12
Hausfrau Extraordinaire

As dawn lit the interior of her new home on her first morning as Luther’s wife, Katharina likely looked around at her surroundings in dismay. The Black Cloister was in shambles. Most of the rooms in the cavernous building were empty, and aside from a handful of kitchen utensils and a few pewter pieces, the majority of household items had disappeared or been stolen. The place was also filthy. “I was tired,” the longtime bachelor said, explaining why he hadn’t changed his bed, “and wore myself out during the day and then fell into bed, and didn’t notice it.”1 A marriage bed rank with smelly, disintegrating straw was undoubtedly not what Katharina had pictured as a new bride.

As the Cranachs’ houseguest for the last two years, Katharina had grown accustomed to the leisurely lifestyle of a noblewoman. Barbara Cranach had taught her protégé some important and necessary household skills, but as a guest rather than the mistress of the house, Katharina would have had far fewer burdens and responsibilities during her time there. Prior to that, Katharina was only responsible for caring for her own basic needs and participating in the communal chores. Now, however, she suddenly found herself faced with a sprawling property that was, quite literally, falling down around her. As mistress of the Black Cloister, it was Katharina’s job to wrestle it into order.

Home Sweet Home

Katharina and Luther lived in four main rooms on the second floor of the former monastery: an ante room (or foyer), a living room, a bedroom, and a smaller room that served as a space for reading and devotions. As was typical during the late Middle Ages, there was no formal dining room. The Luthers ate at a table in the living room, which was also where Luther met with his students and guests, and where Katharina did her sewing and other work. Artwork adorned the ceiling and walls of the living room, including paintings of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child and Christ on the cross. Later a portrait of Katharina by Lucas Cranach was displayed in this room as well.

The kitchen was located on the first floor, accessible through a trap door and a narrow staircase leading down from the living room. Luther’s tiny study, “the poor little room,”2 as he called it, was situated up a spiral staircase in the tower on the third floor. There was no modern-day bathroom, of course, as indoor plumbing didn’t exist at the time. However, in 2004 archaeologists discovered what they surmised were the remains of the Luthers’ lavatory, a stone niche in an annex off the main building.3 The 450-year-old “toilet,” which was very advanced for its time, was made out of stone blocks and, unusually, had a thirty-square-centimeter seat over the hole, underneath which was a cesspit attached to a primitive drain.4

The Luthers’ living room in the Black Cloister as it looks today in the Lutherhaus museum. [By MatthiasKabel (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

One of Katharina’s first chores as mistress of the Black Cloister was to whitewash all the walls with a solution of lime and water. This was a monumental task; records indicate that she had two and a half wagonloads of lime, plus two additional barrels, delivered to the Black Cloister during her first year of marriage.5 Whitewashing brightened the dingy walls and was often undertaken as a health precaution, as lime was thought to deter vermin and insects.

Another of Katharina’s immediate concerns was the garden, which was an unkempt mess of weeds, plants, and flowers when she arrived. Luther had always enjoyed flowers, but Katharina was much more practical. She focused on planting and tending vegetables—peas, beans, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, and other greens—and herbs, which were critically important for both cooking and medicinal remedies. By 1526, a year after Katharina moved into the Black Cloister, the once-overrun garden was flourishing. Even Luther was known to putter around there, at one point planting seeds to grow “Erfurt radishes,” which were purportedly famous for their size.6

“She plants our fields, pastures and sells our cows, et cetera,”7 said Luther about his wife, whom he nicknamed “the Morning Star of Wittenberg,” due to the fact that she rose daily at 4:00 a.m. in order to complete her day’s work by 9:00 p.m.8 The “et cetera” Luther tossed out so casually encompassed an enormous amount of work. Although Katharina had at least one or two servants to assist her (especially later on, after the Luthers had children), in addition to her Aunt Magdalena (who lived with the Luthers after leaving Marienthron), she oversaw the labor and tackled much of it herself. While Luther gardened for pleasure and relaxation, Katharina gardened for the same reasons she bred and slaughtered livestock and poultry; caught pike, loach, trout, perch, and carp in the local streams and ponds; planted and tended the fruit and nut orchards and the vineyard; raised bees; preserved meats, fruits, and vegetables; and brewed beer. She did all this at least in part to sustain the household and Luther’s continuous stream of visitors and houseguests.

