Lost in the annals of time and for all practical purposes nameless, she was a self-described “poor woman with only a small field,” forced to “earn a bitter living.”1 Her lot in life was typical of many, if not most, women in early modern Germany, and not just widows. Most families were poor, whether they were numbered among the peasants or artisans. If the husband was old or infirm, the responsibility of breadwinner was relegated to the wife. This would be essentially true of the widowed Katharina, though before Martin died, she enjoyed a comparably comfortable lifestyle. But all around her were women who were barely eking out “a bitter living.”
I grew up poor. My first memories are of a barely insulated farmhouse, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, my earliest education in a one-room schoolhouse. When the bus stalled in a deep snowdrift, I remember my father arriving with a team of horses to take the driver and children home, all of us bundled under blankets. In some ways, I can relate to the daily life of the sixteenth century more easily than colleagues who grew up in affluent homes in East Grand Rapids. I can hear the horses and feel the deep ruts as Katie and her sister nuns bumped along in the night toward Torgau.
But with all the hardships I encountered as a child, we would have never used the phrase “bitter living.” Nor was Katie’s life a bitter living, at least until her last years when the ravages of war, weather, and physical injuries took their toll. For most families, however, living in the small towns and backwoods of what is now Germany, life was grim—more so for women whose workdays extended from dawn until well after dark. Modern conveniences were available if you were a member of the royalty or otherwise rich. But for the rest of the population, housework was drudgery, and hiring a servant was not financially feasible. Even a decent outhouse was not a standard amenity.
“In Ancient Egypt rich people had proper bathrooms and toilets in their homes,” writes Tim Lambert. As we move ahead in history, however, we see serious toilet regression. “In the Middle Ages toilets were simply pits in the ground with wooden seats over them.”2
By the time I was born in rural northern Wisconsin, farm families had long ago progressed enough to put a little house over a hole in the ground to conceal a bench with a rounded opening (sometimes two), leaving enough space for a Sears & Roebuck catalog (far superior than the leaves of the woolly mullein plant used by medievals). Lambert writes, “In Medieval castles the toilet was called a garderobe and it was simply a vertical shaft with a stone seat at the top. Some garderobes emptied into the moat.”3
The facilities in convents and monasteries were often comparable to those in castles. Sometimes “monks built stone or wooden lavatories over rivers.”4 Some plumbing systems were even more sophisticated: “At Portchester Castle in the 12th century monks built stone chutes leading to the sea. When the tide went in and out it would flush away the sewage.”5 Katie would have been used to more than simply a hole in the ground, and when she joined Martin at the Black Cloister, plumbing would have been comparable to that of other run-down cloisters of the day.
Life was rugged in this era—especially in a one-time backwater village like Wittenberg. Modern-day Wittenberg welcomes guests to a quaint, cleaned-up tourist town. It is charming, warm, and hospitable to travelers. TripAdvisor lists the ten best restaurants, all brand-new since 1517—actually, new since East Germany opened up to the West in 1989. Another site lists the top ten hotels. As much as we long to visit actual historic sites, we know very well what five hundred years can do to a little town known for its larger-than-life Reformer. If Martin Luther had never nailed or taught or settled down in that town, we might find it today trashier than it was when he lived there.
What was daily life like after Katie arrived in Wittenberg with eight other runaway nuns? She had the good fortune of being housed most of the time in mansions, at least by local standards. And she quickly came to know the little hamlet, including fields, woods, and streams nearby. Writers of the day variously described the town in the 1520s. The problem is that, like hometown folks and outsiders today, they write with an agenda, though perhaps less so Philip Melanchthon, who referred to Wittenberg as no more than a village comprised of mud huts with thatched roofs and lopsided houses, with no evidence of pride or city planning.6 That he was a university-educated humanist who had resided in actual cities, may have influenced his rather negative assessment, but he had no particular axe to grind or reason to comically disparage the town.
