The Masculinity of Martin Luther

Theory, Practicality, and Humor

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

One of the scholarly achievements of the last two generations has been to place Martin Luther back into his times by revealing the extent to which he relied upon the thought of certain immediate as well as longer-term antecedents in arriving at his Europe-shaking ideas. Feminists have broadened this perspective in noting how traditional his and his followers’ concepts of the nature and place of women were.¹ While the empirical and theoretical literature on women in early modern Europe now burgeons, a great deal remains to be done on men as men in the wake of the Reformation. Nevertheless, a good beginning has been made.² This essay will discuss Luther’s own ideals concerning proper masculine behavior and his private attempt to embody those ideals, which modern scholarship seems not to have addressed. The two parts of this essay will examine his theory and his life. In contrast to John Calvin, Luther has left ample evidence of his private self, and that evidence makes possible educated guesses concerning his own manhood.

Luther’s Theology of Being a Man

It is wise to take to heart Rüdiger Schnell’s admonition that one must differentiate among the types of texts within which Luther—although Schnell is not writing specifically about Luther—articulates his views and the audiences for which his utterances were intended. Schnell rightly observes that all sorts of opinions on women, men, and marriage existed in the late Middle Ages and that examining the nature of their hearers or readers can help one to understand their differences and arrive at a better assessment of a particular author’s position.³ Thus, Luther’s formal treatises on, say, the book of Genesis will not be unrelated to his social views, but they were presented in Latin to well-educated men, and they may well differ from popularizing treatments in the vernacular for dissemination to a broad laity. Schnell also insists that writings vary according to rhetorical genre. Commentary about women in Latin may well fall into the category of misogynistic writings of the type that celibate and suffering clergy composed for delivery to other clerics. By contrast, sermons about marriage were given every January (the second Sunday after Epiphany on the continent) to entire congregations. Preachers did not intend to discourage ordinary women and men from getting married, and they presented marriage in a favorable light. Indeed, it is from this homiletic tradition that Luther drew much of his praise of the marital estate and within which he defined roles and relationships. He rejected resolute misogyny but retained the elevation of marriage.

Luther’s frame of reference is thoroughly binary. He regards the entire inanimate as well as animate world as divided into female and male. One day he held forth in Latin, to the learned men at his dinner table, on Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Luther elaborated as follows:

Male and female he created them. Even though this statement is made principally about human beings, nevertheless it is to be assigned to all creatures in the world, to those that fly through the sky, to the fishes of the sea, to the animals of the land. Thus has God engraved matrimony upon all creatures, as upon trees, the sky, [and] the land; and one can distinguish this in stones. If indeed there are masculine and feminine among trees, they produce fruit longer and more happily when the masculine and feminine, like the sexes, are planted close to one another; the masculine always extends his branches toward the feminine as if embracing her; and the female lifts up her own branches to the male. In the same way, the sky is the male, the earth the female, which is made fruitful by her husband the heaven. The same thing can be seen whether in stones or gems, as, I think, in corals, emeralds, and others. And so marriage is depicted in all creatures, even among the hardest stones. This magnification of marriage is beautiful.⁴

Already one sees that by its very nature, the male is higher and loftier than the female, as heaven is to earth and the sun is to the moon, and that masculinity entails the function of impregnating, of rendering the female fruitful.⁵ This fundamental vision of the masculine is, of course, in no way original to Luther but can be traced back to the ancient world. It was consistently expounded during the Middle Ages.⁶ Men are higher and women lower; men are made to be fathers and women to be mothers. The sexes’ bodies reflect and constitute their respective destinies. Luther declared in 1531, “Men have broad chests and narrow hips, and for that reason they have more understanding than the women, who have narrow chests and wide hips and lower bodies [Gefäß], so that they ought to stay at home and sit still in the house, [and] keep house and bear and raise children.”⁷

