Katharina and Martin Luther
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Officially excommunicated and branded a heretic, Martin Luther was “captured” in the forest near Eisenach by a band of horsemen sent by Frederick the Wise to usher Luther into safe hiding. Late on the evening of May 4, 1521, he stepped into a small room deep within Wartburg Castle, which stood high above the walled city of Eisenach. Over the following weeks, holed up in the castle, “drunk with leisure . . . reading the Bible in Greek and Hebrew,”20 Luther grew a beard and long hair to cover his tonsure and began to refer to himself as “Junker George” (Knight George).
Luther’s “sabbatical” lasted just ten months. He returned to Wittenberg against his protector Elector Frederick’s wishes in March of 1522, still wearing a full, black beard and dressed in knight’s clothing. Luther settled into his old residence—the Augustinian monastery known as the Black Cloister—and within three days was back preaching, dressed in black clerical robes, his hair shorn into the monk’s tonsure. It was almost as if the Reformer had never left.
7
The Risks of Freedom
Historians are not certain how Katharina and her fellow nuns first heard about Martin Luther or how they gained access to his radical writings. After all, the nuns had little connection with the outside world. Two gatekeepers kept the keys to the main gate of the convent, and few people had permission to enter Marienthron. Even visitors who were allowed in had little to no contact with the nuns, and those who did speak to the nuns did so from the other side of a finely meshed grate, through which a book or even a pamphlet could not have easily been passed.
One visitor who might have smuggled in bits and pieces of Luther’s writings was Wolfgang von Zeschau, the former prior of the Augustinian monastery at Grimma, less than two miles away.1 After reading Luther’s writings on monasticism, von Zeschau resigned as prior in 1522, withdrew from the order, and became a hospital chaplain in Grimma. He knew Luther from their days together at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. He also had two nieces, Veronika and Margarete von Zeschau, who lived at Marienthron. The fact that Veronika and Margarete were relatives would have given von Zeschau easier access into the convent, although there is no proof that it was he who made Luther’s writings available to the nuns.
The other possible courier was Leonhard Koppe, a former city councilman in the town of Torgau, thirty-four miles away.2 A merchant, and one of Luther’s close friends, Koppe regularly delivered herring and other goods to the convent and could have smuggled in some of Luther’s writings, or at least brief summaries of his seminal pieces, hidden amid the goods.
There is no proof that either man slipped Luther’s words into the nuns’ hands, nor do we know for sure which works they read, or if they read any at all. But it stands to reason that Luther’s writings, particularly his statements about monastic vows, reached Katharina and her peers at some point and made a dramatic impact on them. “If some of the Marienthron nuns, including Katharina, came into possession of only one scrap of Luther’s forceful condemnation of monasticism, his rousing battle cry against the orders and their vows,” suggest Rudolf and Marilynn Markwald, “this would have set the stage for their next step: escape from Nimbschen.”3
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Luther’s ten months in Wartburg Castle are often recalled as the period in which he launched his most prodigious literary achievement: the translation of the Bible into German. But he also wrote a lesser-known work in that small room perched high above Eisenach, a treatise that would radically impact Katharina, who was living her own cloistered existence less than 150 miles away. Luther’s Judgment on Monastic Vows, published in Wittenberg in 1522, is not his most famous Reformation work, but perhaps it is the text that most profoundly influenced his future wife. In it Luther specifically attacked the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience that nuns and monks made upon entry into the cloistered life. He argued that these vows were not based in Scripture and were opposed to grace-based salvation (in Luther’s opinion the vows smacked of a works-based understanding of salvation), Christian freedom, God’s commandments, and reason. “They teach that this kind of life, and all that goes to make it up, is the good life, and that by practicing it men become good and are saved,” Luther wrote. “This is sacrilege, godlessness, and blasphemy. It is lies they have trumped up. It is delusion, hypocrisy, and satanic invention.”4
The vow of chastity especially irritated Luther. He stated that only one in one thousand could truly and joyfully live a celibate life without any impure thoughts or actions (later he changed that estimate to one in one hundred thousand).5 Women—including nuns, he argued—were not excluded from temptations of the flesh. “Unless she is in a high and unusual state of grace,” he wrote, “a young woman can do without a man as little as she can do without eating, drinking, sleeping, or other natural requirements. Nor can a man do without a woman. The reason for this is that to conceive children is as deeply implanted in nature as eating and drinking are. The person who wants to prevent this and keep nature from doing what it wants to do and must do is simply preventing nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from wetting, and man from eating, drinking, or sleeping.”6 Luther believed that with the exception of rare cases, neither men nor women could keep a vow of chastity. They might succeed at honoring the vow in body, but they certainly couldn’t succeed in thought.
We don’t have a written account of Katharina’s reaction to Luther in her own words, but the writings of her contemporaries offer insight into what she may have been thinking. For instance, in a 1528 letter to her cousins Lords George and Heinrich, Dukes of Saxony, Lady Ursula, Countess of Munsterberg (who actually lived with the Luthers for a few months after she fled monastic life), listed sixty-nine Christian reasons to explain why she abandoned the convent at Freiberg.
