Ben Lowe

Ben Lowe grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and received his Bachelor of Arts in history and political science from Western Maryland College, his Master of Arts in history from the University of Missouri, and his PhD in early modern European history from Georgetown University. He currently teaches European and Christian history at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton,Florida. His main areas of research are in Tudor political and religious culture. As his scholarship demonstrates, he believes that Tudor history cannot be understood fully without a deep knowledge of the medieval period that came before. In that vein, his first book Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifism (1340-1560) argues that the longstanding wars of the later middle ages, along with humanist thought and Protestant biblicism, created conditions for peace ideas to flourish for the first time in the sixteenth century. His most recent work, Commonwealth and the English Reformation: Protestantism and the Politics of Religious Change in the Gloucester Vale, 1483-1560, makes a contribution to the debate on the English Reformation, positing that support for reform often came not so much out of hostility to the Catholic church and its teachings as from a positive response to the Protestant message that the lived Gospel promoted the common good in all aspects of life.