The story of the Creation is the foundation of Luther’s relational scheme. Adam was made fully in the image of God, which was a “most excellent and noble” thing. His understanding was most clear, his memory the best, his will most pure. He had no fear of death. His eyesight was very likely clearer than an eagle’s.⁸ In Luther’s reading, even before the Fall, women were different from and lesser than men: “A woman is similar to our Lord God, similar not in her tits or navel [a euphemism for her genitals], but because she exercises dominion within the family.”⁹ Eve was, after all, taken from Adam’s side and presented to him to aid and comfort him. Adam is the recipient and beneficiary of God’s generosity. As the male, Adam was always capable of higher-order reasoning than Eve, whereas “she was unsophisticated and simple.”¹⁰ As the more rational being, Adam would have understood and obeyed the divine command to avoid the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and Satan knew this. The devil approached Eve because he was aware that, as a woman, she was vulnerable.¹¹ Eve doubted the instruction of God; she questioned it and was able to be persuaded that it would do no harm to eat that apple, that “we shall not die.”¹² “Eve was led astray, not Adam, because Eve believed what she heard from the serpent; but Adam knew that it was not the truth but voluntarily consented to the devil, thinking, ‘Because she eats, I shall eat.’”¹³ Man, with his greater perceptivity, was not deceived but was aware of choosing to transgress. Luther imagines Adam saying to himself afterward: “It is my fault, for I was ordained to be governor and lord of the woman, and I should have forbidden her.”¹⁴ Before the Fall, Adam was Eve’s superior in his nature and in his functions. Eve was his auxiliary and subordinate.¹⁵ They loved one another nevertheless, and were partners in their dominion over the earth. Their tasks were light, for in the garden of Eden, God provided everything they needed.

Luther adheres to the view that Eve’s responsibility for the debacle was primary. Adam’s allegedly more acute intellectual powers do not move the Reformer to assign greater blame to him.¹⁶ In Luther’s eyes, Adam’s penalty was appropriately lighter. Eve deserved and received the more severe punishment.

God laid down the basic superiority of the man in nature at the Creation. Even after the Fall, Adam retained the image of God.¹⁷ Yet both Eve and he were susceptible to “vices of the spirit” that they had not known in their state of innocence: “Incredulity, the ignorance of God, despair, hatred, and blasphemy.”¹⁸

The enduring societal definitions of both sexes’ duties were consequences of the Fall. The gentle features of Adam and Eve’s harmonious interaction in the brief prelapsarian interlude now hardened, were binding upon both, and became potentially problematic. Cast out of Eden into a thoroughly inhospitable world, Adam had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow until he returned to the dust out of which he had come.¹⁹ At the moment of their disobedience, the mother and father of humanity became lustful. Humans’ bestial appetites are “manifest signs of original sin.”²⁰ In commenting on this, Luther decisively rejects that prominent strand of intraclerical misogyny, most famously represented by the Malleus maleficarum, which labels women more carnally desirous than men.²¹ Luther finds both sexes to be overcome with desire. Throughout his mature works, he attributes as powerful a sex drive to men as to women. Indeed, one could argue from his writings that the lust of many men surpasses that of most women and that men pose a greater threat to women’s safety and to the social order. This was the conclusion of an active pastor rather than an isolated theoretician. Luther readily adopts the Augustinian assertion that husbands and wives serve one another as “remedium ad peccatum,” a remedy for sin—that is, for worse sin, for Luther regards even marital sex as unavoidably fraught with sin.²² In the act of generation, he laments, people are unable to think of God.²³ Human mating is like an epileptic seizure or a fit of apoplexy.²⁴ Sexual desire serves to guarantee the perpetuation of the species, and for that reason and because it protects society against unrestrained lust, God covers its shortcomings with the mantle of his grace.²⁵

Luther decisively rejects what R. N. Swanson has termed the third gender, emasculinity, namely that of men who have taken religious vows of celibacy with its concomitant abstinence.²⁶ A constant theme in Luther’s learned tracts, his sermons, his correspondence, and his spontaneous dinnertime utterances is his scorn for the Catholic insistence on celibacy. Because virtually all men find their sex drive (which God implanted in them) irresistible, prelates, priests, monks, and friars will ineluctably fail to be continent. Because they are not married, their failure will sow disorder on every side—precisely what Luther finds to be the case in Catholic lands. He stresses the irony of the pope’s rejecting clerical marriage and thus effectively preferring fornication in its many forms.²⁷ Luther is persuaded that God requires marriage of every male, except that very rare individual who possesses the divine gift of abstinence. Otherwise, men’s irrepressible sexuality must be channeled, in keeping with God’s will and the public need.