“Faith alone is our salvation,” Ursula argued. “We have allowed ourselves to be glorified as brides of Christ and let ourselves even be lifted over other Christians who we have regarded unworthy.”7 Ursula considered the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to be idolatry—“the works of our hands”—and directly opposed to her baptismal vows in which she had promised to have no other gods.8 In the convent, she argued, “We bind ourselves to obedience, but to people rather than God.”9 Like Luther, Ursula also suggested that true chastity was nearly impossible to achieve. “No one can deny that chastity is a quality that God alone can create in human hearts and bodies; how then, are we so arrogant as to pledge and sacrifice what is God’s [to give] and not ours?” she wrote.10 Ursula concluded her letter with a powerful appeal. “If we are put in such a place where we cannot serve anybody but are very vexed, is it not advisable to leave such a place?” she reasoned. “For who knows what crushes each heart? Even here, the saying comforts: All that glitters is not gold. Who would look for such a great danger under such a neat appearance of human holiness? We would not have believed it ourselves had we not been so deeply stuck in it.”11
Ursula’s words are a powerful example of the unrest many nuns and monks experienced as Luther’s writings spread from convent to convent and monastery to monastery. Although we know Katharina didn’t read Ursula’s actual words before her own escape (the countess wrote her letter five years after Katharina left the monastic life), one can’t help but wonder if Katharina experienced a similar “crushed heart” during her years in Marienthron. Might she have considered herself “deeply stuck” in the monastic life as well? Might some of the doubts and questions Ursula expressed in her letter to her cousins have occupied Katharina’s mind too? At the very least she must have been intrigued by the hints trickling into the convent, rumors about a bold new voice.
The nuns were undoubtedly told Luther was scandalous and heretical, and as his teachings veered further from Rome, the convents must have restricted access to any news related to the Reformer. For women cut off from a world that was moving forward without them, snippets of news, particularly forbidden news, must have been tantalizing. Katharina, by now in her twelfth or thirteenth year in the
cloister, must have initially viewed Luther’s reforms as a curiosity, then as a danger, and ultimately as an opportunity to escape a life she hadn’t chosen for herself. One can imagine both fantasies and fears would have preoccupied her during her many hours of quiet solitude, as she envisioned the dangers she would face in both escaping from the convent and in attempting to build a secular life beyond it. As bits and pieces of Luther’s teachings turned her entire understanding of faith, God, and religion upside down, Katharina might have also wrestled with spiritual doubts and questions.
Yet despite what we don’t know about Katharina’s thoughts in the months and weeks leading up to her escape, her radical decision to flee the convent in the dark of night tells us one thing for sure: at some point Katharina realized she was living a sham, a “neat appearance of human holiness,” as Ursula so succinctly put it. Like Ursula, Katharina began to understand that all that glittered was not gold. Perhaps she had understood it all along.
If Not a Nun, Then What?
As Luther’s writings against monasticism spread like wildfire, convents and monasteries began to close across Germany. In general, there was a cultural shift in how monastic roles, and particularly those of nuns, were seen by laypeople. Prior to the Reformation, a significant part of a nun’s daily responsibilities had revolved around praying for and remembering the dead. A nun typically recited the Office of the Dead (a litany of psalms, other Scripture readings, and formal prayers) and prayed for souls stranded in purgatory as part of her daily duties. At one point, the fees local townspeople paid for nuns to mark the death anniversaries of loved ones with prayers and songs comprised a significant portion of a convent’s income.12 As Luther’s teachings on salvation through grace alone spread, however, laypeople began to view the monastics with skepticism. They accused the nuns of selfishness and saw them as following human rather than biblical dictates. This was a “fundamental shift in mentality from the Middle Ages, when the work of the nuns was seen as helping bring salvation for the entire community,” and the nuns themselves were seen as intercessors for the souls of all. “Now their praying was seen as a selfish act that brought no benefit for society as a whole.”13
Still, not every nun was as eager as Ursula of Munsterberg and Katharina von Bora to abandon the monastic life. In fact, many nuns openly resisted the upheaval, choosing instead to honor their vows and remain cloistered behind the convent walls. Nuns constituted a significant portion of the female population, as much as 5 to 10 percent of the total population in major German cities.14 As Merry Wiesner notes, Reformation history books have long reported the closing of monastic houses, but until recently focused only on the monks who left the cloistered life to become pastors in the new Protestant churches. What these histories didn’t explore was the effect of the closures on women “for whom there was no place in the Protestant clergy.”15
Wiesner makes an important point. For women, especially the abbesses who oversaw the administration of the convents, the monastic life was one of the few realms of female independence and authority. The abbesses of the larger convents controlled vast amounts of property and were politically connected to the ruling nobility of the area. Although each convent was required to have a priest available to say Mass and hear confessions, all other administrative duties and much of the spiritual counseling of novices and others were carried out by women. Many of the cloistered nuns undoubtedly valued their positions in the convent and the work they did there and were not eager to relinquish it for a life of markedly less importance. “They realized, too, that as women they had no position in the Lutheran church outside the abbey,” observes Wiesner. “Former monks could become pastors in the Protestant churches, but for former nuns the only role available was that of pastor’s wife, an unthinkable decrease in status for a woman of noble or patrician birth.”16
There were also the older nuns to consider. Matrimony may have been a viable solution for nuns of marriageable age, but who would want to marry an older former nun, one past childbearing age? And what about the women who did feel a true inclination toward the celibate life? Where would such women live when the convents closed? Johannes Bugenhagen, the pastor who eventually married Luther and Katharina, devised what he considered an appropriate solution for such women: they could live in their parents’ homes as servants. “If some parents or close relatives have a young girl who has been destined by God to remain a virgin, they should keep the girl by them (at home), so that she can help with the household and work, or help oversee the house, as she is bound by duty to do,” Bugenhagen wrote. “And it is the duty of the parents or the relatives to teach her and to keep her for that.”17 Clearly he hadn’t considered the fact that a nun’s family might refuse to allow her to return home, even to live out the rest of her life as a spinster servant. Or that a young woman might not want to live out the rest of her life in servitude.
