Imagine a five-year-old girl going off to kindergarten, a half day of school. Not having attended preschool, she’s frightened, crying, and hanging on to her mother for dear life. We’ve all witnessed such scenes. It’s part of growing up. But what if the year is 1504, and the little girl is not headed for a three-hour morning session but rather to a lifetime of cloistered convent living? Today we would regard such treatment as serious child abuse. Not in the sixteenth century, however—unless a great Reformer rises up to make blistering attacks against this religious practice.
Sister Maria Deo Gratias, a consecrated nun with the Sisters of the Most Blessed Sacrament, was in sixth grade when she sensed her religious calling. When interviewed in 2014 for an article in the New Yorker, she spoke of the liberty in giving oneself “totally to God,” insisting that the vow of chastity, almost universally regarded as limiting women’s choices, actually opened the door to freedom. However, the four-year-old niece of one of the nuns was convinced these women lived in a “Jesus cage.”1 To a little girl, this is an understandable term—and a child’s worst nightmare: to be kidnapped and incarcerated in a cage.
Katharina von Bora was five when she entered a “Jesus cage” in 1504 (a Benedictine cloister that also served as a boarding school for girls). Unlike Sister Maria, she had no opportunity to wait until she was in sixth grade to sense a “religious vocation” and to later enjoy complete satisfaction inside the cloister, “stripped of everything that’s not God.”2
Katie, at five, was certainly not the youngest of girls to be dropped off at a convent. Edburga, a tenth-century English princess, entered a convent at age three. But the decision had been hers, so the story goes: “Her father set before her both religious objects (Bible, chalice, and paten) and secular (jewels, gold, and silver) . . . to decide the future course of her life.” Without hesitation, the toddler chose the religious objects.3 She remained in the convent her entire life, first a nun and then abbess of Nunnaminster. After her death, she was canonized a saint with a centuries-long cult following.
In Germany, too, there had been a long tradition of sending little girls to a convent. Indeed, the famed twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen was slotted for a religious vocation at age eight. Her situation was far more tenuous that that of Katie. A daughter of nobility, Hildegard was placed under the care of the anchoress Jutta, whose solitary cell was a small hut attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Jutta practiced severe asceticism, including self-flagellation. Through her influence, Hildegard embraced the religious vocation.
Indeed, Katie’s circumstances were not unusual during the Middle Ages. In her classic study, Medieval English Nunneries, Eileen Power tells of Guy Beauchamp, a fourteenth-century earl of Warwick, who took his two daughters, Margaret, age seven, and Katherine, age one, and left them at the Shouldham Priory to be trained for a religious vocation.4 Katherine would become a nun, but no records remain of her older sister, who may have died young.
So, like many other young daughters of lesser nobility in this era, Katharina was carted off to a convent. In her case, the decision related to family circumstances. Her mother had died, and shortly thereafter her father made arrangements to marry a widow with children of her own. So her father packed her off to boarding school, perhaps with good intentions, but it effectively left her fatherless as well as motherless within a matter of months. In 1504, she arrived in Brehna to begin her education at the Benedictine cloister there. But one might wonder if she had actually been sold into monasticism, since the decision was primarily a financial one, as was true for many girls in late medieval times. Indeed, it was a common practice among cash-strapped lesser nobility in sixteenth-century Germany. For the recently widowed Hans von Bora, it meant one less child taking up space in a small house, one less mouth to feed, and one less dowry to be paid in the future. And it would also eliminate her from any inheritance. As in every case, there was a cost up front but that was negotiable. The amount paid for little Katie—a measly thirty groschen—could indicate either poverty or just plain stinginess.5
Born on January 29, 1499, near Leipzig, to Hans von Bora and Anna von Haugwitz, Katharina was a country girl with three brothers and perhaps a sister. Although the little kindergartner, as we imagine her, must have been filled with confusion and sadness during those first weeks and months away—no doubt missing her home and siblings—she may have quickly adjusted. Here the days were structured, and for a bright, quick-witted child with a love of learning, the school had much to offer—an excellent curriculum, spiritual nourishment, and proper grooming for a young lady.
