Katharina and Martin Luther

by Michelle DeRusha

  Laypeople generally supported the idea of clerical marriage because they saw it as the best solution to the problem of concubinage among priests. Concubinage was defined as “unmarriage”—that is, unmarried couples living together as husband and wife—and it was a trend that had reached epic proportions among priests by the late Middle Ages. In some places, clerics appeared in public with their wives and children with hardly anyone batting an eye. Everyone knew concubinage among priests was morally wrong, but until Martin Luther came along with his marriage reforms, no one knew quite how to stop it.

  As historian Wolfgang Breul observes, the “desacralization of priesthood and Luther’s desire to normalize the priestly estate formed the central social tenets of early Reformation propaganda. But what drove the change was the widespread criticism of the immoral practice of concubinage and the popular demand that priests marry.”5 In other words, ordinary citizens were fed up with priests living in sin, and they saw Luther’s reforms as the only way to halt the practice once and for all. The general population decided to support Luther’s reforms, and in doing so they ensured that those reforms would be upheld. It was an idea whose time had come.

  In 1523, for example, Hersfeld’s town council issued a mandate threatening those who lived in “unmarriage” with physical punishment and banishment unless they married within fourteen days. Two of the priests in town married, which infuriated the local abbot. Up to this point, Abbot Krafft Myle von Hungen had been largely tolerant of the Reformation movement, but he saw the council’s mandate as a direct challenge to his ecclesiastical jurisdiction. As a result, he exiled the two married priests from Hersfeld, an action that enraged the townspeople, who stormed and destroyed both the office of the chancellor of the imperial monastery and the homes of the priests in town who were still living in concubinage. The laypeople took matters into their own hands, overthrowing the abbot’s authority and carrying out the council’s mandate.6

  While laypeople generally condoned the marriages of priests, monastic marriages were another story. These marriages were considered transgressive, and the former monks and nuns who married were viewed as deviant. Many argued that monastic marriages would damage the institution of marriage, and by extension, society as a whole.

  “While celibacy was expected of all clergy, and they made a clear vow of chastity, the vows made by the monastics, male and female, were held as more binding because of the separation of the monks and nuns from the rest of society,” says historian Marjorie Plummer. “It became a more complicated argument to explain why they should leave the convent and even more so why they should marry.”7 Monastic marriages were even viewed by many as incestuous. Theologically, a monk and a nun were already married to God—a nun was often called a “bride of Christ”—which made them spiritual siblings and thus violated prohibitions against incestuous unions.8

  Laypeople struggled to accept former nuns and monks as regular members of society, and thus, they applied different societal rules to them, particularly to the women. Former nuns were criticized and publicly shamed for participating in any social event that involved frivolity or revelry, even wedding celebrations. In 1525, Leipzig authorities questioned Georg Crucinger about the presence of his daughter-in-law, a former nun, at his daughter’s wedding. Crucinger tried to defend her, claiming his daughter-in-law had not danced at the wedding, “because it was not allowed her as a former nun,” although he admitted that she had participated in the wedding festivities at the inn.9

  In a similar incident, a former Dominican nun by the name of Anna Grab was arrested in 1528 and forced to swear that she would “live as a nun should and not forget the vow she made when she entered the convent.” Grab was informed that she would be banished from the village if she did not adhere to the demands. Her father, in a separate agreement with officials, agreed that neither he nor other family members would interfere with his daughter’s punishment.10 In short, former nuns were held to different standards than other young, single women. They were expected to live like nuns, even when they no longer lived behind the cloister walls.

  To be married in sixteenth-century Europe was to be automatically invited to and included in society . . . unless, that is, you were a married monk or especially a married nun, in which case the opposite was true. Married former monastics were, for the most part, considered outsiders and excluded from society. As Marjorie Plummer notes, “Their marriages [were] a significant contrast to the usual social inclusion that marriage signaled.”11 We can see evidence of how this played out in Luther and Katharina’s marriage as well. While Luther took some heat from his friends and colleagues, Katharina bore the brunt of the public slander that only escalated and intensified after the couple exchanged their vows. While her peers who married after their escape from the convent were undoubtedly the center of harmless town gossip, Katharina was ruthlessly slandered, ostracized, and even threatened. She was a lightning rod for scandal, not just because she married, but because of who she married.

  Scandalized

  Instead of good wishes and words of encouragement, malicious rumors swirled around the couple during the weeks leading up to the wedding and in the days, months, and even years following their nuptials. Melanchthon accused Luther of succumbing to feminine wiles, suggesting that the Marienthron nuns were responsible for Luther’s actions. “I think the explanation is this: the man is extraordinarily easily influenced, and so the nuns, who chased him in every way, ensnared him,” he wrote to his student, Joachim Camerarius, on June 16. “Perhaps having so much to do with the nuns softened him up, although he is a noble and upright man, and caused the fire to flare up in him.”12

  Melanchthon ultimately regretted this letter and actually didn’t send it (he sent a more delicately worded revised version in July), but Luther’s detractors got ahold of the original letter and circulated it around Wittenberg and beyond.13 Even though Melanchthon eventually made peace with Luther’s marriage, he still didn’t give his friend much credit for his ability to resist what he claimed were the nun’s desperate advances.