Beginning on their wedding night, when Luther’s rival Andreas Karlstadt, fleeing the Peasants’ War and seeking shelter, banged on the door of the Black Cloister just before midnight, it wasn’t long before every one of the forty cells in the monastery was occupied by an out-of-town guest.9 Students, professors, theologians, political and religious refugees, and nuns and monks who had escaped the cloistered life were all fed, entertained, boarded, and welcomed with gracious hospitality by Katharina. With ongoing renovations (the Luthers built a basement, added a small room for Katharina’s aunt, repaired the roof, and added the aforementioned lavatory) and a house constantly full of guests, Luther and Katharina didn’t exactly enjoy a quiet honeymoon period in the early months of their marriage.

A Day in the Life of a Sixteenth-Century Housewife

With every twenty-first-century amenity at our disposal, it’s almost impossible for us to fathom a sixteenth-century housewife’s daily domestic workload. Sixteenth-century housekeeping handbooks such as The Boke of Husbandry offer us at least a glimpse of what everyday life was like for Katharina.

When thou art up and ready, then first sweep thy house, dress up thy dishboard and set all things in good order within thy house; milk thy kine, feed thy calves, sile (strain) up thy milk, take up thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband’s breakfast, dinner, supper, and for thy children and servants, and take thy part with them. And to ordain corn and malt to the mill, to bake and brew withal when need is. Thous must make butter and cheese when thou may; serve thy swine, both morning and evening, and give thy pullen (fowl) meat in the morning, and when time of year cometh, thous must take heed how thy hen, ducks and geese do lay, and to gather up their eggs; and when they wax broody to set them thereas no beasts, swine or other vermin hurt them. And in the beginning March is time to sow flax and hemp . . . and thereof may they make sheets, board-clothes (table cloths), towels, shirts, smocks, and such other necessaries; and therefore let thy distaff be always reading for a pastime, that thou be not idle.10

Water wasn’t accessible with the twist of a faucet handle, of course, but had to be hauled in from the well. The woman of the house also chopped and carried in wood for the fire, which was used for both cooking and heating and had to be maintained constantly, especially in the winter. Likewise, laundry wasn’t simply tossed into an electric washer and dryer but rather was lugged down the stairs, out of the building, and across several yards of fields to the banks of the Elbe River, where it was manually scrubbed piece by piece, laid on the shore to dry, and then gathered and lugged back home again at the end of the day. Though she probably didn’t do laundry every week, when she did, it was a chore that would have taken a significant amount of Katharina’s time and energy.

Keeping the Black Cloister’s myriad guests fed also required constant work. When Katharina wasn’t milking cows and goats, churning butter, making cheese, tending the garden, or butchering a cow, she visited the market in the center of Wittenberg to purchase anything she couldn’t or didn’t make herself, including bread (most people who lived in the city bought bread from a baker rather than baking it themselves), spices, and fish, beef, or fowl, depending on what gaps she needed to fill in her weekly menu.

Meals were cooked entirely from scratch, from slaughtering and butchering the meat—including chickens, pigs, cows, sheep and lamb, and game birds such as pheasant and quail and even the occasional peacock—to growing and harvesting the vegetables and herbs, grinding spices and herbs with a mortar and pestle, and preparing the food over an open fire. If the meat was not consumed immediately, it was smoked, salted, or pickled to preserve it and stored in the cool cellar (there was no refrigeration). Meat was almost always served generously spiced, which was both a way to preserve it as well as mask the taste if it had gone slightly bad. Germans also often served their meat with a generous dollop of mustard, and as was typical in the Middle Ages, medieval and early modern cooks made good use of the whole animal, including parts many of us would balk at today, like the brains, tongue, gizzard (throat), sweetbreads (pancreas and thymus glands), lungs, digestive organs, liver, udder, testicles, feet, and even the tail.11

Germans had a particular fondness for pastry deep-fried in lard, as well as fruit dishes, and what medieval culinary historian Terrence Scully calls “animal viscera,” especially intestines and lungs.12 For the noonday meal, for instance, Katharina may have prepared something called morels, which entailed boiling a calf’s lung, then dicing the lung into smaller chunks and deep-frying the pieces in lard until browned. She would have then sliced open the deep-fried morels, stuffed them with herbs and grapes, and roasted them on a small spit over the fire before finally serving the morels still on the spits and arranged in a bowl on the table. Katharina might have opted to serve the morels with a dish called “heathen peas,” which she would have mixed with almonds finely ground with a mortar and pestle, honey, herbs, and spices, and served either warm or cold. Finally, she may have rounded out the meal with Conkavelit—a fruit compote comprised of boiled sour cherries, wine, “a good milk out of almonds,” rice flour, lard, and spices and garnished with sugar.13

People in the sixteenth century generally ate two meals a day—the main dinner around midday, and a simpler “supper” (based on the tradition of serving soup, or sops) at dusk. Breakfast was not typically consumed, or, at most, consisted of a hunk of bread and a mug of beer or diluted wine.14 Not only were two meals a day practical from a preparation standpoint (because it took so long to prepare the food), the practice was also recommended by physicians of the time, who considered eating before the previous meal had been completely digested (or at least made its way out of the stomach) unhealthy and even dangerous.