How well Katharina acclimated emotionally as the months turned into years is not recorded. However, we do know Martin Luther’s view of such customs. His assessment may have been based on Katharina’s own recollections of her abandonment as a little child, which would one day lead to holy vows and life in a cloister. “It is very shameful that children, especially defenseless women and young girls,” wrote Luther, “are pushed into the nunneries. Shame on the unmerciful parents who treat their own so cruelly.”6
In 1524, the year after Katharina escaped the convent, Luther published a pamphlet, A Story of How God Rescued an Honorable Nun, Accompanied by a Letter of Martin Luther to the Counts of Mansfield. The tract consisted primarily of the testimony of Florentina, who was shipped off to a convent at age six. Five years later, she was forced to “take the veil.” When she pleaded with her abbess to allow her to leave, she was ordered to do penance. Then when her efforts to contact her family and Luther himself were exposed, she was flogged and locked in a convent prison cell. It was only after she managed to flee that Luther published her first-person account, adding his own commentary. Her escape was the work of God, he insisted, and the cruel abbess was a Jezebel.7
Katharina was also groomed to “take the veil.” Having barely reached her tenth birthday, the little girl bade good-bye to her schoolmates and friends and set out with strangers to live in a new home. She had no doubt been informed that her father had arranged for her to be relocated to Marienthron, a Cistercian cloister at Nimbschen. When she arrived, she must have realized immediately that her living situation had taken a major downward turn. The convent was smaller with fewer amenities. Housing, meals, and the inventory of books did not stack up to the well-endowed Benedictine compound at Brehna she had come to know so well. How much did she understand about this transfer? Did she realize that her father had decided she would live out her life as a cloistered nun?
There was a saying in early modern Germany: at ten a child (kindische Art), at twenty a maid, at thirty a wife, and so on. “To the people of the time, ‘kindische Art’ expressed the incomplete development of body, mind, and moral faculties.”8 By the standards of her own day, not just ours, Katie was a child when she was taken to Nimbschen to begin the process of entering a lifelong vocation as a nun.
Perhaps she was too immature to fully comprehend what was going on. Perhaps she did understand and took the decision in stride, assuming her future vocation was a family tradition and it was her duty to carry it on. After all, two of her aunts, one from each side of the family, Magdalene von Bora and Margarete von Haubitz, were residents, the latter her abbess and superior. But did she really want to follow in their footsteps? Did she ever fantasize about the world outside? About running away? Or did the deep moat and high fences around the perimeter of the compound give her pause?
Or perhaps she instinctively knew there was much to be commended in a religious vocation. Apart from the health perils, there were many drawbacks to marriage. It is no exaggeration to say that men were gross. Perhaps a prince took baths, wore clean clothes, and had mint to compensate for garlic breath. But the average man about town cared little for personal hygiene (at least in comparison to nuns), and on top of that, they treated women badly. A wife was fortunate not to be pushed around or beaten, and few wives escaped the coarse put-downs of a guffawing husband and his cohorts. Indeed, monastic life had its appeal.
There were many advantages for a girl who was placed in a convent. She was not forced into an arranged marriage with an old man or a younger man she found unappealing. She would not die prematurely in childbirth or be weighed down with household drudgery and the care of a house filled with hungry children. She would not be beaten by a violent husband because she did not do his bidding. She would have opportunities for education in a vocation that carried with it a certain prestige.
In the sixteenth century, there were no statistics of comparative life spans, but we now know that life for women in a convent was significantly healthier than life in the outside world. On average, an abbess lived well into her fifties, while the life span for most women outside the convent was under thirty. Nuns were expected to do manual labor and keep gardens, but there was considerable time devoted to the hours of prayer, meditation, reading, and choir—luxuries few women with families could afford. Cloistered nuns were less likely to die of contagious diseases so prevalent at the time, and for many nuns, a vegetarian diet was standard. However, it was not unusual for cloistered women, like women in the outside world, to complain about almost inedible food and the hunger pangs they suffered.9 So we would be incorrect to imagine these nuns living in some sort of Renaissance spa.