  Melanchthon wasn’t alone in his opinions. Many of Luther’s detractors accused him of being overly lustful, and some, like the Dominican historian Heinrich Denifle, whose 860-page Luther and Lutherdom was published in 1904, saw Luther’s lust as one of the main causes of the entire Reformation.14

  The slander only escalated after the couple’s nuptials. In December 1525, Duke George of Saxony claimed that insanity, wild ambition, and lusts of the flesh had enticed Luther. A year later the duke accused the Luthers of running the other monks out of the Black Cloister—the former monastery where they had been married and where they made their home afterward—so Martin and Katharina could have the place to themselves to feast in “carnal lust.”15 In reality, only a single elderly monk still lived in the abandoned monastery when Katharina moved in as Luther’s wife, and the monk stayed on the premises and shared the residence with the Luthers. Even King Henry VIII of England added his own condemnation to the litany of complaints against the Luthers. In 1526 the king, who ten years later would have his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded simply because the Catholic Church would not grant him a divorce, accused Luther of “disgraceful lust in violating a nun who was consecrated to God.”16

  It was Katharina, however, who was the main target of the malicious slander. In the weeks and months following the wedding she was accused in pamphlets and letters that circulated far beyond Wittenberg’s city walls of being a whore, a “dancing girl,” and a traitor of Christ.17 Many of Luther’s detractors viewed Katharina as a sex-crazed seductress—a former nun who had broken her lifelong vow of chastity to seduce not just any man, but a monk, and a famous one at that. Even the theologian and Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam took a turn at the backstabbing, claiming in his letters that Katharina had borne a child a few days after the wedding. This was a grave accusation—recall the punishment of the tower and stockade for the bride and groom who were discovered to have engaged in premari
tal sex. When he realized his error—the Luthers’ first son arrived a proper twelve months after the nuptials—Erasmus was forced to retract his accusation, yet he couldn’t help but ponder a popular legend of the time: that the “Antichrist”18 in the form of a two-headed monster would be born to a monk and a nun.19

  Melanchthon defended Luther on this count, insisting, “The talk that he had already slept with the woman Bora is a lie,” but the rumor persisted for years, despite the fact that it was obviously false.20 Even a seemingly innocuous copper engraving was used by the rumor mongers against the Luthers. The engraving depicts Luther and Katharina along with their six children, but a seventh child lurking in the background (Andreas, actually Luther’s nephew, who lived at the Black Cloister) was said to be Katharina’s oldest child, “proof” that she’d come to the marriage pregnant.21

  This vilification of Katharina continued long into her marriage and even long after her death. As Luther biographer Richard Friedenthal points out, as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers were still producing “fat, fictitiously elaborated biographies in the most colorful baroque style,” including one titled Lucifer Wittenbergensis—the “Morning Star of Wittenberg” (one of Luther’s many nicknames for Katharina)—in which Katharina was depicted as a “nymphomaniac virago who jumped into bed with all [of Luther’s] students.”22 “The fact that the moral indignation continued so long shows how violently this step of Luther’s roused people’s feelings, more so indeed than other steps of his which were far more significant,” says Friedenthal.23 It also illustrates the deep-seated suspicion with which women, particularly single women, of that time were viewed by much of society.

  A “Domestic Danger and a Delectable Detriment”

  Since only eight of her letters have survived, none of which address the early months and years of her marriage, we don’t know for sure how Katharina responded to these vicious attacks on her character. We can only assume she was mortified and perhaps even afraid for her life. This was, after all, the late Middle Ages—a time when women were accused as witches and heretics and burned at the stake for far lesser “wrongs” than marrying a monk.

  It’s impossible to know exactly how many witches were hanged or burned between 1400 and 1800, but conservative estimates usually cite between 40,000 and 50,000, with some estimates as high as 100,000 or more.24 The vast majority of those executed on charges of sorcery were either unmarried single women or widows. Katharina was born only a few years after the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum—known in English as the Hammer of Witches—which instantly became the go-to source for information about witches and witchcraft. Although there had been witch treatises written before, the Malleus was different, both because it was so readily available—it was reprinted dozens of times after its initial publication in 1487—and because it pointed to witchcraft as one of the primary reasons for the world’s ever-increasing ills.25

  The authors, Dominican inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, aimed to answer two main questions in the Malleus—What is witchcraft? And who is a witch?—as well as offer advice to priests and assistance to judges, both of whom were combating sorcery in the trenches. They dedicated a significant portion of the book to the question of why witchcraft was chiefly practiced by women. Women, the authors concluded, were much more prone to engage in sorcery because they were more impressionable, more apt to doubt in their faith, feebler in mind and body, and defective in form, having been created from a “rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man.”26

  Furthermore, Sprenger and Kramer continued, a woman was a “liar by nature”; vain in gait, posture, and habit; and insatiable in carnal lust, as well as wicked: “a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!” “A woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade,” wrote the authors, quoting Seneca. “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”27

  The Malleus is a lengthy document, but much of the authors’ argument regarding the origins of witchcraft is summarized in one succinct statement: “All [witchcraft] comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”28 As historian Hans Peter Broedel notes, “Witchcraft in the Malleus thus emerged as a phenomenon that is explicitly gendered and sexual. It arises from the insatiable sexual appetites of women.”29 Witches, for example, were blamed for infertility, miscarriages, male lust, and even impotence and sexual dysfunction in men, including the disappearance of a man’s penis, so that he could “see and feel nothing except his smooth body, uninterrupted by any member.”30 If something went awry with a man’s sexuality or in his marriage, a witch was undoubtedly to blame, and that witch was usually found to be a spinster or a widow.