Not so Luther, who is quoted as saying, “Here in Wittenberg there’s no more than a miserable corpse; we sit here in Wittenberg as if it were a miserable place.”7 His droll exaggeration was no doubt influenced by one of his bad days. But Wittenberg, even on its best days after it had come out of its long night of medieval lassitude, was not a village we could today endure without some serious sanitary codes. Roland Bainton’s description would fit almost any sixteenth-century town. Larger cities were no doubt even worse:
There is no denying that he [Luther] was not fastidious, nor was his generation. Life itself stank. One could not walk around Wittenberg without encountering the odors of the pigsty, offal, and the slaughterhouse. And even the most genteel were not reticent about the facts of daily experience. Katie, when asked about the congregation on a day when Luther was unable to attend, replied, “The church was so full it stank.” “Yes,” said Luther, “they had manure on their boots.”8
One of Luther’s enemies belittled the town nearly as much as did the Reformer himself, calling it a “miserable, filthy little town” that pales in comparison to Prague. It was no more than “a peasants’ chamber; rough; half-frozen; joyless; filled with muck.”9 How could such a miserable hamlet even imagine itself challenging the authority of Rome?
An objective assessment of sixteenth-century Wittenberg is impossible, but it did have some favorable qualities. It was a fortified town with stone walls, giving it a look of substance, however small, with a moat surrounding the walls. In 1485, when Frederick III the Wise succeeded his father, he made Wittenberg the capital of his electorate and then founded a university in 1502. This fortified town boasted not only a mill but also water power, a major engineering project completed some generations earlier. Indeed, it was an unusual scene to have two fast-flowing streams cutting right through town. There was danger as well, when carousing, beer-drinking students staggered toward campus late at night.10
Indeed, Wittenberg was a college town, with all the rowdiness that comes with late-night reveling. There was beer aplenty—also prostitutes—to keep restless students jolly. Luther was not amused by such behavior, associating it with low morals perpetuated by the Catholic Church, certainly not by Reformers. He was well aware that what he was hearing was more than rumor of boastful exploits—that, in fact, students at his own university were seeking the services of prostitutes, who plied their trade “in the vicinity of the town’s pig-market.” Luther was quick with his pen. The essay was titled “Against the Whores and Fat-Students.”11
At the turn of the century, when word spread of the plans for Frederick’s new university, the town quickly increased the number of dwellings. And as early as 1504, local councilmen had written a new code to provide for student housing, specifying that anyone who had a vacant lot was required to construct a home within a year.12 In early 1521, the student body—male only—approached three thousand, with more students than town residents. Many of them had come to sit at the feet of Martin Luther, although there were other professors, including Philip Melanchthon, whose reputation rivaled that of the great Reformer.
By the time Katie arrived in 1523, however, the student enrollment had fallen off. Fear for their lives due to the Edict of Worms and Luther’s hiatus at the Wartburg Castle contributed to a decrease. Still students would have been the most visible presence of the town population. Katie might have been aware of them mocking her and the eight other “wretched” nuns who clumsily hoisted themselves off the wagon, and she might not have appreciated being identified as one among the virgins who had just come to town. Runaway nuns certainly would have been fodder for jest, whether the students were drinking or not.
As capable as Katie was, it is doubtful that she ever even thought about gender and privilege and lack of higher education for women. She was no doubt fully aware, however, of the Renaissance assumption that boys deserved a good education. “A father who does not arrange for his son to receive the best education at the earliest age,” wrote Erasmus, “is neither a man himself nor has any fellowship with human nature.”13 And what about daughters? Her future husband would see to it that progress was made in that direction.
