A History of the Wife (17 page)

With no response from their families, the nuns took matters into their own hands. They wrote directly to the Reformation leader, Dr. Martin Luther, explaining that their newly enlightened consciousness did not permit them to live as nuns any longer. But how were they to escape from a nunnery in a land divided by fierce religious factions, and where were they to go?

A daredevil plan was improvised with a fish merchant. On Easter Eve, 1523, Katherina and eight other nuns were hidden in a wagon among herring barrels, and three days later they were delivered to the Augustinian monastery at Wittenberg, where Luther was still a monk

and professor of biblical theology. He undertook to place these women in good homes and some in marriages. News of their whereabouts quickly spread, as in the letter from a Wittenberg student to one of his friends announcing that “a few days ago a wagonload of vestal virgins came to town, more eager for wedlock than for life. God grant them husbands before they fare worse!”
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Katherina spent two years in Wittenberg, learning domestic econ- omy and keeping her eye open for a suitable match. One learned young man from a patrician family in Nürnberg was attracted to her, as she was to him, but he was forced to bow to the objections of his parents to marriage with a portionless ex-nun.

Luther, taking up her cause, suggested the parson Kaspar Glatz. Katherina found Dr. Glatz unacceptable, but let it be known that she would consider Luther’s friend, Dr. Amsdorf, or Luther himself. Clearly she was no shrinking violet. Despite her lack of a dowry, Katherina was conscious of her origins in a family from the minor nobility and her irreproachable convent background.

While not every man would have wanted to take an ex-nun as a wife, Luther began to think she might be right for him. With the approval of his father, a man of simple origins who had prospered as a copper miner, Luther married Katherina and embarked upon a very successful union. What began as a match of convenience for both of them eventu- ally turned into a marriage of love.

Their betrothal, considered the official marriage, took place in the presence of four witnesses and was followed two weeks later by a pub- lic celebration attended by Luther’s father and mother. For all Luther’s public fame, he had to depend upon the largesse of his patrons to finance the wedding banquet. This was the first of many economic con- straints the new bride was to encounter.

What was it like for her to move into the monastery at Wittenberg, with its dirty straw mattresses and years of neglect? What did she feel in bed next to a middle-aged man with a paunch, neither handsome nor refined? Later she would criticize his coarse expressions and peasant manners, but early in the marriage, she probably held her tongue. Indeed, recognizing the gap in their age and stature, she addressed him deferentially as
Herr Doktor
throughout their married life.

Katherina was not one to sit about and complain. From the start, she took over the management of her home with a determined will. The

Augustinian monastery, first loaned to Luther by the Elektor Frederick and then given to him as a wedding present by the new Elektor, had forty rooms on the first floor with cells above. In time it would house Katherina and Luther’s six children (one of whom died in infancy), six or seven orphaned nephews and nieces, the four children of one of Luthor’s widowed friends, Katherina’s aunt Magdalene, tutors for the children, male and female servants, student boarders, guests, and refugees. Katherina was not just a good
Hausfrau;
she became a remark- able manager of an oversized boardinghouse.

For the sake of cleanliness, she installed an indoor bathroom, which probably also served as a laundry. For the sake of economy, she created a brewery, planted a vegetable garden, and developed an orchard that produced apples, pears, grapes, peaches, and nuts. She herded, milked, slaughtered, and sold the cows, and made butter and cheese. No one has ever accused Katherina of laziness, though her critics—and there have been many—found her bossy and overbearing. Luther sometimes referred to her as
Dominus
(“My Lord”), and occasionally punned on her name
Kethe
(“Katie”) with the word
Kette
(“chains”). Yet for all his theories about the hierarchy of men and women in marriage, he seems to have accepted her yoke with good grace. “In domestic affairs,” he said, “I defer to Katie. Otherwise I am led by the Holy Ghost.”
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As a wife, Katherina ministered to all aspects of her husband’s phys- ical and emotional needs—his diet, his illness, his bouts of depression. There was a long tradition behind her that expected the wife to be a healer, or, at the least, to oversee her husband’s health. One of the duties of a wife, as set out in a 1467 German manual, was to accom- pany her husband when he had a tooth pulled. It contains a drawing of a husband sitting in a chair, one hand held by his wife, while the sur- geon-dentist performs the extraction.
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Katherina knew the secrets of herbs and poultices. She monitored Luther’s diet and gave him massages. When he fell into fits of depres- sion—which he interpreted as the work of the devil—she was there to see that they ended, sometimes by dramatic means, such as having the door removed to the room in which he had locked himself. Katherina may have shown deference in public, but in private she knew when to intervene and override his decisions.