What Katharina cooked was also based on the medieval belief in the four humors, which posited that all living things were composed of a combination of two pairs of elements: warmth and cold, and dryness and moistness. In humans, the humoral agents were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, on which the temperaments sanguine (warm and moist), choleric (warm and dry), melancholic (cold and dry), and phlegmatic (cold and moist) were based. “If all things have their own peculiar temperament, then all foodstuffs certainly must have, too,” observes Scully. Therefore “everything he or she consumes is logically bound to influence his or her own personal temperament.”15 As Luther was prone to a melancholic disposition and frequently suffered from bouts of depression and anxiety, Katharina would have likely focused on warm, moist food to counter his dry, cold temperament: ripe grapes; figs sweetened in wine; plump mutton, chicken, or game birds prepared in a ginger or saffron sauce.16 Likewise, it was thought a fever could be cured with ice water and herbs considered to be cold (like hemlock), while someone who was suffering from the chills or listlessness might be offered a dish prepared with peppers.17

Even when her husband wasn’t struggling with a bout of melancholy, Katharina likely prepared foods to balance the warmth and dryness or coolness and wetness of a particular season. So, for instance, during the temperate spring, the Luthers might have dined on foods like quail and partridge, eggs, goat’s milk, and lettuce. Summer demanded foods that would counter the season’s heat and dryness: acidic apples, cucumbers, veal or kid dressed in vinegar, and any type of meat or fish dressed in verjuice—the sour juice of crab apples, unripe grapes, and other fruit. Autumn’s combination of coolness and dryness suggested foods beneficial to the melancholic temperament, such as those listed above. And finally, to help the body resist the cold, damp winter weather, Katharina likely served roasted game animals and hens and rich meat pies generously seasoned with pepper and other spices and served with spiced wine (although Luther preferred beer).18

Katharina was also the brewmaster of the house, and on more than one occasion Luther commented on the fact that he preferred his wife’s home brew over anyone else’s. Because water was largely considered unsafe to drink, beer was the beverage of choice for early modern Germans, and it was even offered to children as young as four months old as a supplement to breast milk.19

Brewing was a complicated, time-consuming process that involved germinating grain into malt, mashing various types of malt (depending on how light or dark you wanted your beer) with hot water, allowing the grain to soften, and then boiling the mixture in order to convert the starch in the grain to fermentable sugars. Precise temperatures were required at this point in the process (which, as you might imagine, was difficult with a wood-burning fire)—low heat inhibited conversion; on the other hand, heat too high could kill the enzymes. Once all the starch was converted to sugar, the mixture—called wort—was transferred to a special tub with a false bottom, which allowed the wort to filter through the grains that had settled. The wort was then boiled for two hours, after which hops were added, which helped to preserve the beverage and gave it the classic bitter taste of German beer.20

The introduction of simple instruments like thermometers and hydrometers and the development of the pasteurization process in the nineteenth century greatly improved quality control, but until that point, brewing was more art than science. Quality varied widely from batch to batch, a fact that greatly frustrated Katharina. “There is a German saying that goes, ‘Hops and malt are lost,’ meaning it is hopeless,” Luther said in Table Talk. “As my Kate is now struggling with her beer, this sentence takes on a new meaning.”21 Brewing was hot, laborious, time-consuming work, and Katharina was vexed to no end when all her labor resulted in a batch that had, in Luther’s words, “turned to ‘convent’”—that is, a weak, thin beer like that served in the monastery.22 Beer was Luther’s beverage of choice, and like most Germans of the time, he drank a generous amount of it daily. A bad batch was bad news because it meant a cranky husband and more work for Katharina.

House Calls

Katharina was also a skilled nurse and prepared her own medicinal remedies from the plants and herbs she grew in her garden. Historians are unsure how she learned these skills. She may have served in the infirmary at Marienthron, but it’s just as likely she gleaned her knowledge here and there: from Barbara Cranach and other acquaintances, through trial and error, and via popular cookbooks. Katharina may have even owned a “book of secrets,” which were popular vernacular works containing prescriptions, recipes, and advice concerning medicine and other practical arts, including alchemy, cosmetics, perfumery, veterinary science, and more.23 For instance, a book of secrets might offer instructions on everything from how to remove unwanted body hair or ease menstrual cramps to how to make soap and glue to how to determine if your husband is impotent.