With the Fall comes men’s assignment to nourish and provide fully for their spouse, children, and household. Doing so is a truly onerous task, despite the fact that Adam’s penalty was, Luther thinks, light in contrast to Eve’s.²⁸ Even though many of Luther’s contemporaries no longer tilled the soil as Adam had been condemned to do, all men had to work in the public sphere at their vocation. The husband, Luther summarizes, “governs the home, takes part in public affairs, wages war, defends his own, tills the earth, builds, plants.”²⁹ Men rule, teach, and preach. Luther informally outlines the stages of a man’s life: first comes infancy and then at seven years comes boyhood, when they are to be introduced to basic literature and the liberal arts; they begin to notice the world when they are fourteen and can be taught higher subjects. At twenty-one they want to marry. At twenty-eight they are heads of households and patresfamilias. At thirty-five they take part in governing public affairs and the church. At forty-two men are in top form; they are kings. But from then on their acuity begins to decline, and by seventy they are in quite another condition.³⁰ Occasionally a woman has some good advice, but offices are given to men.³¹ Women, by contrast, are confined to the home; and Luther is convinced that they should nearly always stay there. Metaphors of woman as a house or like the snail, which carried its house around on its back, were widespread, and Luther employs them.³²

Men’s burdens are especially great, for they not only go out of the house to work and earn, but they must also oversee house and hearth. The wife submits in all things. Her dominion is circumscribed, and even within the home it is delegated to her by her husband, who supervises all that she does.

By nature the masculine physique is stronger than the feminine, but quite apart from inborn tendencies, the postlapsarian woman, as part of her penalty for sin, must endure far more than the pain of childbirth. She will have all the discomfort and ailments that accompany pregnancy.³³ The husband must be patient with his wife on two scores: first, because she is physically and intellectually weaker; and second, because in her parturient function she will be subject to many fleshly ills.

Luther foresees that masculine patience will have its limits. He nonetheless urges it upon all men.³⁴ They should not beat their wives unless there is no other recourse; rather, they should speak seriously with a disobedient spouse. “Unbeaten is the best,” he declares.³⁵ But husbands are duty-bound to control their wives’ untoward behavior, just as they must that of their children and servants. Luther uses the word effeminate, as many other men of the day did, to indicate qualities of weakness and inferiority.³⁶ By comparison, that which is masculine is strong and superior.

Men must not grudgingly enter into matrimony but do so with conviction. They should love their wives devotedly and enjoy reciprocity. Long before his own wedding, Luther surpasses both Peter and Paul in his enthusiasm for marriage. He agrees that “it is better to marry than to burn,” and one should not be reluctant but should rejoice in the pairing. Likewise, he exceeds Peter in urging husbands to love their wives. The word love in English bespeaks many kinds and degrees. Peter’s notion of love was probably calm, just as Luther’s was at the time he married. But Luther writes in 1519, as well as later, about the strength and singularity of marital affection, which he terms bridal love. He applies it not alone to the honeymoon but to a couple’s entire life together.³⁷

In sum, in his theological works Luther depicts Adam as initially magnificent, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. The shortcomings of contemporary men are owing to sin. God’s creatures were deformed by original sin. All their afflictions are marks of the human departure from God’s commands. Now men are still superior to women, but they are charged with greater obligations than they can easily fulfill. They administer the public and the private sphere,³⁸ and they must earn enough money to sustain their families. Luther himself was unable to bear all the burden that he allocated to husbands in his teachings.

Luther as Realist at Home

Luther made a serious effort to conform his life to his principles. He took very seriously the husband’s headship over his wife. He and Johann Bugenhagen, city pastor in Wittenberg, became very impatient with the city scribe of Zwickau, Stephan Roth, whose wife kept running off. In 1528, they jointly wrote to him:

Grace and peace in Christ, together with authority over your wife. Your lord and mistress has not yet come to me, my dear Stephan, and this disobedience of hers to your wishes displeases me. Indeed, I am beginning to be somewhat put out with you, too, because you are soft-hearted; and out of the service by which you should have helped her, you have made a tyranny and have treated her so tenderly heretofore that it would seem to be your own fault as well that she now ventures to defy you in everything. Certainly, when you saw that the ass was greedy for fodder, that is, that your wife, because of your indulgence and consideration, was becoming unmanageable, you should have remembered that you ought to obey God rather than your wife and not have allowed her to despise and trample underfoot the marital authority, which is the glory of God, as Saint Paul tells us.³⁹

