7
The Risks of Freedom

Historians are not certain how Katharina and her fellow nuns first heard about Martin Luther or how they gained access to his radical writings. After all, the nuns had little connection with the outside world. Two gatekeepers kept the keys to the main gate of the convent, and few people had permission to enter Marienthron. Even visitors who were allowed in had little to no contact with the nuns, and those who did speak to the nuns did so from the other side of a finely meshed grate, through which a book or even a pamphlet could not have easily been passed.

One visitor who might have smuggled in bits and pieces of Luther’s writings was Wolfgang von Zeschau, the former prior of the Augustinian monastery at Grimma, less than two miles away.1 After reading Luther’s writings on monasticism, von Zeschau resigned as prior in 1522, withdrew from the order, and became a hospital chaplain in Grimma. He knew Luther from their days together at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. He also had two nieces, Veronika and Margarete von Zeschau, who lived at Marienthron. The fact that Veronika and Margarete were relatives would have given von Zeschau easier access into the convent, although there is no proof that it was he who made Luther’s writings available to the nuns.

The other possible courier was Leonhard Koppe, a former city councilman in the town of Torgau, thirty-four miles away.2 A merchant, and one of Luther’s close friends, Koppe regularly delivered herring and other goods to the convent and could have smuggled in some of Luther’s writings, or at least brief summaries of his seminal pieces, hidden amid the goods.

There is no proof that either man slipped Luther’s words into the nuns’ hands, nor do we know for sure which works they read, or if they read any at all. But it stands to reason that Luther’s writings, particularly his statements about monastic vows, reached Katharina and her peers at some point and made a dramatic impact on them. “If some of the Marienthron nuns, including Katharina, came into possession of only one scrap of Luther’s forceful condemnation of monasticism, his rousing battle cry against the orders and their vows,” suggest Rudolf and Marilynn Markwald, “this would have set the stage for their next step: escape from Nimbschen.”3

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Luther’s ten months in Wartburg Castle are often recalled as the period in which he launched his most prodigious literary achievement: the translation of the Bible into German. But he also wrote a lesser-known work in that small room perched high above Eisenach, a treatise that would radically impact Katharina, who was living her own cloistered existence less than 150 miles away. Luther’s Judgment on Monastic Vows, published in Wittenberg in 1522, is not his most famous Reformation work, but perhaps it is the text that most profoundly influenced his future wife. In it Luther specifically attacked the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience that nuns and monks made upon entry into the cloistered life. He argued that these vows were not based in Scripture and were opposed to grace-based salvation (in Luther’s opinion the vows smacked of a works-based understanding of salvation), Christian freedom, God’s commandments, and reason. “They teach that this kind of life, and all that goes to make it up, is the good life, and that by practicing it men become good and are saved,” Luther wrote. “This is sacrilege, godlessness, and blasphemy. It is lies they have trumped up. It is delusion, hypocrisy, and satanic invention.”4

The vow of chastity especially irritated Luther. He stated that only one in one thousand could truly and joyfully live a celibate life without any impure thoughts or actions (later he changed that estimate to one in one hundred thousand).5 Women—including nuns, he argued—were not excluded from temptations of the flesh. “Unless she is in a high and unusual state of grace,” he wrote, “a young woman can do without a man as little as she can do without eating, drinking, sleeping, or other natural requirements. Nor can a man do without a woman. The reason for this is that to conceive children is as deeply implanted in nature as eating and drinking are. The person who wants to prevent this and keep nature from doing what it wants to do and must do is simply preventing nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from wetting, and man from eating, drinking, or sleeping.”6 Luther believed that with the exception of rare cases, neither men nor women could keep a vow of chastity. They might succeed at honoring the vow in body, but they certainly couldn’t succeed in thought.

We don’t have a written account of Katharina’s reaction to Luther in her own words, but the writings of her contemporaries offer insight into what she may have been thinking. For instance, in a 1528 letter to her cousins Lords George and Heinrich, Dukes of Saxony, Lady Ursula, Countess of Munsterberg (who actually lived with the Luthers for a few months after she fled monastic life), listed sixty-nine Christian reasons to explain why she abandoned the convent at Freiberg.

