so discontented with the ruling Catholic class that they ran into the arms of Protestantism, eventually swaying the culture of the country. But around the 1970s, this answer started to feel less satisfying.
“[Historians] started looking at… Are there signs that churches were refurbished? They start looking at wills and they say, what are people giving to their local church? And what seems to be the case is that in England, there’s actually a huge upswing in both of those kind of things. These don’t seem to be the signs of people who are troubled by the kind of religion around them. Whether it’s good or bad, they seem to like it. They seem relatively content with it. We don’t have these signs of corruption and decay that we might see elsewhere in Europe, where there’s some more endemic problems,” Reimer said.
The alternative answer posited by scholars was instead a “top down” approach, in which the king and the elites forced the religious transformation upon the people. While this has some plausibility, Reimer isn’t satisfied with that answer either. “In this era, unlike our own, it’s under institutionalized. You don’t really have a standing army. So you can’t coerce everybody to kind of change their religion. And so you need to have a pattern of persuasion as well. It’s not just a groundswell from below, it’s not just coercion from above. If you want to have a kind of reformation from the middle, you have to figure out, well, how did this happen?” Reimer said.
This kind of “reformation from the middle” where a culture of persuasion is present is what Reimer is exploring throughout his book – and he’s doing it through analyzing the works of the most-read author in England at the time, Thomas Beacon. Beacon was a Protestant devotionalist, meaning he was not writing necessarily the kinds of polished, academic texts most historians look at. And yet, Reimer says Beacon’s devotionals were found on the bookshelves of countless English people at the time, from the elite class all the way down to the barely-literate. A man whose work was this ubiquitous must have impacted the culture in a time of division and transformation.
Reimer’s method of historical analysis is less about what was considered to be the classics and more what was most read at the time. “An analogy that I might use today, if we were saying what’s going on in 21st century America, some of the enduring classics wouldn’t really be what historians of the future will want to look at. I think largely they’re going to be looking at things like who’s on Joe Rogan’s podcast or whatever the other equivalents are with different sorts of cultural niches. And so, it’s not always the best stuff, but stuff that we can say, okay, a lot of people read this,” Reimer said.
Beacon was initially brought to Reimer’s attention by what he describes as a “providential mistake.” He entered his graduate work at the University of Cambridge with many ideas but no clear path forward. His doctoral supervisor told him to check out a collection of Thomas Beacon’s work from the theology library, where he discovered books from the 19th century still uncut. (Old books were printed with bundles of pages that had to be cut open.) A librarian handed him a letter opener and suddenly he found himself manually cutting up a 19th century book with words from the 16th century.
Reimer vowed to himself after “desecrating” the book he had to read every page. So he did, and what he found fascinated him: Beacon summarizing true Christianity in three commands: love God, love your neighbor and… obey the king.
Reimer was shocked to see the inclusion of the third command, and decided to unpack what was happening in 1540s England which would prompt the inclusion of such a statement. “It was this sort of strange accident of encountering this book, cutting it open and then reading it and thinking, I want to study this. So, I’ve been studying it. Sometimes my doctoral supervisor jokes that I’m still working on the first assignment he ever gave me,” Reimer laughed.
In his writing process, Reimer has most enjoyed going to archives and searching high and low for more evidence on Beacon, a man who is largely lost in time despite his well-read devotionals. He recounted one story of looking through payment documents and finding Beacon’s handwriting scrawled in the margins, reimbursing a woman in his congregation for housing a man with physical and cognitive disabilities.
“It was just this really remarkable moment where I was like, oh, gosh, this is something he wrote with his hand. The day to day is often lost in history, which is a real difference, right? Because you think about the kinds of things that we can construct hundreds of years later, and they’re much more macro level. But most of our lives, our day to day, are little experiences that occupy a huge amount of our mental and emotional real estate. And so to be able to stumble on even just one of these events [revealed] this was the life of somebody who wasn’t just a writer, but was also a pastor,” Reimer said.
The hardest part of writing a book has been the accompanying imposter syndrome. His advice to anyone who wants to do something large like write an entire book? Take it a step at a time, and “level up.” Writing 200 words in high school felt challenging, and now it’s a Tuesday morning for college students. Writing a 10 page paper feels challenging, but then you do it. And then, if you’re Reimer, someone asks you to write a book.
“I think everybody has a little bit of imposter syndrome, where you’re like, is someone going to find out that I don’t really know what I’m doing? And I think for most of us, that never really goes away. You just knock it up to the next level.” As an Eastern professor, Reimer inspires all of us to find out how to level up to becoming our most creative selves.