Luther was persuaded that men who were overly permissive in dealing with their wives compromised their masculinity accordingly. Throughout his works, he intermittently disparages “she-men” (Siemänner). In doing so, he reflects the opinion that prevailed among his contemporaries, some of whom carried out rituals of degradation against men whose wives dominated them, such as making them ride backward on a donkey.⁴⁰ Luther chided his own wife for talking too much and accused her of wanting to be clever. He commented casually to the men at his table, “God created man with a broad chest, not wide hips, so that the man in that part of him can grasp wisdom; but that place where filth comes out is small; this is reversed in a woman. For that reason she has much filth and little wisdom.”⁴¹

Both Katharina and Martin accepted the theoretical roles assigned to them. At least in the presence of others, Käthe addressed her husband as “Herr Doktor”; and Martin everywhere used the familiar “Du” in speaking to his wife. In the abstract, Martin was in charge of all that his wife, children, student boarders, and servants did; but in a practical sense, Käthe administered every facet of the household. Between these spouses it was doubtless understood that, in some technical sense, all the authority that Käthe wielded was delegated to her by her husband. By whatever means she acquired the power, she oversaw the finances, pantry, and nursery. Martin could not have been the world-shaking clergyman and scholar that he was without conceding this domain to her. He trusted her completely and could not have dispensed with her multifaceted labor. Partly for this reason, he took the unorthodox measure in his will of naming her the guardian (Vormund) of their children.⁴² She wielded the household scepter, saving, as he noted, only his masculine right.

The Luthers’ sexual relationship was central to their marriage. The frequency and conviction with which Luther attacks vows of celibacy may lead one to conclude that the Reformer had been all too familiar with sexual desire as an Augustinian friar. In 1519, six years before he wed, he still maintained that celibate chastity was the best state, but he insisted that no one was without “evil fleshly lust.”⁴³ He continued to regard sexual desire as tainted by sin. When he insisted in 1525 (just after marrying Katharina von Bora) that he had not wed Käthe out of love, he meant that lust had not motivated him. He had not, as he put it, “burned for her”; rather, he esteemed her. Quickly, however, he came to appreciate their intimacy, and his enjoyment reinforced the conviction with which he advocated wedlock. He could be unrestrained in his private correspondence. He wrote to his friend Georg Spalatin on 6 December 1525, upon Spalatin’s marriage:

Believe me, my mind exults in your marriage no less than yours did in mine. . . . Greet your wife kindly from me. When you have your Katharine in bed, sweetly embracing and kissing her, think: “Lo, this being, the best little creation of God, has been given to me by Christ, to whom be glory and honor.” I will guess the day on which you will receive this letter, and that night I will love my wife in memory of you with the same act, and thus return you like for like. My rib and I send greetings to you and your rib. ⁴⁴

Probably more revealing of the Luthers’ sex life, however, is the Reformer’s moving letter to Käthe of 1 February 1546, two weeks before he died. He tells her that the letter is from her “old, poor love, and, as Your Grace knows, impotent.” He assures her jokingly that he no longer fears that he will be tempted by “the pretty women.”⁴⁵ On 7 February, he returns to the subject of his impotence. He urges her to consult Philipp Melanchthon, who will understand and give her advice. He assures her, “I would gladly love you if I could, as you know.”⁴⁶ The fact that Luther brings this up in his letters suggests that it is a recent development as well as something that urgently concerns her. He implicitly reveals that sex is a regular part of their life together and that the lack of it will be distressing to her.

Both of these passages offer evidence that in contrast to his clerical predecessors, Luther integrated sexuality into his condoned existence as at once a pastor-theologian and a husband. He has decidedly abandoned “emasculinity” as ideal and as practice. He criticizes Saint Jerome as having been unchristian in what he wrote against marriage.⁴⁷ In living out and publicizing the new union between piety and the marriage bed, Luther was indeed a revolutionary.