The workday for nuns often carried a sense of accomplishment, whether laboring in their own garden plots, copying manuscripts, or producing psalters for daily convent use. In fact, “nuns in Germany,” writes Judith Oliver, “made many psalters for their own use, despite repeated prohibitions against book production by women under Dominican supervision.”10 Most psalters were made by urban craftsmen, but nuns carried on this craft well into the sixteenth century, especially in Germany. The psalters were classified as “nonnenbücher” or “nuns’ books.” It was a pejorative term, and their craft was considered deficient in comparison to those made by professional bookbinders.11 Today an original nonnenbücher would hardly be dismissed as inferior, either at a Sotheby’s auction or at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
When Katharina escaped the convent, she was in some respects prepared for the outside world, having learned how to make do with very little and having mastered a wide range of skills that served her well as she stepped into the role of abbess of the Black Cloister. But her preparation went far beyond the basic functions of running a large household. There is every indication she was emotionally and mentally prepared as well. It is interesting that her escape involved what we might term a sorority. She was not one girl alone in the night, but rather part of a small, tight-knit group of sisters who told secrets and made clandestine plans.
But how were such plans accomplished? Like most cloisters of the time, silence was strictly observed—except, of course, for communal prayers and choir. But the nuns of Nimbschen, Ernst Kroker speculates, might have utilized a secret sign language to communicate, perhaps very well-honed gestures by the time it became necessary to plan their escape.12
Despite the rule of silence, it was not unusual for nuns to have best friends in the cloister and to become deeply attached emotionally, almost as though it were a romance—as it in fact sometimes was. Perhaps the most well-known such “romance” involved the celebrated abbess Hildegard of Bingen and a young nun, Richardis von Stade. Born in 1098, Hildegard’s life would span most of the twelfth century. She expressed her love for Richardis as an intimate friend and one who had encouraged her in her writing: “When I wrote the book Scivias, I bore a strong love to a noble nun . . . who suffered with me until I finished this book.”13
In fact, their relationship was so passionate that other nuns became concerned. Hildegard poured out her heart to her beloved, alluding to this very unease among the other nuns: “I loved the nobility of your conduct, your wisdom and your chastity, your soul and the whole of your life, so much that many said: What are you doing?”14
Later when Hildegard learned that Richardis had been appointed abbess of another convent (a promotion arranged by her archbishop brother), she was heartbroken—and livid. She sought intervention from the pope, but to no avail. Some time later when word came that the young woman, only twenty-eight, was on her deathbed, Hildegard grieved in anger, blaming the untimely death on a prideful spirit and on the devil: “But the ancient serpent had attempted to deprive her of that blessed honor by assaulting her through her human nobility. Yet the mighty Judge drew this my daughter to Himself, cutting her off from all human glory.”15
It is not difficult to imagine that Katharina missed the sisterhood and special friends who were left behind in the convent after her escape. Then as a busy hausfrau, there was no time for secret sisters, knitting groups, book clubs, and playful feminine banter.
Sisterhood, however, sometimes took a sinister turn, as when nuns fought among themselves or lashed out against an abbess or an outsider. Indeed, convents could be dangerous places for those who sought to clamp down on misbehavior or to institute new rules. When reform came to the diocese of Hildesheim in the mid-fifteenth century, father confessor Johann Busch was sent to the nuns of Derneburg. Among other changes, he insisted that all food must be held in common, including kegs of beer. To enforce this communal property directive, the priest asked to be taken to the cellar by one he thought to be a compliant sister. She courteously suggested he go first, as he later related:
Without thinking, I did so. But when I went down into it, she suddenly clapped to the door or vault over my head and stood upon it. I was shut up alone in there, thinking what would have happened if the nuns had shut me up there secretly . . . At length after some delay they opened the trap-door of the cellar and let me come out. After that I was never willing to go first into any closed place in any nunnery . . . The sister who did this was good enough and very simple, whence I was astonished that she should think of such a thing.16
In his effort to confiscate her beer, confessor Busch (no connection with Anheuser) may have imagined this clever nun to be simple. But we suspect otherwise.
