All sorts of crazy stuff happens when women get involved in theology! Proposed date of commemoration: September 20.
Eighteen-year-old Arsacius Seehofer couldn’t contain his excitement when he arrived as a university tutor in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, after a stint studying in Wittenberg. For there he had learned that faith alone is sufficient for our justification! God imputes His own righteousness to us regardless of our works! God pours His Spirit into us, so we should not place our confidence in any good work of our own—yet certainly our Spirit-granted faith will produce good fruit! And since this is known only from Scripture, no one should trust any church official, not even a bishop, unless it is certain that his teaching comes from the word of God.
Those who had ears to hear knew what they were hearing. Arsacius was spouting Lutheran ideas, which had already been denounced by local preacher Georg Hauer two years prior. The ducal government was actively suppressing nascent Lutheranism by means of censorship, the seizure of Lutheran books, and the arrest of participants in private discussion groups on Reformation themes.
Therefore, no theologically intoxicated youth was going to be allowed to flout the law without consequences. In August of 1523, Arsacius’s rooms were searched and his possessions seized. On September 7, he was forced to recant before the entire university in words prepared for him: “Everything that I have read out from the writings of Philip Melanchthon in my lectures, and everything else which was spoken or written by me, and has just been read out by the notary of this university, is the most awful arch-heresy and knavery. I will never again adhere to or make use of any of it; but will betake myself, body and soul, to the Ettal monastery, not to leave the same without being commanded so to do by our gracious Lords, so that I have no desire to read or spread Lutheran ideas. May God almighty help me!”
No man came to Arsacius’s defense; it was much too dangerous.
But a woman did.
She was a noblewoman of the von Stauff line, but she held no authority in matters legal or juridical. She was literate, but she’d received no formal education. She was a wife, a mother of four, and a busy household manager. And she was the only one in Ingolstadt to come to Arsacius’s defense.
Such an unlikely champion as Argula von Grumbach (named, like her siblings, for characters from the medieval German epic Parzival) was given her first impulse toward being a confessor of the gospel at the tender age of ten, when her affectionate father gave to her—and surprisingly, not to any of her brothers—a beautiful, costly, and impressively illustrated Koberger Bible, one of the many German translations of the Scriptures before Luther’s own. This along with a family prayer book became treasured resources in her spiritual development. As an adolescent she became a lady-in-waiting to the emperor’s sister, Kunigunde, who was herself a friend of Luther’s mentor Johann von Staupitz; the latter even dedicated his On the Love of God to the young duchess.
It was a promising start, but Argula’s adulthood was pockmarked by a series of disasters. Both of her parents died within a few days of each other when the plague struck in 1509. Just a year later she married Friedrich von Grumbach, and things seemed to be improving, but only until her beloved uncle Jerome became entangled in a court intrigue, culminating in his beheading in 1516. Her brother Marcellus died in the Peasants’ War. Friedrich died young in 1530. Argula’s second and happier marriage to Count von Schlick in 1533 ended prematurely as well with his death in 1535—and it had been interrupted by vindictive politicians who decided to dispute the legality of their marriage and throw him in prison. (Argula wasn’t the only Lutheran woman to face this problem; so did Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg). With Friedrich, Argula had four children, two of whom went on to study with reformers, and even her daughter Apollonia received advanced tutoring in Nuremberg, but only her youngest son Gottfried outlived his mother.
Argula’s involvement in the Reformation came early on. Her brother Bernhardin attended the Diet of Worms that condemned Luther in 1521, and the next year he hired an evangelical preacher who served holy communion in both kinds. Three of their cousins, daughters of the beheaded uncle, fled their convents like Katharina von Bora. Argula was always an avid reader—late in life her correspondents gently chided her for failing to return borrowed books in a timely fashion—and she devoured Luther’s writings whenever they could be smuggled into Bavaria.
But what propelled her into action was the Seehofer affair. Marcellus had enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt and related his eyewitness account of Arsacius’s show trial. Only two months earlier, the first execution of Luther-sympathizers had taken place elsewhere—in fact, it was Argula who informed Luther by letter of the martyrdom of Johannes van den Esschen and Henricus Vos. She saw a dark night descending on her beloved Bavaria.