A feature central to Martin Luther’s identity as a married man is his sense of humor. Reformation scholars are aware of this aspect of the Reformer’s persona because they regularly encounter his witticisms, and they are assisted in this perception by the sheer volume of Luther’s surviving personal documents. Additionally, the previously less respected Table Talk is now seen as a window onto Luther’s private life that is unavailable for other leading figures in this religious movement. Readers of Luther’s works can be variously shocked and entertained as well as informed. Their world, half a millennium removed from the early sixteenth century, is characterized by prevailing values that do not coincide with those of early modern Germany, and so readers of Luther must be cautious about asserting that what they find amusing Luther intended to be so. When Luther declares, for example, that the sex act is like an epileptic fit, he means it. In his eyes, sensuous excesses could “rage through the streets” and disrupt public as well as private life, and they did not conform to God’s preference for modest sexual expression—along with moderate eating and drinking—in his human creatures.⁴⁸ When he directs a vulgar, highly witty arrow at Sebastian Franck for his collection of misogynist aphorisms, calling Franck “a great arse-bumblebee,” Luther would likely be annoyed by our levity. He intends to reprimand Franck and all others who think the worst of women.

Luther deliberately cultivated humor in the household setting where he was surrounded by his closest family members and also by guests and boarders. Matters of theology and worship were altogether serious and should be so treated by the whole community. The circle of one’s intimates was the place for men to exercise their comic gifts, to pun and insinuate. Humor lay at the heart of Luther’s masculine authority, as he thought that it should for other heads of household too. He writes to Käthe from Eisenach in 1540, relieved that Melanchthon is recovering from severe illness: “Master Philipp is returning to life again from the grave; he still looks sick, yet he is in good spirits, jokes and laughs again with us, and eats and drinks with us as usual. Praise be to God!”⁴⁹ The men at his table could share the comic elements of all manner of things. We recall Luther’s episodes of constipation and depression, but his companions also note those occasions when he was in high spirits. “He was happy and joked with his friends and with me,” wrote Johannes Mathesius, later Luther’s first biographer, in 1540.⁵⁰ Luther even played with his dog in the dining room.⁵¹ In this setting, he teases Lucas Cranach the Younger, who wanted to sit by his new wife and constantly engaged her in conversation.⁵² On another occasion, he inquires of “Muhme Lehna,” Katharina’s aunt Magdalena von Bora, with whom Käthe had lived in the convent at Nimbschen and who was now engaged to be married, whether she would not like to return to the convent. Lehna protests, “No, no!” Luther slyly asks his male table-mates, “Why do you suppose that women do not wish to be made virgins?” All the men smile, in silence.⁵³

Luther once joked that after the Fall, and after their exit from the garden of Eden, for the remaining nine hundred years of their marriage, Adam and Eve argued about who was at fault: “You ate the apple!” “Why did you give it to me?” Luther comments: “They must have had an amazing household regimen!”⁵⁴ Another time, and despite his disapproval of Jerome’s ascetic advice to widows, he remarks on the disadvantages of marrying a widow: “A maiden, as you will. A widow, as she will. Beware of the one who has had two husbands! My horse will kick you!”⁵⁵ When he attends the wedding of Hans Lufft’s daughter and goes to the festivities after the ceremony, at the bedding of the couple, he advises the groom to be lord in the house—when the bride is not at home! Luther himself placed the groom’s shoe on the top of the hard canopy of the marital bed, so that the groom might dominate in the marriage.⁵⁶ At the dining table, he expresses approval of this popular custom.⁵⁷

Luther regularly used humor in interacting with Katharina; to do so was part of his definition of himself as a husband. With the help of anthropologists, I have finally realized what Luther means when he looks back upon his parents’ marriage and recalls: “My father . . . slept with my mother and joked with her, just as I do with my wife, and [still] they were pious people, just as all the patriarchs, archfathers, and prophets did and were.”⁵⁸ I used to think that gescherzt (joked) was a euphemism to cover the sex act, but Luther seldom resorted to euphemisms and it did not seem to be a saisfactory explanation. Furthermore, despite his oft-professed advocacy of marriage and his demonstrative love of his wife, he expressed what by modern lights are dreadful slanders of women—their responsibility for the Fall, their idiocy, their guile, and their susceptibility to temptation because of their pride and lust for dominance. How do these seemingly contradictory convictions fit together?