As is true of all institutions, whether religious or secular, secret sins sometimes unravel and public scandals ensue. This has been true in the history of monasticism. Indeed, there were convents in medieval Europe that were thought to be little more than brothels. Luther himself had characterized convents with a slur that has resounded through the centuries: “worse than common brothels, taverns, or dens of thieves.”17
Characteristic of Luther, he was grossly exaggerating, though if he had in mind the sixth-century Frankish convent at Poitiers, his assessment might have been fitting. The nun Chrodield and some forty followers staged a revolt against their abbess. Bishop Gregory of Tours offered his version of the uprising:
Chrodield, having collected about her . . . a band of murderers, wrong-doers, law-breakers, and vagrants of all kinds, dwelt in open revolt and ordered her followers to break into the nunnery at night and forcibly to bear off the abbess . . . The armed bands rushed in, ran about the monastery by the light of a torch in search of the abbess, and . . . carried off the prioress whom they mistook for the abbess in the darkness.18
Here we have a reverse rendition of the Keystone Kops. What a subject this would have been for a silent film! As Gregory reports, when Chrodield and her gang of nuns and thugs realized they had kidnapped the wrong woman, they returned and “secured the real abbess, dragged her away, and placed her in custody near the basilica of St. Hilary.”19
Sixteenth-century accounts of rebel nuns were equally fascinating. In 1517, the very year that Luther was pounding nails into a church door, an English bishop sent an emissary to check out a small Benedictine convent near Somerset. The prioress, Katherine Wellys, had years earlier given birth to a daughter, the father of whom was a local chaplain who regularly spent the night with Katherine. But that was apparently the least of the problems. When it was time for the daughter to marry, Katherine dipped into the convent coffers for the dowry. Worse than that, the resident nuns’ own allowances were being sent to the relatives of the prioress. So the nuns were living in a shabby dwelling, shivering without firewood and surviving on barely edible food and substandard ale. They were threatened that any form of whistle-blowing would be seriously punished. Indeed, they were terrified of Katherine.
When the bishop himself visited some months later, he learned that Elisabeth Wynter had been placed in stocks because of her “incorrigibility,” only to escape with the assistance of three other nuns, having broken a window in the process. With nowhere to go, the nuns returned to the convent soon enough for Joanna Wynter, sister of the incorrigible nun, to go into labor and suffer the pains of childbirth. Hardly had the afterbirth been cleaned up when the prioress Katherine placed in stocks another nun who had not even been involved in the rebellion; and then she punched, beat, and kicked Elisabeth Wynter. All of this mayhem in contrast to the liturgy of the hours. At the end of the day, Juliana Bechamp, apparently only an observer of the mayhem, told the bishop, “I am ashamed to [be] here [under] the evil ruele [of] my ladye.”20
Such shame would have been reason enough for Juliana to hitch a ride on a wagon load of herring barrels and make her escape. But what prompted Katharina von Bora to make that momentous decision? Was her decision based primarily on curiosity and excitement about the exhilarating new religious ideas emanating from Wittenberg? Was she intrigued by new notions of ecclesiology and biblical interpretation? And was there a sense that she was not finding fulfillment behind cloistered walls and simply wanted to be free? Imagine a Katharina von Bora not even able to speak and express her strong and articulate opinions. Were her words those of a twentieth-century Martin Luther generations hence? “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”21
The dysfunctional convents, of course, are the ones who easily grab our attention. But there is no reason to assume that most little girls like Katie who grew up to be nuns encountered such chaos or desired freedom in the outside world. Many of them were very satisfied with the silence behind cloistered walls. This was true of the nuns of St. Katharina in the town of St. Gall. In 1518, several years before Katharina herself would escape, Ulrich Zwingli began preaching and instituting reform in Switzerland. As a result, nuns were encouraged to abandon the convent. If they refused, they were required to leave the cloister and attend sermons delivered by Reformed preachers. The organist at the local cathedral described the situation:
Then the women went forth shamefacedly two by two with the youngest in front according to age. But they showed little joy or eagerness: old, sick, limping women with great swollen eyes, for clearly they had found this going out a great hardship. It appears that those who were there would have preferred to stay separated from the world in their cloister until death. Otherwise they would have left [the house] before this, considering the quantity of scorn and denigration of their order that had been preached to them.22