The growth of the university exposed the shortage of housing for professors. As is true today, it is difficult for a school of higher learning to attract distinguished professors unless the available housing is fitting of their prestige. Gottfried Krüger’s assessment of Wittenberg before and during Katie’s residence makes us believe that on settling in, she must have been impressed. Despite the negative press, Wittenberg by the 1520s was in many ways a respectable college town, no longer a two-bit hamlet unworthy of recognition.14
Wittenberg, like all towns of the day, offered inns for travelers. They were typically dirty, smelly, disease-ridden, cramped houses, not to be confused with the more spacious, well-kept Black Cloister boardinghouse where Katie served as matron during her twenty-year marriage and on into widowhood. A travel writer in early sixteenth-century Germany offers a glimpse of typical accommodations—a country inn “no worse than most inns in a German land.” There was no custom of welcoming guests. “Upon arrival, we initiate the ritual necessary to secure a bed,” he writes. “We stand out in the yard for an interminable time and yell. God forbid that the innkeeper should greet us, for we Germans consider it demeaning to trawl for paying guests.” Finally someone’s “head thrusts forward from a tiny window and you inquire about lodging. If they have none, they say so. But if they do, they don’t answer your question, but simply withdraw, to meander out a little later, feigning indifference.”15
There was no one to water and feed the horses, so the guests had to do that themselves and “then enter the common room, which is indeed common, as all guests are here, in their boots, with their baggage and road dust. There must be eighty or ninety people.” Some of the wayfarers are “decidedly ill, but these are housed with the rest of us. Men, women, children, rich and poor, sick or well, all share the same fetid air, for Germans consider it the height of hospitality to warm their guests to a lather.” The place stank to high heaven, “not a man present whose clothes are not dark with sweat.” Yet when this traveler’s companion “dares open the window a little, a terrible clamor of indignation is heard.”16 So they settled down amid grunts and snores, rasping coughs and vomiting—just another night on the road.
Wittenberg during the early decades of the sixteenth century is best understood as a growing center of scholarship, court activities, and commerce. Despite a temporary drop in student population by the 1520s, the town was becoming a bustling urban hub, particularly in comparison to its long night as a medieval backwater. Preserved Smith offers an overview of the rapid changes that were taking place:
Wittenberg lies along the inner curve of the winding, eddying Elbe, in the midst of a sandy plain neither fertile nor beautiful. Frequent floods and poor drainage made the town unwholesome. Prior to the close of the fifteenth century it was a mere hamlet, with about three hundred and fifty low, ugly, wooden houses and few public buildings . . . Frederic the Wise, anxious to build up a capital equal to Leipsic, adorned the town with a new church and a university. The rise of the Evangelic teaching made Wittenberg one of the capitals of Europe, and its growth and improvement kept pace with its more exalted position.17
If any of the many students in town had paid heed to the runaway nun Katharina once she had settled down, they did not make note of it. She would have been easily overlooked as she hurried through the market or stopped by a shop for shoe repair. Though for a time she lived in the largest and most elaborate house in town owned by artist Lucas Cranach, she was probably regarded as little more than a servant. Her everyday attire would likely have been coarse and plain.
Long skirts were standard for all women, sometimes partially pulled up and tied to a belt when working in the privacy of an isolated backyard garden. Panties were not standard, making it easier for a full-throttled thug to savagely assault and rape an unsuspecting woman. Covering of the head (or braiding hair for girls) was not only a sign of submission but also a sign that a woman was appropriately clothed, never to be mistaken for a prostitute. In the winter a cape was added to the outfit. For women like Katie, a belt with a leather bag containing money and other small items was an essential accessory when running errands about town. Brightly colored fabric was typically the province of wealthy matrons.