In distress, she took herself and the children from her village of Dietfurt to the city of Nuremberg to consult with Andreas Osiander, a good friend whom she called her “true pastor.” Immediately upon her return home on September 20, she wrote a public letter to the University of Ingolstadt: defending Arsacius, Luther, and Melanchthon, challenging the professors to a public debate on the contested matters, and altogether defying the ordinance against religious dissent in Bavaria. “All this fuss, too, about an eighteen-year-old child! Even the righteous person falls seven times a day. Much good may yet come of this youth.”
Such a thing was unheard of—a woman interjecting herself into politics and religion alike. She was well aware of it. “I suppressed my inclinations,” she wrote in her letter; “heavy of heart, I did nothing. Because Paul says in 1 Timothy 2: ‘The women should keep silence, and should not speak in church.’ But now that I cannot see any man who is up to it, who is either willing or able to speak, I am constrained by the saying: ‘Whoever confesses me,’” in Matthew 10. That verse was the charter of her Christian discipleship. Her baptismal vow was as serious as any priest or monk’s vow and obligated her to speak.
Her letter was an overnight bestseller. It was printed as a pamphlet and went through fourteen editions in the next two months. Almost thirty thousand copies of this and her next six letters ended up in print, making her one of the top-selling pamphleteers of the sixteenth century.
The Ingolstadt theologians were beside themselves. Georg Hauer preached against the “wretched children of Eve” and leveled accusations against “you female desperado,” “you wretched and pathetic daughter of Eve,” “you arrogant devil,” “you arrogant fool,” “you heretical bitch,” and “you shameless whore.” It is not difficult to surmise who he had in mind. Chancellor Leonhard von Eck insisted that this “female devil” be punished. He even accused her of the unthinkable: having preached in Dietfurt!
But since all she’d done was write letters, and since as a woman she had no official power, the best he could do was get her husband Friedrich dismissed from his post, throwing the family into a spiral of debt and litigation that they never escaped. Driven out of Dietfurt, they ended up moving first to the old family seat of Burggrumbach and eventually to Zeilitzheim. Some of the Bavarian authorities also suggested, none too subtly, that Friedrich ought to shut Argula up by any means necessary, and no one would blame him.
If the Ingolstadt theologians thought that such measures would silence Argula, they were profoundly mistaken. Late in October of the same year she wrote another open letter, this time to the Ingolstadt city council. (The councillors waited nine months to read it, and when they finally did, they elected to ignore it.) In November, she traveled at her own expense to Nuremberg again to attend the Reichstag—the meeting of all the princes and electors in the Holy Roman Empire—to persuade them to favor the Reformation cause. She published her letters to Duke Johann of Simmern and Elector Frederick the Wise, commending them to fortitude on behalf of the gospel, as well as a response to her mother’s cousin, Adam von Thering, who deplored her unwomanly behavior.
“I hear that some are so angry with me that they do not know how best to speed my passage from life into death,” she wrote. Despite the threats, Argula’s support network remained strong. Luther himself asked his friends to greet her and wrote letters to her for years after; he sent her a signed copy of his Personal Prayer Book; he also wrote his own defense of Arsacius. Argula, in turn, appears to have been the first one to encourage Luther to get married!
Aside from Luther, Argula was friends with an extraordinary range of Reformation figures from every corner of the controversy, among them Paul Speratus, compiler of the first Lutheran hymnal; George Spalatin, Frederick the Wise’s court chaplain; Balthasar Hubmaier and Sebastian Lotzer, later to become proponents of the Anabaptist movement; Urbanus Rhegius, the refomer of Lüneburg; even, later in life, John Eck, one of Luther’s earliest antagonists!
And the ordinary Christians were certainly on Argula’s side. She was part of a broader movement of laypeople to reclaim the Bible and their baptismally-given right to read and interpret it, an argument Luther had made in his 1520 Address to the Christian Nobility. In April 1524 a satire of the Ingolstadt theologians circulated, depicting them as denouncing young Arsacius “for believing that lay people and women can be theologians, which is clearly impossible since only men can be ordained, and since all theologians are men,” despite the fact that all the peasants believed Argula to be more educated than the lot of them and of having committed the entire Bible to memory. A woodcut (see above) gracing a compilation of her writings vividly illustrated this belief: Argula, Bible in hand, faces off with a whole court of university theologians, whose textbooks and summae have fallen to the ground as if dead. Argula herself believed that if her opponents inflicted martyrdom upon her, “a hundred women would emerge to write against them.” Being a woman or a layperson or even a duke was no excuse for being “as well informed about the Bible as a cow is about chess.” For “all Christians do have a responsibility to know the word of God.” She certainly did: her few and short collected writings boast around three hundred biblical citations in all.