  Katharina was surely familiar with the Malleus Maleficarum, and she would have been keenly aware, too, of the “witch hunt” that was exploding across Europe, the primary target of which were single women very much like herself (before she married). In fact, while she was still living, four witches were executed in Wittenberg, an event that would have garnered significant attention.31 The Catholic Church would likely have viewed her as a witch, and even Protestant reformers would have considered Katharina a “witchly” seductress. There was danger in every direction, and all anyone needed back then to incite the cries of “Witch!” was a motive. We can’t know for sure if Katharina was afraid of being accused as a witch, but we do know that the threat of such an accusation was real.

  The So-Called Wife

  While we don’t know Katharina’s reaction to the rumors and gossip that dogged her, we can look to one of her contemporaries for insights. Katharina Schütz Zell was the first woman in the city of Strasbourg to marry a priest. After she wed Matthew Zell in 1523, she crafted a letter to the bishop, later printed publicly, in which she defended her husband, calling the letter an “apologia for Master Matthew Zell . . . because of the great lies invented about him.”32 Zell systematically invalidated each of the rumors and accusations aimed at her husband, and in doing so, cleverly succeeded not only in defending her husband but also herself and her own motives for marriage as well.

  “He began such a marriage because he wanted very much to raise up God’s honor, his own salvation, and that of all his brothers,” Zell wrote. “For I can perceive in him no dishonorableness, no inclination toward lust or other such thing—for I am not gifted with either overwhelming beauty or riches or other virtue that might move one to seek me in marriage!”33 Zell dismissed the rumors that her husband had seduced another woman before their marriage and the family maid after, and insisted that she was not physically abused, nor had she run away to her father’s house to escape her husband’s wrath. In short, Zell concluded, “I know nothing else in this hour than that we would want to satisfy each other in all our intentions insofar as they are godly, and we do that. I attest that such liars forcibly struggle against him without any reason and lie about him. These lies are also against me and all people.”34

  Simmering with anger and indignation, Zell’s words offer us a glimpse into some of the emotions Katharina Luther may have experienced as the slanderous rumors swirled around her. As far as we know, she chose not to respond to her detractors, either verbally or in writing. Or perhaps, given her status as the wife of someone so famous, Katharina felt she could not respond. Luther, on the other hand, obstinate, rebellious, and sharp-tongued as always, vocalized his reaction loud and clear for all to hear. Clearly spurred on by the resistance to his marriage and the malicious gossip it provoked, he rarely missed an opportunity to respond with vigor, and often a bit of fun, to those who slandered him.

  A year after they were married, Katharina and Luther received two letters, one from Johann Hasenberg and the other from Joachim von der Heyden, both protégés of Duke George. Hasenberg addressed his letter in Latin, the language of the clergy, to “M. Luder and his unmarried wife, Katharina von B
ora,” and called for them to repent and “return remorsefully to their cloisters.”35 At the very least, Hasenberg insisted, Luther should “send his nun back to her bridegroom Christ and to her Mother Church.”36 If he refused, he should “suffer the torments of hell.”37 Von der Heyden, on the other hand, addressed his letter in German specifically to Katharina, calling her Luther’s “so-called wife,” blaming her for leading other nuns astray, and accusing her of abusing evangelic freedom through her lustful sin.38

  Luther simply couldn’t resist. He penned an anonymous satirical reply, noting that the two letters had been bound into a “beautiful little book” and entrusted to his household servants, who took it to the privy and then sent it back to Luther after using it (implying that their letters had been used as toilet paper). The servants, the anonymous response read, had also enclosed a reply, bluntly informing the two men that they were asses and concluding with a stinging attack aimed specifically at von der Heyden: “How dare you preempt the power of a common judge and condemn publicly, and before all the world, a godly woman as though she were a perfidious, perjuring, gone astray whore. Where have you, impudent young brat, learned to defame the virtue of other people?”39

  As a man, and a man of power and prestige, Luther could get away with such a vehement response. Katharina’s role, on the other hand, was to stay as quiet and unobtrusive as possible and hope that her husband’s word would be enough to restore her honor and secure her future. She was in a uniquely terrible position at this point. After fleeing the secure, albeit confining, life of the convent for the unknown, Katharina had leapt from the precarious life of single womanhood into the security of marriage, only to discover that she was a lightning rod for controversy and anger, a threat to the reform movement, and completely powerless to defend or save herself.