Ultimately the convents became some of the most vocal and resolute opponents of the Protestant Reformation. For example, when Duke Ernst of Brunswick (who was Elector Frederick the Wise’s nephew, an ally of Luther, and a champion of the Protestant Reformation) began to encourage monasteries and convents to disband in the 1520s, almost all of the male monasteries agreed to hand over their property to the duke with very little resistance. The nuns, on the other hand, declined. In Walsrode and Medingen, Germany, the nuns even refused to listen to the Protestant preachers the duke sent to the convents. Instead, they locked the doors and took refuge in the chapel choir. Duke Ernst made a special trip to the convents to plead with the nuns personally, until, exasperated, he ordered the gates forced open and a hole blasted into the choir for the Protestant preacher to speak through.18 In the town of Lune, the nuns burned old felt slippers in an attempt to drive out the preacher with smoke. They also sang loudly during his sermons and, when ordered to be quiet, demonstrated their rebellion by pointedly ignoring him and reciting the rosary under their breath instead.19
In 1525, when Nuremberg’s city council ordered all the cloisters to close, four of the six male houses in the city immediately turned the monks onto the streets and shut their doors, but both female houses refused to follow the council’s orders.20 The more the nuns failed to heed the council’s demands, the more pressure the council exerted, denying the nuns access to confession and Catholic communion and making it difficult for their servants to purchase food. The townspeople picketed outside the enclosure, singing profane songs, lobbing rocks over the convent walls, and threatening to burn the buildings to the ground.
Caritas Pirckheimer, abbess of the St. Clara convent in Nuremberg, vividly described in her memoir the ways in which three of her young nuns were violently dragged out of the convent by their parents. “The children cried that they did not want to leave the pious, holy convent, that they were absolutely not in hell, but if they broke out of it they would descend into the abyss of hell,” she wrote. “The three children screamed in a single voice, ‘We don’t want to be freed of our vows, rather we want to keep our vows to God with his help.’”21 The scene at the convent gate became violent, with four adults dragging each of the three young women, “two pulling in front and two pushing from behind.”22 One mother “threatened her daughter that if she did not walk before her she would push her down the stairs to the pulpit,” Pirckheimer recounted. “She threatened to throw her on the floor so hard that she would bounce.”23 By the time the carriages pulled away from the convent with the weeping, screaming girls locked inside, a great crowd had gathered “in such numbers as if a poor soul were being led to his execution.”24 Pirckheimer said later she didn’t know what had happened to the “poor children among the vicious wolves.”25
In the end, the council failed to persuade Caritas Pirckheimer and the nuns of St. Clara to renounce their vows and abandon the convent. Three nuns were forced by their parents to leave the convent against their will, but only one nun left of her own accord; the rest remained. Although the convent no longer accepted novices, and the nuns who remained we
re not allowed to practice Catholic Mass and confession, St. Clara remained open until the last member died in 1596, more than sixty years after Pirckheimer’s own death in 1532.26
Another nun, Katherine Rem, penned an angry letter in 1523 to her brother Bernhart, whose daughter Veronica was also in the same convent in Augsburg. “If you don’t come in kinship, stay out,” Rem wrote. “If you want to straighten us out, then we don’t want your [message] at all. You may not send us such things any more. We will not accept them.”27 Bernhart had given one of his sister’s earlier letters to the local printer and had it published, which had angered Katherine. “I see that you are angry,” he responded. “Whoever has anger and envy is still in the world. . . . Your little human discoveries and trust in your own works, habits, convent, fasting, and such things will soon fall away. . . . For one does not presume to buy God’s grace with spiritual simony. . . . And it is worthless straw, whatever one makes of it.”28 Katherine and Veronica ignored Bernhart’s disdainful opinions and remained in the convent.
Caritas Pirckheimer, Katherine and Veronica Rem, and many other nuns like them refused to be swayed by the Protestant reforms sweeping across the land. Clearly many of these nuns truly felt called by God to the monastic life, while others were unwilling to relinquish the unexpected and rare autonomy they enjoyed behind the cloister walls. This is something Katharina surely considered as she weighed the benefits and challenges of abandoning the convent.