In short, most women during the late Middle Ages and early modern period had at least some knowledge of medicinal remedies, although it seems from Luther’s and others’ comments that Katharina had more skills than most. Many years later, her grown son Paul, a medical doctor, complimented his mother’s nursing skills and praised her for being half a doctor herself.24 The German reformer Wolfgang Capito also noticed Katharina’s medical aptitude, writing to Luther after he had visited the Black Cloister: “[Your wife] was created to maintain your health so you will be able to serve for many years that church that was born under you.”25

In fact, as many of her critics began to observe her positive impact on Luther’s physical and mental health, their opinions of Katharina began to soften. Eventually she earned the begrudging respect of several of Luther’s allies and advisors, who came to see Katharina not as the impediment they had feared, but as an integral part of his success.

Luther’s health struggles kept Katharina busy, especially later in their marriage, and since he didn’t have much confidence in the physicians of the time, he relied on Katharina’s skills and home remedies for his ailments. People in medieval and early modern times didn’t typically see a physician (unless it was a life-or-death situation, and often not even then), both because physicians weren’t readily available (there were far fewer doctors during medieval and early modern times than there are today) and because people either couldn’t afford a visit from a doctor, or because they trusted their own home remedies more. If they did see a medical practitioner, surgeons, barber-surgeons, and apothecaries, rather than physicians, provided most of the care.

Surgery as we understand it today—heart surgery, for example—didn’t exist during Luther’s day. Radical surgery, which mainly consisted of amputations during wartime, was rare; most surgical procedures were restricted to lancing boils, setting broken bones, treating contusions, stitching lacerations, and the like.26 Barber-surgeons, on the other hand, in addition to cutting hair, also specialized in leeching, bloodletting, lancing boils, cauterizing, and pulling teeth (one cure for toothache was to rub urine on the gums; if that failed to alleviate the problem, the tooth was often knocked out using a hammer and chisel).27 When they weren’t taking care of humans, barber-surgeons often cared for sick animals.28

Apothecaries were responsible for the sale and distribution of medicines, including simple herbs and other single-ingredient medicines as well as compounded varieties, which were specially mixed and oftentimes exceedingly complex formulas.29 For example, one sixteenth-century English recipe for “a most precious and excellent balm” called for sixty-eight herbs, twenty types of gum, six laxatives, and twenty-four different roots.30 Every city and most towns and villages had apothecaries, and Katharina likely visited one in Wittenberg for the medicines that were too complicated to make herself or for which she didn’t have the proper ingredients.

Luther suffered from an array of maladies and symptoms, including kidney stones, asthma, dizziness, shortness of breath, alternating bouts of diarrhea and constipation, and chronic ear infections, in addition to his struggles with melancholia. He considered many of these ailments the result of the devil’s work or a spiritual imbalance, and thus believed they could be cured only with God’s help through prayer and faith.31 Yet he let Katharina doctor him, and he often sent for her home remedies when he was on the road.

The treatments weren’t always successful, nor were they very appealing. “Your skill doesn’t help me, even with the dung,” Luther complained in 1537, when he was suffering from kidney stones while in Smalcald. Excrement and urine—both human and animal—were frequently used to treat common, chronic conditions during the medieval and early modern period.32 For example, an ointment made of honey and pigeon dung and applied warm to the inflamed or painful area was commonly thought to be helpful in alleviating kidney stones, while gout was treated with a poultice of rosemary, honey, and a generous sprinkling of goat droppings.33

Luther wasn’t Katharina’s only patient, nor was he the only Wittenberger who appreciated her nursing skills. She also cared for her children, as well as guests who fell ill while visiting the Luthers. At one point illness swept through the Black Cloister, leaving Katharina with forty ill guests under her care.34 When the plague hit Wittenberg and most of the residents fled, Luther and Katharina stayed and turned the Black Cloister into a hospital. “We did not flee,” Luther said about the plague in 1539. “I am your preacher and visitor of the sick, and Kate is the nurse, doctor, pharmacist, counselor, etc.”35 As to why they didn’t flee, Luther explained, “We have been blessed in this city in good days, why should we leave when suffering strikes?”36

Katharina even gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth during the plague outbreak of 1527 while Luther was out of town. She doesn’t seem to have feared the plague or other dire illnesses like many of her contemporaries did, perhaps because Katharina had a remarkably strong constitution and rarely became ill herself.