In 1940, the British structural-functionalist anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown identified what he labeled “joking relationships” in African society.⁵⁹ This concept has become part of the vocabulary of the discipline of anthropology and is now applied to Western groups and settings.⁶⁰ Radcliffe-Brown defines it as follows:

What is meant by the term “joking relationship” is a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence. It is important to distinguish two main varieties. In one the relation is symmetrical: each of the two persons teases or makes fun of the other. In the other variety the relation is asymmetrical: A jokes at the expense of B and B accepts the teasing good humouredly but without retaliating; or A teases B as much as he pleases and B in return teases A only a little. There are many varieties in the form of this relationship in different societies. In some instances the joking or teasing is only verbal, in others it includes horseplay; in some the joking includes elements of obscenity, in others not.⁶¹

One of the functions of joking relationships is to render minimal the potential for conflict in a bond.⁶²

Luther instinctively regarded the happy marriage as a joking relationship and as a bond that was sustained by humor. Observing his demeanor, one may perceive that Luther lived out his jocular tie to Katharina. The evidence is chiefly in the form of his letters to her and his frequent interaction with her in the dining room in the presence of their guests. No single interpretation is sufficient for either context; both letters and jokes have various levels of meaning. But one of those levels is indeed his performance of the husband’s teasing, the ridicule, the mirthful insults of the marital commitment. He was the comedian, and she was the straight woman. Theirs was an asymmetrical joking relationship. His often charming epistolary jousts are well known, in particular the salutations. In 1534, he greets her as “my friendly, dear lord, Lady Katherin von Bora, Mrs. Dr. Luther in Wittenberg.” He continues teasingly, “Yesterday I got hold of a bad drink and had to sing. If I don’t drink well, I am sorry, and I would so enjoy it. And I thought what good wine and beer I have at home, and in addition a beautiful lady—or should I say lord.”⁶³ In 1540, he writes to her as “the rich lady of Zulsdorf, Lady Mrs. Doctor Katherin Ludherin, physically resident in Wittenberg but mentally sojourning in Zulsdorf, my little love, to her hands.”⁶⁴ In 1545, he says, “To my friendly, dear housewife Catherina [sic] of Luther von Bora, preacher, brewer, gardener, and whatever else she can be.”⁶⁵ In 1546, he addresses her, “My dear housewife Katherin Ludherin, Mrs. Doctor, swine marketeer of Wittenberg, my gracious lady, to her hands and at her feet.”⁶⁶ On 10 February 1546, eight days before his death, Luther pens, “To the holy, anxious lady, Lady Katherin Luther, Mrs. Doctor, resident of Zulsdorf in Wittenberg, my gracious dear housewife.” He calls her “my most holy lady Mrs. Doctor.”⁶⁷

Luther’s language is all the more witty for its complex topography. It expresses his great love of his wife; it puns and plays mightily. It reveals his ongoing recognition that she is a member of the German nobility and that he himself is of humbler provenance. It also acknowledges his cession to her of masculine activities along with his awareness of not being able to function as a theologian and pastor without her. In spite of what they both accept to be husbands’ and wives’ proper arenas, he must transfer to her such a degree of authority that she is his “empress” and his “lord.”⁶⁸ His use of Lady and gracious refers both to her social rank and to her daily, practical superiority in everything having to do with the household and family. In their private life, he is her subject and her dependent. By unspoken agreement, he is willing to take on feminine traits and to permit her masculine ones.

He jokes with her in the body of his letters too: “Today at eight we drove away from Halle, yet we did not get to Eisleben but returned to Halle again by nine. For a huge female Anabaptist met us with waves of water and great floating pieces of ice; she threatened to baptize us again, and has covered the whole countryside.”⁶⁹ And again:

Most holy Mrs. Doctor! I thank you very kindly for your great worry, which robs you of sleep. Since the date when you started to worry about me, the fire in my quarters, right outside the door of my room, tried to devour me; and yesterday, no doubt because of the strength of your worries, a stone almost fell on my head and nearly squashed me as in a mouse trap.⁷⁰

Like interlopers in the dining room, readers observe that the Reformer gives vent to the gamut of emotion from love to rage. A relaxed and self-confident host, he jokes here too with Katharina, whereas she is invariably serious in the responses that are recorded. One day Käthe comments to her husband in the hearing of their guests: “Ah, sir, the church was so full today that it stank! ” Martin replies: “There were also piles of filth there, although concealed. The best thing about it is that they [the people] carried it all out with them again.”⁷¹

