The woman Proverbs 31 no doubt had in mind: “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.” Proposed date of commemoration: December 20.
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Proverbs 31 may as well have been written about Katharina von Bora, the former nun who married Martin Luther and thereby became the most world-changing wife in history. But in her case, to be a wife was not simply to be attached to a famous husband. Wife was truly an office, like the office of preacher or teacher or judge: a public role with vast responsibilities demanding faultless acumen. It is hard to imagine that anyone with less resolve, grit, and personality could have pulled off the role as first lady of the Reformation and personal companion to the energetic and irascible Martin Luther.
Though more is known about Katharina than just about any other woman of her time, that still amounts to precious little. Almost none of her own thoughts are preserved; what we know about her comes to us through other people’s records. Her birthyear of 1499, for instance, was mentioned by Erasmus of all people, and her exact birthdate of January 29 doesn’t show up in any records until 1733.
Her family is known as historically important landed gentry, relatively impoverished by the time Katharina came along. Her mother died early, which may account for why Katharina spent nearly twenty years in convents, starting at the age of six as a boarder in Brehna, then five years later joining two of her aunts at Marienthron in Nimbschen, where she eventually took her vows. There she learned to read, write, and sing and started on Latin—a remarkable education in an era that considered girls’ education to be a luxury at best—as well as the business of running a household economy. No one knows what she thought of convent life except for the sheer fact that, in the end, she left it.
Somehow or other Luther’s ideas snuck into the Marienthron convent. His rejection of both monastic vows as binding for life and the consequent denigration of married sexuality must have spoken potently to many of the young women there. During the Easter vigil, on the night of April 4, 1523, twelve nuns fled Marienthron with the help of Leonhard Koppe, a councillor and merchant from Torgau, the city that would much later become Katharina’s final resting place. They were greeted in Wittenberg on Easter Monday with a public welcome, and Luther—who had helped to arrange the feat—immediately published a tract entitled “Why Nuns May, in All Godliness, Leave the Convent,” deliberately broadcasting the news of an action that in his eyes deserved widespread acclaim. It was a bold move on both Koppe and Luther’s parts: abducting nuns earned the death penalty.
The question was then what these liberated women were to do. Families were often furious at their escaped daughters or sisters, not least of all because it had cost quite a lot of money to secure them a spot in the convent in the first place. Employment opportunities for women were, of course, very limited, but Luther pulled it off in a few cases. For example, Margarethe von Staupitz, the sister of none other than Luther’s teacher Johann von Staupitz, got hired as the teacher at the girls’ school in Grimma. Most of the nuns ended up marrying, and some managed to secure settlements from the state to provide for them.
Two years later, Katharina alone was left unemployed and unclaimed, though happily settled in as a member of the Lucas Cranach household. She had hoped to marry one Hieronymous Baumgartner, but despite the reciprocal affection his wealthy family suppressed the match and left her disappointed. Luther actually intervened with Hieronymous on her behalf, but to no avail. Baumgartner eventually married a much younger and wealthier girl, but only after Katharina herself had married Luther. During this period she also made friends with King Christian II of Denmark, temporarily driven out of his realm and idling the time away in Wittenberg, who gave her a gold ring—with what exact purpose remains unclear. Luther even tried to match Katharina up with another man, but she outright refused and informed Luther’s best friend, Nicholas von Amsdorf, that she would have only him—or the reformer-in-chief. Amsdorf promptly saw to it that she married Luther, and himself remained a bachelor till his dying day.
In truth, Luther hadn’t been quite sure about getting married. He certainly supported the marriage of priests, which had begun already in 1521. He joked that he would marry on his deathbed just to prove the point. He did think that getting married would reconcile him to his parents, who had been unhappy with his career choice from the get-go. But there was no urgency about it for him; despite his concerns that remaining unmarried was not reasonable for most people, he considered himself to have received the supernatural gift of celibacy. It was on the basis of Scripture that Luther considered marriage to be the oldest and highest estate, giving a man and a woman to each other for mutual support, the raising of children, and the proper channeling of desire.
We don’t know how the matter was finally settled, aside from Amsdorf’s relaying of the message. There was clearly regard on both sides of the match, but not what we would call romance. Their quiet wedding on June 13, 1525—followed by a public celebration two weeks later—was, ultimately, a calling. But what didn’t start out with romance did in fact turn into love, rather soon, and quite profound.
Despite the Reformation message about marriage, Luther’s friends were less than thrilled with his. Melanchthon thought the timing was awkward—in the midst of the Peasants’ War—though after Luther’s death he did his utmost to see that Katharina was well cared for when forces all around were trying to snatch her husband’s property away from her. Still, the theoretical and biblical certainty of the good of marriage took some getting used to in everyday life. A wife was not just a theory but a person with emotions, predilections, opinions. Women were suddenly invading an eternally male sphere. The Table Talk reveals the resistance that many of Luther’s guests put to her presence and participation in the general conversation, not to mention their disapproval that Luther did nothing to rein her in.