Mistress of Finances

Money was tight in the Luther household from the beginning. For a long time Luther didn’t own the Black Cloister; he simply lived there as one of the last two monks left in the house. When Katharina moved in, Elector Johann Frederick—who succeeded his brother, Frederick the Wise—allowed them both to live there tax free until his death in 1532, when he left the former monastery, along with all the rights to brew, malt, sell beer, keep cattle, and conduct all other civil matters, to Luther in his will, with one stipulation: that the elector’s successors would retain the right to buy it if Luther ever decided to sell the property.37

Despite the fact that they inherited their home and all the property that went along with it, the Luthers still struggled to pay their bills and frequently owed money to various merchants around town. The problem stemmed from the fact that, although by the time he married Katharina he was paid a respectable annual salary of 100 Gulden for his work as a professor and frequently received gifts of grain, meat, lumber, bricks, hay, and lime from the elector and the town of Wittenberg, Luther gave away or spent nearly all his earnings. What remained wasn’t nearly enough to cover the expenses of such a large household. Furthermore, Luther refused payment for his published writings, he wouldn’t accept honoraria for his lectures, and he often tried to give back gifts, including some of the gifts he and Katharina received for their wedding. When Luther couldn’t afford to hand out cash to those in need, he would often donate silver cups and tankards from his own cupboards.

Eventually, however, after he’d pawned his last silver cup to pay off a debt, Luther realized his spending and charity were out of control, even when, later in their marriage, he was earning significantly more than 100 Gulden a year. “I have a peculiar budget: I consume more than I take in,” he admitted. “Every year we need 500 gulden for the kitchen alone, but my annual pay is only 300 gulden. . . . What am I to do?”38 Luther’s solution? To hand the household finances over to Katharina. This was not altogether unusual for the time period—wives often managed the household finances during medieval and early modern times—but it’s clear that Luther trusted Katharina completely, and he outright admitted that she was a far better financial manager than he. “In domestic affairs I defer to Katie,” Luther acknowledged, “otherwise I am led by the Holy Ghost.”39

With complete control over the finances, Katharina made two important decisions: she purchased additional land in nearby Zülsdorf in order to expand her farming operations and produce more income, and she began to charge many of the Black Cloister’s visitors room and board, a decision that irritated the men who had always stayed at Luther’s house for free. Reformer and theologian Veit Dietrich called Katharina a “tightwad and a miser,” and Gregor Brück, the elector’s chancellor, accused her of being a “stingy householder.”40 As Ernst Kroker points out, even contemporary critics tend to portray Katharina as miserly, stingy, and greedy.

The more likely truth is that Katharina was simply a good businesswoman and a frugal housewife who upset the applecart and bruised some male egos when she crossed the threshold of the Black Cloister as Luther’s wife. Kroker notes, “Not a single time do we hear that she seriously opposed her husband’s lavish charity.”41 At the same time, Luther never spoke “of her alleged greed, but instead praised her thriftiness.”42 “What she has now, she got without me,” he admitted with obvious admiration in 1542.43 In his letters to her, Luther often addressed Katharina as “Lord,” “Sir,” and “Doctor,” not sarcastically, but with obvious respect, admiration, and love. Luther had the good sense to appreciate his wife’s intellect and her savvy business finesse.

Although Katharina has often been criticized by biographers for her supposed arrogance and aloofness, one wonders if she was simply too busy running what was essentially a midsize business, complete with brewery, vineyard, farm, and a forty-room hotel (in addition to raising six of her own children and four adopted children, which we’ll cover in a subsequent chapter) to spend time making small talk with the neighbor ladies.

Luther biographer Edith Simon, for instance, states that Katharina was “generally regarded as stuck up,”44 while another Luther biographer, Richard Marius, paints her as a shrew: unattractive, controlling, miserly, and disliked. “She often seems grasping and even petty in her quest for money, and we have many hints that the Wittenbergers did not like her,” he writes. “She was apparently crotchety—not an advantage in a day when husbands expected wives to be submissive or at least pretend to be so until the time of marriage.”45 Yet as historian Elsie McKee points out, “The sheer physical effort of living [in early modern Europe] consumed a great deal of energy,” something we who live in modern times can hardly begin to comprehend.46

For the twenty-one years she was married to Martin Luther, Katharina worked seventeen hours a day, from well before dawn until far past dusk. Add to that the fact that Katharina’s responsibilities went far above and beyond that of a typical sixteenth-century housewife, and the result is not someone who was merely aloof or crotchety but simply busier than most of us could ever possibly imagine. The Wittenbergers and Luther’s colleagues and peers may not have appreciated Katharina’s industriousness, but Luther clearly did. And as we will see, Luther came to rely on his Morning Star of Wittenberg in more than just domestic affairs.