The journal of Caritas Pirckheimer, who had entered the monastic system at age twelve, also reveals the predicament a loyal nun faced during the early years of the Reformation. Her entries span from 1524 to 1528 (the very years that Katharina was embarking on her new life). It was a perilous time for Caritas and her nuns, particularly as they were hearing reports from the outside world. Monks and nuns were being persecuted. Others simply “ran away from their cloisters and threw off their robes and habits.”23 Despite the pressure from Luther and his followers, Caritas and her nuns stood their ground:
Many of the powerful as well as simple people came to their relatives who resided in our cloister. They preached to them and spoke of the new teachings and argued incessantly that the cloistered were damned . . . [They] wanted to remove their children, sisters and aunts from the cloister by force and with many threats and also with many promises half of which, without doubt, they could hardly keep . . . The ferocious wolves, both males and females, came to my precious lambs, entered the church, drove out all the people and locked the church door, [arguing that] here their children were in the jaws of the devil, [the daughters responding] they did not want to leave the pious, holy convent. They were not in hell at all.24
Highly esteemed by Erasmus as one of the wisest women of the era, Abbess Caritas viewed the Reformation as evil and a serious threat to monastic life. There was nothing about the new teachings that tempted her. Schooled in Latin and the church fathers, she was in some respects a woman of the world, well-read and acquainted with literary figures and artists of the day, including Albrecht Dürer. Indeed, the German poet laureate Conrad Celtis labeled her the German Sappho. She was educated and articulate, and her journal offers a powerful record of events from the voice of a critic—and a woman. As abbess of the Convent of St. Clare’s, she wrote of her clashes with the city council of Nürnberg, which supported Lutheran reform and sought to compel the convent to get in step with the times. Her refusal is recorded in sixty-nine short chapters that take the form of letters. She simply would not be cowed by upstarts seeking to split the church—the church she so dearly loved.
The oldest of twelve children, Pirckheimer (1467–1532) was in her fifties when Katharina and so many other nuns were leaving their monastic houses and habits behind. In her eyes, such nuns were denying the very foundations of faith and were forsaking the vows they had promised before God and Mother Church. Such activity was appalling—a nun divorcing Jesus, to whom she had pledged her troth.
For most nuns, rumors of religious revolution outside their bolted cloistered doors were nothing short of frightening. Life on the inside was routine. They were unprepared for the perils they learned of through personal testimonies. Mothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, had been widowed or died in childbirth or the plague, often leaving behind orphaned little ones. Life outside was grim.
Inside cloistered walls, nuns often enjoyed a certain amount of leisure—sometimes writing journals or devotionals, even theological or scientific treatises. And they read. Indeed, many were familiar with the newly discovered tenth-century popular German playwright Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim. One of her most often-cited scenes takes place in a convent and is as funny as it is serious. Here the predatory Governor Dulcitius sneaks into a convent in the dark of night to molest three holy virgins who run for cover into the kitchen. It might have ended badly for the nuns—as it often did—but not as we learn through the whispers of the holy virgins and the pen of Hrotsvitha: “Oh, look! He must be out of his senses! I believe he thinks that he is kissing us . . . Now he presses the saucepans tenderly to his breast, now the kettles and frying-pans! He is kissing them hard! . . . His face, his hands, his clothes! They are all as black as soot.”25
Nuns may have feared such predatory outsiders, though not if they had a commanding abbess like Caritas Pirckheimer. If Katharina had perchance read this play (or saw it performed), we imagine she would have laughed heartily at this scene, as would have Martin Luther. Most of the writings of women religious, however, were devoid of humor. Making fun of men, especially men in authority, was not typically an acceptable way for a nun to express herself. Although lacking in wit and humor, Pirckheimer left behind a fascinating journal about life in a sixteenth-century German convent. Katharina has left us nothing—at least nothing that was deemed worthy of saving.