Indeed, for wealthy perfumed Renaissance women, dresses, shoes, wigs, and jewelry were works of art in themselves. But when we visit sixteenth-century Germany, lower-class women would often be considered old hags by the time they are thirty. “Pre-industrial women—daughters, maidservants, wives, widows, and independent spinsters,” writes Sheilagh Ogilvie, “appear again and again in local documents as responsible for their own subsistence, as earning ‘a bitter living.’ ”18
It might be natural to assume that women in this era married early, endured childbirths, and died young, having spent fourteen-hour shifts of household drudgery year after year. But Ogilvie maintains that such was not always the case especially in northern and western Europe, “where marriage was late, lifetime celibacy was high, life-cycle service was widespread, and there were many female lodgers. Women were able to inherit land, were sent to school and were allowed to participate in labour markets.”19 Although this overview is based on research in the era soon after Katharina’s death, its beginnings can be seen in her own life—in her insistence that she remain single rather than marry a man she did not esteem and also in her independent demeanor after her marriage. In pre-industrial German towns, “women could work outside the household as maidservants or even independent employees, earning wages at tasks that were not constrained by reproductive activities.”20
Marriage and reproductive activities, however, would soon constrain Katie. Statistics tell us that childbirth for both mother and child was perilous during this era, and plagues swept through cities, small towns, and the countryside at regular intervals. Joel Harrington points out that life was precarious even before an infant was born with an estimated one in three pregnancies not coming to term. The odds were even as to whether or not a child would live to age twelve. “The first two years of a child’s life were the most dangerous,” according to Harrington, due to “frequent outbreaks of smallpox, typhus, and dysentery [that] proved particularly fatal to younger victims.”21
Adding to the very real scourges and maladies and significant problems of early medical malpractice were superstitions that might have easily kept a mother and wife like Katie awake at night. Horror stories of unexplained happenings were everywhere in the air, and not just among the lower classes but among the brightest and best of Wittenberg. Kaspar Peucer, son-in-law of Philip Melanchthon, researched such phenomenon and published his findings in Commentary on the Various Types of Divinations. Here he presented all manner of unexplained marvels, including a 1531 multiple birth in Augsburg: “three offspring, one a head wrapped in membranes, the second a serpent with two legs, the body and the feet of a toad, and the tail of a lizard, the third a perfectly normal pig.”22
Why would a rational sixteenth-century philosopher and theologian such as Peucer, and others like him, make such claims? Euan Cameron, in his book Enchanted Europe, has sought to explain:
They confronted the brutal facts that children fell sick and died; that cows mysteriously failed to give milk; that horses either bolted or suffered from unexplained exhaustion; that summer storms came from nowhere to devastate the crops; and that less educated people persisted in believing in the existence of a huge, amorphous variety of semi-visible or invisible spirit-creatures who might influence their lives. Ecclesiastical authors struggled to make sense of these mysteries and, even more, to analyse the exotic variety of remedies and prophylaxes that people traditionally used against them. The superstition-critique presents pastoral theology at its most practical, specific, and applied. Moreover, since pastoral theologians participated in the broad culture of their birth as much as in the formal intellectual habits of their professional training, the analysis of “superstition” challenged them repeatedly to navigate their own way between custom and instinct on one hand and intellectual formation on the other. Occasionally . . . the mask slipped. Sometimes it fell away altogether.23
Katie does not seem to have been susceptible to such superstitious fears. Her world was all too real, and her worries were reality based. Perhaps her years in the convent had focused her attention on a fear of God more than sinister spirits in the surrounding dark forests. But the convent also offered women other health benefits. For celibate nuns, childbirth was not a killer. Nor were long days of backbreaking toil. And contagious diseases sometimes passed right over the rooftops of isolated convents. The very isolation, however, held horrifying dangers as well. Convents were often easy targets for barbarian thugs. Despite walls and moats, a nun who ventured alone into the garden might be attacked and dragged into the tangled forest. In fact, this was the very crime Catholics alleged had taken place when Leonard Koppe kidnapped Katie and her sister nuns from the Marienthron convent.
Crimes of all kinds were rife throughout the Middle Ages, and the lawlessness continued without abatement into sixteenth-century Germany. And not just one boorish hooligan acting alone. Warring militias and marauding bandits could overrun towns and leave in their path only charred remains. Indeed, the fear of the torch was one of the most terrifying features of life during this era. Mutilated bodies were left along roads to be fought over by buzzards. Mayhem was everywhere in this era when forensic science was unknown and crime investigation depended largely on eyewitness accounts. Serious crimes often went unpunished, while the innocent were found guilty. Penalties were severe.