“Faith alone is our salvation,” Ursula argued. “We have allowed ourselves to be glorified as brides of Christ and let ourselves even be lifted over other Christians who we have regarded unworthy.”7 Ursula considered the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to be idolatry—“the works of our hands”—and directly opposed to her baptismal vows in which she had promised to have no other gods.8 In the convent, she argued, “We bind ourselves to obedience, but to people rather than God.”9 Like Luther, Ursula also suggested that true chastity was nearly impossible to achieve. “No one can deny that chastity is a quality that God alone can create in human hearts and bodies; how then, are we so arrogant as to pledge and sacrifice what is God’s [to give] and not ours?” she wrote.10 Ursula concluded her letter with a powerful appeal. “If we are put in such a place where we cannot serve anybody but are very vexed, is it not advisable to leave such a place?” she reasoned. “For who knows what crushes each heart? Even here, the saying comforts: All that glitters is not gold. Who would look for such a great danger under such a neat appearance of human holiness? We would not have believed it ourselves had we not been so deeply stuck in it.”11

Ursula’s words are a powerful example of the unrest many nuns and monks experienced as Luther’s writings spread from convent to convent and monastery to monastery. Although we know Katharina didn’t read Ursula’s actual words before her own escape (the countess wrote her letter five years after Katharina left the monastic life), one can’t help but wonder if Katharina experienced a similar “crushed heart” during her years in Marienthron. Might she have considered herself “deeply stuck” in the monastic life as well? Might some of the doubts and questions Ursula expressed in her letter to her cousins have occupied Katharina’s mind too? At the very least she must have been intrigued by the hints trickling into the convent, rumors about a bold new voice.

The nuns were undoubtedly told Luther was scandalous and heretical, and as his teachings veered further from Rome, the convents must have restricted access to any news related to the Reformer. For women cut off from a world that was moving forward without them, snippets of news, particularly forbidden news, must have been tantalizing. Katharina, by now in her twelfth or thirteenth year in the cloister, must have initially viewed Luther’s reforms as a curiosity, then as a danger, and ultimately as an opportunity to escape a life she hadn’t chosen for herself. One can imagine both fantasies and fears would have preoccupied her during her many hours of quiet solitude, as she envisioned the dangers she would face in both escaping from the convent and in attempting to build a secular life beyond it. As bits and pieces of Luther’s teachings turned her entire understanding of faith, God, and religion upside down, Katharina might have also wrestled with spiritual doubts and questions.

Yet despite what we don’t know about Katharina’s thoughts in the months and weeks leading up to her escape, her radical decision to flee the convent in the dark of night tells us one thing for sure: at some point Katharina realized she was living a sham, a “neat appearance of human holiness,” as Ursula so succinctly put it. Like Ursula, Katharina began to understand that all that glittered was not gold. Perhaps she had understood it all along.

If Not a Nun, Then What?

As Luther’s writings against monasticism spread like wildfire, convents and monasteries began to close across Germany. In general, there was a cultural shift in how monastic roles, and particularly those of nuns, were seen by laypeople. Prior to the Reformation, a significant part of a nun’s daily responsibilities had revolved around praying for and remembering the dead. A nun typically recited the Office of the Dead (a litany of psalms, other Scripture readings, and formal prayers) and prayed for souls stranded in purgatory as part of her daily duties. At one point, the fees local townspeople paid for nuns to mark the death anniversaries of loved ones with prayers and songs comprised a significant portion of a convent’s income.12 As Luther’s teachings on salvation through grace alone spread, however, laypeople began to view the monastics with skepticism. They accused the nuns of selfishness and saw them as following human rather than biblical dictates. This was a “fundamental shift in mentality from the Middle Ages, when the work of the nuns was seen as helping bring salvation for the entire community,” and the nuns themselves were seen as intercessors for the souls of all. “Now their praying was seen as a selfish act that brought no benefit for society as a whole.”13