Argula’s publishing career was short-lived. Her last letter in June 1524 was an appeal to the city of Regensburg—ignored like every other letter she wrote—objecting to the clamp-down on evangelical activities. “The word of God must be our weapon,” she insisted. “We must not hit out with weapons, but love our neighbor, and keep peace with one another.” In this she anticipated the emphasis in the later Lutheran Book of Concord on obedience to God rather than worldly authorities (which itself came from Acts 4 and 5). But this letter was not quite her last word to the wider world.
Instead it was to be a poem, a response to another poem, “A Word about the Stauffen woman and her disputatiousness”: a coarse, vulgur, and scurrilous attack on her character. Quoting no Scripture other than a few verses from I and II Timothy, the sole purpose of the poem’s pseudonymous author was to discredit Argula as a promiscuous wild animal who had brazenly abandoned her spindle and thread. Undaunted, she reprinted the original poem along with her own withering response, calling out the coward to meet her in public debate instead of hiding behind an assumed name. Her poem assembled a much more impressive range of Scripture, too, from God speaking through Balaam’s ass in Numbers 22, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh, male and female alike, in Joel 3, to the stories of biblical and apocryphal heroines, especially the warrior women Deborah, Jael, and Judith.
Even after the end of her writing career, Argula remained active in the Reformation cause. In 1530 she traveled to the Diet of Augsburg, where Philip Melanchthon and others presented the Augsburg Confession—the eventual charter for the Lutheran church—to the emperor, dukes, and princes. It is no surprise that she published nothing this time around: Emperor Charles V had sent her a personal note warning her to keep quiet! Her involvement in the Seehofer affair had never been forgotten, apparently.
But Argula found her own ways to make a difference. She journeyed to Coburg Castle where Luther was being forced to hide due to the price on his head. It was the first time they met in person after nearly a decade’s correspondence. She brought him news of the Diet’s progress and offered advice on weaning infants, which he dutifully reported in a letter to his wife.
She and two other Luther-sympathizers also arranged a meeting between Melanchthon, as a representative of Wittenberg, and Martin Bucer, as a representative of the south Germans, hoping they could come to some kind of agreement about the Lord’s Supper after the failed Marburg Colloquy with Zwingli and the Swiss the year before. Miraculously enough, it worked: Melanchthon was convinced that Bucer and his cohort did confess the physical presence of Christ in the sacrament after all. A lasting agreement between the two parties was drafted in 1536, known to us as the Wittenberg Colloquy, building on the Augsburg meeting’s success. Once again Argula had intervened in Reformation politics—but this time she could be pleased with the outcome.
Altogether, people were amazed that any women at all took a stand during the Reformation. That Argula should—a wife, a mother of four, a laywoman without even a nun’s level of learning—was nothing short of miraculous. But for her the miracle was the word of God itself, its power to bring light into the darkness, to change hearts of stone into flesh, to make good on its own promises.
Argula turned out to be right about Arsacius Seehofer, incidentally. Though sent to the Ettal monastery for his punishment, he managed to escape and went directly from there to Wittenberg. During the mid-1530s he taught at a school in Augsburg and eventually became a pastor. His book of sermons published in 1539 was so influential that it eventually made it into the first rank on the Index of Prohibited Books. (The Index was formally abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1966).
The memory of Argula persisted long after her death. She was included in Ludwig Rabe’s 1572 History of the Martyrs, the first work of Lutheran hagiography, which anointed her a confessor “especially for the consolation and encouragement of the female sex.” Bavarian tradition credits her with having started a number of churches before her death in 1554. A plaque in Argula’s memory can be found to this day in the St. Sigismund Lutheran church in Zeilitzheim, and even the mostly Catholic town of Beratzhausen keeps her memory alive as an early advocate of religious toleration. She was honored by German Pietists in the eighteenth century, venerated in a number of popular hagiographies of rather spurious historical value in the nineteenth century, and finally became the subject of Reformation research in the twentieth century.
As her exact date of death is unknown, Argula’s feast is fittingly celebrated on the day she first took up pen and paper to write in defense of the gospel, September 20.