Katie would have been well aware of how punishment for a capital crime was meted out. “A woodcut of 1540, attributed to Lucas Cranach the Younger,” writes C. Scott Dixon, “depicts the charred remains of four criminals, each bound to a stake, with the slightly altered text of Romans 13:4 . . . ‘The sovereign powers are not to be feared by those who do good, but rather by those who do ill.’ ” Dixon goes on to suggest that Luther, “by limiting the powers of Christ’s kingdom to purely spiritual concerns,” granted “an unprecedented strength of rule to the early modern state.”24
“While John Calvin remained content to acknowledge the executioner as ‘God’s instrument,’ ” writes Joel Harrington, “the ever-ebullient Luther went so far as to provide a celebrity endorsement for the profession: ‘If you see that there is a lack of hangmen . . . and you find that you are qualified, you should offer your services and seek the position so that the essential governmental authority may not be despised or become enfeebled.’ ”25
Crime was seemingly everywhere in sixteenth-century Germany. This was particularly true for travelers, who were all too often robbed of their possessions and left for dead. Safety was found in numbers, and when he traveled, Martin Luther (unlike his wife) was often accompanied by others who simply enjoyed being in his company.
Harrington writes, “Well-traveled paths and country lanes often lay far from help as well. The roads and forests just outside a city, along with all border territories, were especially dangerous. There a traveler might fall prey to bandit gangs led by vicious outlaws such as Cunz Schott, who not only beat and robbed countless victims, but also made a point of collecting the hands of citizens from his self-declared enemy, Nuremberg.”26
In addition to very real bandits, some known by name, there were other forces at work that scared the living daylights out of travelers: “Hostile natural and supernatural forces, mysterious and deadly epidemics, violent and malevolent fellow human beings, accidental or intentional fires—all haunted the imaginations and daily lives of early modern people.”27
Emperor Maximilian I more or less conceded the violent chaos that prevailed throughout his realm, proclaiming in his 1495 Perpetual Truce, “No one, whatever his rank, estate, or position, shall conduct feud, make war on, rob, kidnap, or besiege another . . . nor shall he enter any castle town, market, fortress, villages, hamlets, or farms against another’s will, or use force against them; illegally occupying them, threaten them with arson, or damage them in any other way.”28
It was a truce aimed in the right direction, but it probably had no more force than a church mission statement would have today. Its significance lies in its description of daily life.
Perhaps the most private crime of the era was abortion and infanticide. The Luthers themselves were involved in a situation that illustrates a behind-the-scenes attempt to induce an abortion. In a letter from Wittenberg to a judge in Leipsic, dated January 29, 1544, Martin informed his “good friend” that he had learned that a woman who identified herself as Rosina von Truchses was being housed as a guest. In truth, he said, the woman was a “shameful liar” with a false identity who had “played the harlot behind my back and foully deceived every one with the name Truchses.”29
Having been fooled himself, Martin was now warning the judge: “I took her into my own house with my own children. She had lovers and became pregnant and asked one of my maids to jump on her body and kill the unborn child. She escaped through the compassion of my Katie; otherwise she would have deceived no more men unless the Elbe ran dry.”30
What Luther would have done to prevent her from ever again deceiving men, he does not specify, though he ends his righteous rant with these words: “I fear that if a strict inquiry should be made, she would be found to deserve death more than once . . . I have written to [warn] . . . you against this damned, lying, thievish harlot.”31 This was no doubt a man’s world and a violent time. It is also interesting to learn of the woman’s escape with the help of Katie. What happened to the unborn child is unknown. Abortion and infanticide were often considered matters better relegated to the private world of women.