Still, not every nun was as eager as Ursula of Munsterberg and Katharina von Bora to abandon the monastic life. In fact, many nuns openly resisted the upheaval, choosing instead to honor their vows and remain cloistered behind the convent walls. Nuns constituted a significant portion of the female population, as much as 5 to 10 percent of the total population in major German cities.14 As Merry Wiesner notes, Reformation history books have long reported the closing of monastic houses, but until recently focused only on the monks who left the cloistered life to become pastors in the new Protestant churches. What these histories didn’t explore was the effect of the closures on women “for whom there was no place in the Protestant clergy.”15

Wiesner makes an important point. For women, especially the abbesses who oversaw the administration of the convents, the monastic life was one of the few realms of female independence and authority. The abbesses of the larger convents controlled vast amounts of property and were politically connected to the ruling nobility of the area. Although each convent was required to have a priest available to say Mass and hear confessions, all other administrative duties and much of the spiritual counseling of novices and others were carried out by women. Many of the cloistered nuns undoubtedly valued their positions in the convent and the work they did there and were not eager to relinquish it for a life of markedly less importance. “They realized, too, that as women they had no position in the Lutheran church outside the abbey,” observes Wiesner. “Former monks could become pastors in the Protestant churches, but for former nuns the only role available was that of pastor’s wife, an unthinkable decrease in status for a woman of noble or patrician birth.”16

There were also the older nuns to consider. Matrimony may have been a viable solution for nuns of marriageable age, but who would want to marry an older former nun, one past childbearing age? And what about the women who did feel a true inclination toward the celibate life? Where would such women live when the convents closed? Johannes Bugenhagen, the pastor who eventually married Luther and Katharina, devised what he considered an appropriate solution for such women: they could live in their parents’ homes as servants. “If some parents or close relatives have a young girl who has been destined by God to remain a virgin, they should keep the girl by them (at home), so that she can help with the household and work, or help oversee the house, as she is bound by duty to do,” Bugenhagen wrote. “And it is the duty of the parents or the relatives to teach her and to keep her for that.”17 Clearly he hadn’t considered the fact that a nun’s family might refuse to allow her to return home, even to live out the rest of her life as a spinster servant. Or that a young woman might not want to live out the rest of her life in servitude.

Ultimately the convents became some of the most vocal and resolute opponents of the Protestant Reformation. For example, when Duke Ernst of Brunswick (who was Elector Frederick the Wise’s nephew, an ally of Luther, and a champion of the Protestant Reformation) began to encourage monasteries and convents to disband in the 1520s, almost all of the male monasteries agreed to hand over their property to the duke with very little resistance. The nuns, on the other hand, declined. In Walsrode and Medingen, Germany, the nuns even refused to listen to the Protestant preachers the duke sent to the convents. Instead, they locked the doors and took refuge in the chapel choir. Duke Ernst made a special trip to the convents to plead with the nuns personally, until, exasperated, he ordered the gates forced open and a hole blasted into the choir for the Protestant preacher to speak through.18 In the town of Lune, the nuns burned old felt slippers in an attempt to drive out the preacher with smoke. They also sang loudly during his sermons and, when ordered to be quiet, demonstrated their rebellion by pointedly ignoring him and reciting the rosary under their breath instead.19

In 1525, when Nuremberg’s city council ordered all the cloisters to close, four of the six male houses in the city immediately turned the monks onto the streets and shut their doors, but both female houses refused to follow the council’s orders.20 The more the nuns failed to heed the council’s demands, the more pressure the council exerted, denying the nuns access to confession and Catholic communion and making it difficult for their servants to purchase food. The townspeople picketed outside the enclosure, singing profane songs, lobbing rocks over the convent walls, and threatening to burn the buildings to the ground.