It is perhaps astonishing that Luther spent so much time at the table holding forth on marriage and the nature of women. It is easy to forget that Käthe is present. Occasionally, she takes part in the conversations. She weeps openly over the death of their daughter Magdalena, and Martin comforts her.⁷² She rubs salve on his arthritic legs, and as she does so, he pronounces, “The Latin word uxor, wife, comes from unguendo, smearing unguent.”⁷³ Katharina may have dashed out occasionally to assist the serving maids, and she left the table when she was in the early stage of pregnancy and was nauseated.⁷⁴ Otherwise, she was the hostess, and she heard what were often dreadful—but sometimes highly approving—utterances of her spouse on the nature of womankind. It seems that the barbs Luther directs at women are intended partly for his wife’s ears specifically and form part of their joking relationship. They are, as Luther perceived it, a means of maintaining goodwill and thus strength in his marriage. If one assumes that Katharina is the target of her husband’s observations, his slurs may be viewed with somewhat less hostility. At times, he speaks in Latin, which would have been comprehensible to her when on a simple subject; at times he speaks in German, and often he mixes the two. She understands what he is saying.

Katharina enjoys the dining-room conversation and takes part in it. Laughing at her, Luther inquires whether she has said an Our Father before she preached so many words.⁷⁵ One day an Englishman is their guest, and he does not speak German. Luther says, “I suggest my wife to you as your instructor in the German language. She is particularly fluent. She can speak so well that she far surpasses me. But eloquence is not to be praised in women. It befits them to lisp and stammer; that is more suited to them.”⁷⁶ At another meal, Luther opines that women’s eloquence about domestic matters surpasses that of Cicero, but their thoughts on politics are worthless; whatever they can’t achieve with words, they accomplish by means of tears.⁷⁷ Katharina is there; she listens. Perhaps she has ventured a remark on a political issue. Women need, her husband thinks, to wear a veil to remind them of their proper subordination.⁷⁸ He uses a different metaphor on another day when, presumably, Käthe has again uttered a point of view: “No blouse is as unattractive on a woman as when she wishes to be clever.”⁷⁹ Luther declares that women are not to be trusted. We are given no context for this statement. He says: “What goes in through their ears comes out through their mouths.” Thus men should not entrust secrets to them.⁸⁰ On the surface this is not amusing. But as a joke between Käthe and him, it takes on a different coloration.

When Luther holds forth about mismatched couples, it may be that he recalls the sixteen-year separation in age between Katharina and himself: “When an old man takes a young woman to wed, that is a very ugly spectacle, for she can take no pride or pleasure in him; the opportunity is gone. There is no longer anything attractive or strong about him. An old man and a young woman are against nature.”⁸¹ Discoursing on the division of the entire creation between male and female, Luther declares, “In the woman are defects in strength and intelligence. The defect in strength is tolerated because the men nourish them; we wish [they did not have?] the defect in their intelligence [defectum ingenii desideramus], but we should also consider their character, for marriage is a necessary thing which may be seen in all of nature.”⁸²

Luther enjoins the young Lucas Cranach, who has just married and is quite enamored of his bride, “Don’t behave that way! Before half a year has passed, you will have had enough! You will prefer any maid in the house to your wife!”⁸³ The unseen, unheard participant in this conversation is Katharina von Bora Lutheryn. One cannot see her exchange glances with her husband, but they probably did. It is known for a fact, from Luther’s correspondence, that six months before declaring that he had not married his wife for love, he was infatuated with her. He joked to his men friends that, as a bride, in order to stay near her beloved, Käthe had sat by Luther as he worked. She had once interrupted him to inquire, “Doctor, sir, is the Hofmeister in Prussia the Margrave [of Brandenburg’s] brother?”⁸⁴ Her simplicity tickled Martin, but he fully reciprocated her ardor. Years later, he teases her by repudiating a feeling that they both acknowledged. At another meal, he informs his guests, within her hearing, that thirteen years before, he would have preferred to marry Eva Schönefeld. “At that time, I didn’t love my Käthe, for I suspected her of being proud and arrogant. But it pleased God well that I should have mercy on her. And God be praised, that was good advice!”⁸⁵ If he had asked his friends, he recalled, they would have pressed him not to marry Käthe but somebody else.⁸⁶