Sixteenth-century Wittenberg, and all of Europe for that matter, was a man’s world. Though expected to remain faithful to his wife, the man had far greater sexual freedom than she, and even Protestant Zurich kept its brothel. Illicit sex was common among every social class. A dowry paid by the bride’s family was a common practice among upper classes, causing parents to celebrate the birth of a boy. Failure of a wife to become pregnant was commonly blamed on the wife—or witchcraft. The husband, however, was sometimes mocked for his insufficient manliness. After all, it was widely believed that women had no part in conception except for providing the incubator for the male “seed.”
It was during this era that the most primitive condoms were in use. Homemade or underground-manufactured linen pouches soaked in chemicals and then dried were the most effective available. Not until the mid-nineteenth century were rubber condoms available. But such forms of birth control were used only by adulterous husbands and young unmarried men. For married couples, children were highly prized.
From a young age, children were harshly disciplined and expected to work long days alongside their parents. Reformers and humanists, however, would emphasize education and children’s participation in music and games. Luther loved to sing and play games with the children; Katie as well, when she had a free moment from her hectic schedule.
Mealtime was an important event for sixteenth-century Germans, and a meat casserole—or roasted meat—was the preferred entrée. In Wittenberg and elsewhere among the dense forests of Europe, wild game and birds were readily available. Fish offered a nutritious alternative, and, of course, bread and fresh vegetables from a well-tended garden made a hardy supper complete. Milk and beer were standard beverages, and a good meal might be topped off with lebkuchen or honey cakes.
For most women there was little time for relaxation. We might like to think of Katie in an easy chair, curled up with a book, but that would be highly unlikely. Not that such pastimes would have been unavailable to her. Growing up in the 1520s, Teresa of Ávila later confessed that as a girl she had succumbed to reading romance novels: “So excessively was I absorbed in it that I believe, unless I had a new book, I was never happy.”32 There were devotional books and handbooks on godly child rearing, but it is unlikely that the busy Katharina would have made time to read them.
Katie was, however, fully aware of books and tracts and was actively involved in the publishing and promotion of her husband’s writing. Of the two of them, she was the one with business acumen. With the invention of the movable press, the book business had skyrocketed after the turn of the sixteenth century. Most of the pamphlets and books available were sold by book peddlers and, after that, the earliest version of the bookmobile, a donkey-driven covered wagon that made regular circuits from town to town.
If she had little or no time in her days left for reading, we might ask why she didn’t at least take a few private moments every day for writing. After all, writing and especially publishing were the hottest activities of the day, and in the convent, Katie surely must have been aware of nuns who were writers. One sister from a convent in Brussels in the late fifteenth century had managed to steal enough time from her daily duties to write two pages a day. And Teresa of Ávila found time amid her travels and busy schedule to write her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus.
But women generally were discouraged from writing. “Many of those who chose to recall sixteenth-century female authors,” writes Susan Broomhall, “praised women grudgingly, if at all.” Of Marie de Gournay’s writing, it was said, “She was familiar with all the learned languages; she wrote badly in her own; but it was a great deal then for a woman even to know how to write.”33
One could hope that Marie was as proud and strong-minded as Katie was accused of being. There were many such women on the streets and byways of sixteenth-century Germany, and that was the only way to thrive in this very politically incorrect culture that regarded ridiculing women to be a sport. Katie pulled herself out of “a bitter living” by sheer determination and chutzpah. She stood her ground and sassed back, as did other women of the era.
In her book Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature, Ann Marie Rasmussen tells stories of sixteenth-century women who “resorted to tactics of shame and public ridicule in order to enforce their claims.” In one instance, “a seduced [or raped] maid servant . . . jumped up on her seducer’s marriage cart and refused to get off until she had received payment.”34 The woman who was already the object of derision turned the tables on the offending man. This is just one example of female empowerment that was not entirely uncommon in the Reformation era.
Though never in such a brazen manner, Katie’s self-confidence would also be on display for all to see. Old Wittenberg was a man’s world, and in her own way, she would jump up on the marriage cart of male dominion and assert her rightful place.