Caritas Pirckheimer, abbess of the St. Clara convent in Nuremberg, vividly described in her memoir the ways in which three of her young nuns were violently dragged out of the convent by their parents. “The children cried that they did not want to leave the pious, holy convent, that they were absolutely not in hell, but if they broke out of it they would descend into the abyss of hell,” she wrote. “The three children screamed in a single voice, ‘We don’t want to be freed of our vows, rather we want to keep our vows to God with his help.’”21 The scene at the convent gate became violent, with four adults dragging each of the three young women, “two pulling in front and two pushing from behind.”22 One mother “threatened her daughter that if she did not walk before her she would push her down the stairs to the pulpit,” Pirckheimer recounted. “She threatened to throw her on the floor so hard that she would bounce.”23 By the time the carriages pulled away from the convent with the weeping, screaming girls locked inside, a great crowd had gathered “in such numbers as if a poor soul were being led to his execution.”24 Pirckheimer said later she didn’t know what had happened to the “poor children among the vicious wolves.”25

In the end, the council failed to persuade Caritas Pirckheimer and the nuns of St. Clara to renounce their vows and abandon the convent. Three nuns were forced by their parents to leave the convent against their will, but only one nun left of her own accord; the rest remained. Although the convent no longer accepted novices, and the nuns who remained were not allowed to practice Catholic Mass and confession, St. Clara remained open until the last member died in 1596, more than sixty years after Pirckheimer’s own death in 1532.26

Another nun, Katherine Rem, penned an angry letter in 1523 to her brother Bernhart, whose daughter Veronica was also in the same convent in Augsburg. “If you don’t come in kinship, stay out,” Rem wrote. “If you want to straighten us out, then we don’t want your [message] at all. You may not send us such things any more. We will not accept them.”27 Bernhart had given one of his sister’s earlier letters to the local printer and had it published, which had angered Katherine. “I see that you are angry,” he responded. “Whoever has anger and envy is still in the world. . . . Your little human discoveries and trust in your own works, habits, convent, fasting, and such things will soon fall away. . . . For one does not presume to buy God’s grace with spiritual simony. . . . And it is worthless straw, whatever one makes of it.”28 Katherine and Veronica ignored Bernhart’s disdainful opinions and remained in the convent.

Caritas Pirckheimer, Katherine and Veronica Rem, and many other nuns like them refused to be swayed by the Protestant reforms sweeping across the land. Clearly many of these nuns truly felt called by God to the monastic life, while others were unwilling to relinquish the unexpected and rare autonomy they enjoyed behind the cloister walls. This is something Katharina surely considered as she weighed the benefits and challenges of abandoning the convent.

Obstacles to Freedom

The decision to abandon the monastic life was not a simple one, especially for women, who had far less opportunity outside the cloister walls than men and shockingly few rights in sixteenth-century Europe in general. As was noted earlier, single women were rarely granted city citizenship, which was based on one’s ability to work, own property, and support the military. Citizenship fees increased as many towns experienced economic decline in the sixteenth century, making it even less likely for women, who were typically poorer than men, to afford citizenship.29 In Nuremberg, for example, women made up 13 percent of the new citizens in the 1460s. That percentage dropped to 4.6 percent in the 1500s and to less than 1 percent by the 1550s.30 Laws forbade unmarried women to move into cities, required widows to reside with one of their male children, and increasingly required unmarried women to be appointed a guardian to manage their financial and legal affairs. Once a nun left the convent, the city council either assigned her a guardian or transferred economic control to her new husband. Even if the nun left the convent with money, those funds were turned over to her guardian, new husband, or family members. A former nun would not have been allowed to sign her own name as a financially independent person.31

“The standard opinion was that women had to be taken care of by some male authority, whether a father, a husband, a son or the church,” explains Protestant Reformation historian Amy Leonard. “If none of these were available, the council [in Strasbourg] decided in the late fifteenth century, a guardian must be assigned to handle all of a woman’s public business. In particular, she could not carry out any financial transactions herself, but rather had to defer to her male custodian.”32 This was a significant issue for Katharina, who, having been virtually abandoned by her family, did not have a male relative or guardian she could turn to for support.