He announces publicly that Käthe can persuade him to do anything she pleases, for he concedes the dominion in the household to her, saving only his right and his honor. He takes aim at her, however: “The governance of women never achieved anything good.”⁸⁷ At another meal, he picks up the same subject: “When God made Adam the lord over all creatures, everything stood in its good and proper order, and everything was governed in the best way. But when the woman came and wanted her hand too in the soup and to be clever, everything fell to pieces and became a disorderly wasteland.”⁸⁸ This is not merely the Reformer’s opinion on the origins of evil; he is joking with his wife. Perhaps one day he found fault with the food, or else he was inspired by, as he saw it, Eve’s guilt in feeding the apple to Adam. To a discussion about the blessing of a good marriage, he adds, “That man is a martyr whose wife and maid don’t know how to do anything in the kitchen. This is the first calamity out of which many evils follow!”⁸⁹

Luther’s letters to close friends and especially to his wife are larded with jokes. Likewise, his commentary at table should be regarded as jocular as well as serious when it touches on Käthe, womanhood, marriage, and housekeeping. One needs to read the Table Talk from a perspective that is different from past perspectives. Luther’s view of the masculine spousal role stands revealed here, if only one peers through an altered magnifying glass. He believed that the husband should joke with his wife in expressing love and instructing her. He should “look through his fingers” (as the Germans said) at his wife’s faults. Humor provided a mechanism for preventing or diminishing tension among those who lived (and ate) in close proximity to one another so that they might discuss sober matters and yet endure their closeness. Husbands, in Luther’s demonstrated opinion, can contribute to nuptial contentment by maintaining good humor toward their wives even as they make their criticisms known. The Luthers’ asymmetrical joking relationship by no means diminishes the fact of Martin’s late medieval worldview—of his sincerity in regarding women as lesser creatures than men and properly subordinated to them. Yet, in the service of facetiousness, he may well have sharpened the hyperbolic edge of his expression. If the wisdom of Rüdiger Schnell’s admonition concerning the identification of audiences is taken to heart, then Katharina Lutheryn must be placed back in the dining room.

Martin Luther’s Masculinity

Luther was more tradition-bound than he liked to think in his definitions of the proper traits and activities of women and men and of the relations between them. His mental universe was still thoroughly binary. Nonetheless, he initiated changes in the concept of masculinity among his followers—and he was aware of attempting to do this. He altered both theory and practice for Lutheran clergymen by joining their marital sexuality with sanctity. Even though the sex act included sin for both husbands and wives, God, he said, overlooked this sin in the service of Christian procreation.

Luther brought clerics into close, committed familiarity with their wives and daughters. Whereas Catholic priests had been formally obliged to maintain a distance from women, Lutheran pastors now knew the feminine sex in more than the proverbial biblical sense. Catholic religious men had known them as well, but with a sense of transgression, even in those cases where they paid an annual concubinage fee to the bishop. Certainly, some priests must have engaged, too, in psychological intimacy with their long-term “cooks,” the mothers of their children; but in the church’s eyes, this would only have compounded their infraction. Luther rejected this model not alone on the grounds that celibacy led ineluctably to promiscuity. He was persuaded that God’s presentation of Eve to Adam as consort and helpmeet was meant to set the pattern for all adult humanity. “It is not good that man should be alone.”⁹⁰ Proper masculinity kept spousal company.

On 13 June 1525, at the age of forty-one, Luther took spousal company. If one may believe his reminiscence about his parents’ marriage, his father provided a template for mature sexuality and the psychic dimensions of spousal interaction. Without advice books, simply by following the paternal route, Luther made his way. He joked regularly with his wife, and he had sex with her. These were central to his concept of being a man. Joking enabled him to flirt and criticize simultaneously. His seemingly harsh bantering was an effort to maintain an ideational boundary even though Katharina regularly permeated it. Comedy enabled him to tolerate Käthe’s indispensable transition across the gender divide into that realm of dominion that was properly male. Only by compromising his theoretical principles could Luther gain the freedom he required to write and to take part personally in the shaping of a new religious polity.

A version of this essay was presented at a conference on masculinity at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in February 2001; and in German as “‘Mihi reliquerit animum paene muliebrem’: Die Maskulinität von Martin Luther,” at the University of Erfurt in November 2001. A revised German version appeared as “‘Fast wäre mir ein weibliches Gemüt verblieben.’” The present rendition contains new material on humor as an aspect of marriage.

Abbreviations

WA = D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften. 69 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–.

WABr = D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel. 18 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1930–85.

WATR = D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Tischreden. 6 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1912–21.

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