And if it was hard for his sympathizers, how much more for his slanderers! Katharina’s remarkable and powerful character is revealed in how unfailingly she went about the business of pioneering the holy life of a pastor’s wife with so much vitriole spilling on all sides and disgusting accusations against her character. Unabashed, Luther announced that he used the worst of these reports, by one Joachim von Heyden, in the only suitable manner: as toilet paper. The naysayers were startled indeed when the first Luther baby arrived a full year after the marriage—healthy, whole, and showing no signs of being the Antichrist expected as the fruit of a nun and monk’s union.
Katharina quickly discovered that housekeeping for Luther was no small task. Friends report her saying, “I have to accustom the Doctor to a different set of habits, so that he does things the way I want.” Her first job was to throw out Luther’s bed, a completely rotten straw sack that he had never thought to change, turn, or even air out. Furthermore, Luther was useless at money, or at least better accustomed to giving it away than investing it. It’s no surprise that two or three charlatans took advantage of the couple before she wised up.
Katharina took over the accounts, demanded payment for Luther’s books, managed the livestock, tended the gardens, and brewed locally praised beer. The couple were always trying new plants; Katharina even grew her own subtropical saffron, the most notoriously labor-intensive and therefore expensive spice of all time. She oversaw extensions and renovations of the old Augustinian cloister where they lived, which in turn allowed a great community to gather there for short- and long-term stays—in exchange for reasonable fees, of course. She took their profits to buy more gardens and even a farm in Zülsdorf, near her hometown, a retreat so beloved by them both that they considered retiring there to get away from tiresome Wittenberg society. By the end of the 1520s their position was financially secure, though the wealth was not an end it itself. Only the Melanchthons outstripped them in generosity.
Baby Hans, healthy and normal, was followed by five more pregnancies, one of which miscarried. The first daughter, Elisabeth, died at less than a year old, a bitter pill for the parents, but the death of twelve-year-old Magdalena much later nearly destroyed them. In the end three sons and the youngest daughter survived to adulthood. In addition to these children, the Luthers took in a number of nieces and nephews.
People have often wondered to what extent Katharina contributed to Luther’s theological work. It’s clear enough that she had no particular desire to take on a public theological role, as for instance Argula von Grumbach did. But that she was vitally interested in Luther’s work, and understood it well enough to invite his confidence and conversation, is beyond question. She was the one to encourage him to write a response to Erasmus, which became The Bondage of the Will, the treatise that Luther later valued as his most important work. The Table Talk records a debate between them about whether God really wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Luther’s letters to her, for instance from the 1529 Marburg Colloquy, convey details of the dispute.
But in the end Katharina’s task was to live Reformation theology rather than to write it. When Luther offered her fifty gulden to read through the Bible again, she retorted that she’d read enough of it and now wished to live it! She was known to express the wish that his students would take care to live out the word they studied so intently as well. Katharina’s wide-ranging intelligence and responsiveness are probably best indicated by the many nicknames her doting husband gave her: not only Carissima, Herzliebe, and Morning Star of Wittenberg, but also Lord Kate, Doctorissa, Herr Doktor, Preacher, Judgess, and Most Holy Mrs. Doctor. And, conversely, he called the Epistle to the Galatians his “Käthe von Bora.”
Life was good for Katharina while Luther lived. It ceased to be good after he died. He had foreseen this and done what he could to forestall the inevitable by, once again, defying convention. According to Saxon law, women were not permitted to inherit. The most they could hope for was the right to live on their husband’s property for the duration of their lives. Property passed to sons; lacking sons, to the nearest living male relatives.
Luther thought this was, in short, hogwash. His will deliberately eschewed legalese (though he did have the good sense to get three witnesses to countersign it) and stated plainly that every last bit of his property was to go to his beloved wife. His final act, in other words, was to break the law in favor of a woman. It was a battle to get the will enforced, but the elector backed her up. Still, the remaining six years of her life were marked by multiple flights from Wittenberg due to war or the plague or financial woes.
The last of her flights took Katharina to the neighboring city of Torgau. On the way she fell and broke her hip. She died shortly thereafter and was buried and remains buried in Torgau, with a monument to her displayed prominently in the Lutheran church. Her final words prove how deeply she had made Luther’s theology her own: “I will stick to Christ as a burr to a top coat.”
It has been all too easy for both fans and foes of the Luthers to fixate on the scandalous nature of an ex-monk and ex-nun getting hitched. It has also been common to turn them into an abstract principle; marriage is, after all, a blessed Christian vocation. But that’s to miss the still greater miracle of the very specific pairing of Martin and Katharina: a marriage of unanticipated love, respect, honor, passion, and partnership. We can well imagine Martin echoing the concluding accolades of Proverbs 31: “Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’”
For Further Reading
Martin Treu, Katherine von Bora: Luther’s Wife. trans. Stephen P. Glinsky Jr. 4th ed.
Reformation Biographies (Lutherstadt Wittenberg: Drei Kastanien Verlag, 2013).
Martin Treu, “Katharina von Bora, the Woman at Luther’s Side,”
Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999): 157–78.
Kirsi Stjerna, “‘Herr Doktor’ Katharina von Bora, 1499–1552. The Lutheran Matriarch,”
ch. 5 of Women and the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 51–70.
Rudolf K. Markwald and Marilyn Morris Markwald, Katharina von Bora: A Reformation Life
(St. Louis: Concordia, 2002).