In short, virtually the only way a nun could become a citizen (and thus have any social, financial, or legal power) was to marry, which meant, of course, that she was no longer a nun. “A priest could be both a citizen AND a priest, but a nun could not be a citizen and a nun.”33 The legal status of a woman depended on whether she was unmarried, married, or widowed, whereas adult males were generally treated as a single legal category.34 As she considered the possibility of fleeing the convent, Katharina undoubtedly played out these scenarios in her head. Her father had abdicated his responsibility for her the day he transferred her to Marienthron. Aside from her confessor, she hadn’t spoken to a man in years, so marriage prospects were slim to none. And she didn’t know anyone who could serve as her male guardian. Katharina’s options were limited, at best.

Employment was yet another area fraught with difficulty for women during this time. While it was recognized and accepted by society that some women had to work for wages (for example, women of the middle or lower classes), this work was often viewed as a temporary measure until the women could attain, or return to, a married state.35 The kinds of paid employment available to women were also highly regulated by city and state laws, which often detailed exactly which professions were considered acceptable for women. For example, a sixteenth-century Nuremberg ordinance listed female tailors, shopkeepers, money changers, innkeepers, wine handlers, and market women as appropriate positions for middle-class women.36 Still, even a married woman who pursued these acceptable employment opportunities couldn’t sign a business contract without the agreement of her husband (although married women often gained the right to conduct business on a regular basis by appealing to the appropriate governing body).37

Of course, mulling over possible employment options would have been an exercise in futility for Katharina. As a noblewoman, she would not have been allowed to consider even temporary paid employment as, say, a shopkeeper or innkeeper. Women of noble birth like Katharina didn’t work for pay, even if they didn’t have a cent to their names.

Marriage was increasingly the best means of survival for most women, as unmarried women during the late Middle Ages and early modern period were treated with outright hostility and suspicion. Women in general were viewed as intellectually and emotionally inferior to men, and unmarried women in particular were seen as a menacing threat. “Sweeping generalities about women’s nature were made not only by moralists and preachers, but also humanists and writers of popular satire,” observes Wiesner. “Many of these expressed or reinforced the notion that women suffered from uncontrollable sexuality and lacked the ability to reason.”38 Because it was believed that a woman’s libido increased with age, older unmarried women were considered particularly threatening. Seen as potential seductresses who were willing to go to any lengths to satisfy their sexual desires, they were frequently accused as witches (the devil was believed to promise sexual satisfaction) and almost always viewed with suspicion.39

Women were seen as threatening in part because relatively little was known about their physiology and sexuality; what was unknown was considered mysterious and therefore frightening. For example, according to popular beliefs of the time, a menstruating woman could rust iron, sour wine, spoil meat, and dull a knife with her touch, a glance, or even her mere presence.40 On the other hand, menopause, and even the cessation of menstruation during pregnancy, was considered dangerous for women because it was thought to leave impure blood within a woman’s body, which could harden into a tumor, or compel excess blood to run into her brain, which would lead to overheating.41

Not only was the health of postmenopausal women considered at risk, the women themselves, particularly those who were unmarried, were considered dangerous to others. Often depicted as witches with an insatiable sex drive that drove them to seek demon lovers, postmenopausal women were thought to emit invisible vapors from their mouths which could cause a nursing mother’s milk to dry up and children and animals to become ill.42 Luther himself believed the common folklore about witches, and once recounted a story about his mother, who blamed a female neighbor for cursing her young son and causing his death. Luther remembers his mother wailing, “That wicked witch, our neighbor, has murdered my poor child.”43

The foundation for understanding female sexuality and human sexuality in general was always male sexuality. For example, female reproductive organs were often thought of simply as the male genitals pushed inside the body—the sixteenth-century anatomist Vesalius depicted the uterus as an inverted penis—and several female anatomical parts didn’t even have their own unique names. Since they were thought to be congruent with a corresponding male organ, they were simply called by that same name.44