In Convent Chronicles, Anne Winston-Allen asserts that rarely have voices of religious women been heard. Rather, we often learn about them in hagiographical accounts (legends of saints) typically penned by men. To truly understand them, we must go directly to their own writings and hear their own voices. Works relating to convents, for example, differ when the narrative is written by a man in authority from when written by a woman, whether an abbess or nun. In these writings, women are the subjects rather than objects. They show themselves as “self-determining, active agents, taking the initiative in solving the problems that face them. Collectively, they express a strong sense of self-worth and, in first-person narratives, indicate many forceful personalities.”26
Problems that nuns encountered come to life very clearly in the narrative of Beel te Mushoel found in Book of Sisters (1503). Beel was sent to the Sisters of Common Life when she was fourteen. Her personality simply did not mesh with cloistered living: “For she had been high spirited and merry and now had to behave in a restrained, subdued manner. Oh, this life seemed so unsettling to her that her heart failed her when she thought that she must spend her life here.”27 She did, however, find that she was consoled by reading Scripture and by being the most industrious of the nuns in spinning and weaving. But still her personality was the wrong fit: “Thus her nature and this life were like light and darkness. And therefore she had a hard, difficult life and had to overcome her nature and break it.”28
In Beel, we may have more than a glimmer of Katie von Bora’s personality: high spirited and merry, industrious and finding it difficult to behave in a restrained, subdued manner. Katie escaped; Beel did not, though we are told that some time later, after consulting with a celebrated holy woman, Sister Beel’s “heart became completely ignited by the love of God.”29 Such would not have been said of Katharina. “The darkness of history,” writes Martin Treu, “weighs over the early years of Katharina von Bora.”30
In some respects, Katharina’s story parallels that of Patricia O’Donnell-Gibson, an ex-nun living today in southern Michigan. Though they are separated by centuries and circumstances of calling and convent life, I wonder if they might resonate with each other if language and time barriers were broken. Patricia grew up in a devout Irish Catholic family and felt the hand of God on her life when she was a young child. Then at seventeen, she experienced a profound sense of calling: “It followed me like the ‘Hound of Heaven’ all through the rest of my junior year.” But she had questions: “Why me? . . . And the worst one—what would happen if I was supposed to go and didn’t?”31 After she graduated from high school, Patricia joined the Order of the Adrian (Michigan) Dominicans, where she slowly and arduously climbed the nunnery ladder.
Patricia tells her story in a book titled The Red Skirt. Her story is as dead serious as it is humorous. When she entered the convent, she left the world behind, including her short red skirt. “Hiding my butchered hair did nothing to heal the reality of my diminishing recognition of my female self,” she writes. “Only my face and hands would be seen. I would not have children . . . I would keep my eyes down in modesty and purity, avoiding the gaze of men, and never bring attention to myself.”32
Patricia escaped, not because she had turned her back on the Catholic Church; rather, the convent was too confining for her worldly ambitions, including having a family of her own. Today she is married, holds a master’s degree, and has for three decades taught English literature. She and her husband live by a lake in Watervliet, Michigan. Together in their blended family they have two cats, seven children, and thirteen grandchildren.
It is not difficult to imagine Katharina as a young woman aware that her church was in desperate need of reform—that Johann Tetzel was little more than a sleazy con man making money off a mighty pyramid scheme, convincing gullible Christians to invest in indulgences for time off in purgatory. But had she also gotten wind of nuns and priests getting married in defiance of church order? Had she read Martin Luther’s words on marriage, and his outcry against those who would forbid marriage? Luther insisted that the requirements of celibacy for priests and those in religious orders were instituted by Satan and regulated by rules that only benefited the church. He called on parents and friends of nuns to rescue them from their prisons, daring them to risk their very lives if need be.33
Did Katharina, like Patricia, find the convent too confining? Did she dream of having the freedom to walk about unencumbered to the downtown market and simply purchase a head of cabbage or to wear a red skirt? Did her maternal instincts cause her arms and breasts to ache with longings—longings to hold and nurse an infant? Did she want a more diverse life than could be had behind cloister walls? If only she had left behind a Red Skirt memoir. If only a musty, water-stained, handwritten package of papers buried in a crumbling old trunk had been picked up and left behind in a weatherworn German castle. If only new owners had pitched the detritus, leaving the pile at the end of their drive. If only a trash handler, moonlighting as a curious junk collector, spotted the bundle, there to find a strange manuscript: Memoir of an Ex-Nun by Katharina von Bora. If only . . .