The fact that female reproductive organs were contained inside the body was considered a sign of female inferiority, a result of a woman’s colder, damper nature, which hadn’t generated the heat necessary to push the organs out.45 Sex manuals from the early modern period depicted female sexuality negatively, and this negative view was supported by contemporary religion, which saw sexuality as base and corrupt, originating from Adam and Eve’s fall rather than as part of God’s original plan for creation. Women were seen as more sexual than men because they were associated with Eve, who was the first to succumb to the serpent’s temptations and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

As open as he was about human sexuality, Luther subscribed to popular beliefs about female sexuality and its dangerous lure. “For girls, too, are aware of this evil [lust] and if they spend time in the company of young men, they turn the hearts of these young men in various directions to entice them to love, especially if the youths are outstanding because of their good looks and strength of body,” he wrote in his Lectures on Genesis. “There it is often more difficult for the latter to withstand such enticement than to resist their own lusts.”46 It was one thing for men to wrestle with their own lust, Luther suggested, but to be confronted with the enticement of female sexuality was a worse and far more threatening situation. In short, a woman, simply by being in a man’s company, was to blame for his lust.

The Church even regarded sex within marriage as a sin and considered the best possible marriage an unconsummated one. (This belief led to the popular medieval idea that Jesus was birthed out of Mary’s ear, so as not to defile himself with passage through the birth canal like a common man.47) Initially Luther’s thoughts about sexual intercourse within marriage for reproduction purposes only aligned with those of the Church. However, he began to shift his perspective in 1519 with his Sermon on the Estate of Marriage, in which he concluded that God allows desire within marriage—even desire not intended for the purpose of procreation—as long as “one seriously tries to moderate that desire and does not make a manure-heap and a sow-bath out of it.”48 By the time he published his 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he was firm in his convictions, stating that the pope should “not have the power to prohibit [sex], just as he does not have the power to prohibit eating, drinking, natural secretion or becoming fat.”49

This understanding and perception of female sexuality and society’s view of women in general meant that as an unmarried woman approaching middle age, Katharina von Bora would have been considered a threat to the accepted social structure of the time. As a convent escapee and a former nun, she also would have been viewed by conservative Church authorities and others as an overly sexual woman, someone who had likely fled her cloistered existence and abandoned her vows of chastity in order to satisfy irrepressible sexual desires. She might have even been suspected a witch, an accusation that, as we’ll see in the next chapter, would have posed a grave threat to her life.

Katharina knew she would face serious obstacles in her bid for freedom. Despite the fact that she had lived a sheltered existence behind cloister walls for nearly her entire life, she was well aware of the challenges she would face as an unmarried woman outside the convent. As a member of the landed gentry, she knew paid employment would not be an option. Yet with no dowry, she also understood that finding a suitable husband would be challenging, if not impossible. Katharina knew that her family would not provide for her, yet she also realized that as a single woman, she would be viewed with suspicion and perhaps even ostracized by society.

Still, something drove her to take the risk. One can imagine how Luther’s words would have impacted Katharina, whose life up to this point had been entirely determined by others. As a woman forced into the convent against her will, Katharina would have been rocked to the core by Luther’s treatises against monasticism. “They lose this life and the next,” he wrote, “they are forced into hell on earth and hell in the other world. . . . You bring them to this point for the sake of your accursed property.”50 From the day of her birth, events and circumstances over which she’d had no say and no control had determined her life’s path. Born female to noble but poor parents, she had endured the early death of her mother and the loss of all familial connections when she was placed in the convent school far from home. From there she’d been forced into the nunnery and required to take the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience; after that, marriage and motherhood were out of the question.

In Luther’s impassioned words, Katharina saw herself. Her identity—her past, present, and future—was defined by the vows she’d proclaimed at the altar at age sixteen. These vows were the foundation upon which Katharina’s entire life and self-identity revolved, and now one man, a renegade monk, had questioned their validity. In doing so Martin Luther undoubtedly prompted Katharina to question not only her identity and calling as a nun but also perhaps her life and faith as a whole.

Until now, Katharina hadn’t had any options; her life had been laid out, determined for her by others. Luther’s powerful words cracked open a door, allowing the possibility of another path—a path Katharina might discover and travel herself.