And in economic matters, she took the reins firmly in hand. Luther’s generosity to students, needy relatives, friends, and hangers-on had to

be curbed, if the household was to survive. One senses that some of Katherina’s detractors resented the restrictions she placed on Luther’s munificence, as well as her acute business sense. Like so many women married to men of the mind—the wives of absentminded professors and Jewish rabbis, for example—the distaff half of the couple attended to material issues by default, though in Katherina’s case, inclination also played its part.

As parents, Katherina and Martin Luther seem to have been of one mind: they welcomed their six children joyously, observed their wean- ing and teething with the attentiveness of “modern” parents, took pride in their achievements, and deeply mourned the loss of two daughters, one dead at less than a year and the other at fourteen. Certainly there were differences in the kinds of care the two parents gave to their chil- dren. Katherina had carried them in her body, given birth in pain, and breast-fed them. She probably cleaned up after the son who, according to Luther, relieved himself in every corner of the house. Would she have cried out to one of the children, as Luther did: “Child what have you done that I should love you so? What with your befouling the cor- ners and bawling through the whole house?”
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In comparison to Abelard’s disgust at the bawling and filth of children, which both he and Héloïse saw as incompatible with intellectual pursuits, Luther’s acceptance of children as the core of his rejuvenated life speaks for one of the Reformation’s most dramatic shifts. Henceforth the pastor’s home, replete with managerial wife and children underfoot, would offer a new model for Protestant couples throughout the world.

Other women in Switzerland and Strasbourg (a “free city” under the control of Austria) followed in the footsteps of the Germans by marry- ing Protestant reformers, most of whom were former priests. They shared their husbands’ zeal for the Reformation, as well as the hard- ships and dangers occasioned by religious strife. Like Katherina von Bora, these wives provided companionship and comfort to embattled theologians, and shelter for Protestant refugees. Sometimes they, too, were forced to flee when Reformation politics became too heated.

Wibrandis Rosenblatt (1504–1564) married no less than three Protestant reformers in Basel and Strasbourg, bearing children to all of them; and prior to those unions, she had been the wife of the Basel humanist Ludwig Keller, who died in 1526 after only two years of mar-

riage. With a daughter from Keller to raise, Wibrandis then married the minister of Saint Martin’s church in Basel known as Oecolampadius, a learned theologian and professor. She was twenty-four and he forty- five, causing some of his contemporaries, including Erasmus, to com- ment mockingly on the difference in their age. Oecolampadius seems to have been thoroughly satisfied with his choice. In 1529 he wrote to a fellow reformer, Wolfgang Fabricius Capito: “My wife is what I always wanted and I wish for no other. She is not contentious, garrulous, or a gadabout, but looks after the household.”
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What Wibrandis thought of him we do not know, but she bore him a son and two daughters in a three-year period, entertained Protestant ministers and their families, exchanged letters with the wives of other reformers, shared her hus- band’s victories in the religious battles of Basel, and mourned his death in 1531.

Wibrandis was widowed in the same month as Wolfgang Capito, to whom her second husband had written so glowingly of his marital choice just two years earlier. It took less than a year for Capito, encour- aged by his matchmaking friends, to settle upon Wibrandis and for her to accept him as her third husband. With the children from her first two unions, she moved to Strasbourg, where Capito was a well-known pastor and professor. Once again, Wibrandis fulfilled her multiple duties as wife, housekeeper, and mother, producing no less than five children in her ten-year marriage to Capito. Her nine children all sur- vived until the great plague of 1541, which carried away three of them . . . and Capito as well.

At the very same moment, Elisabeth Butzer, the wife of the reformer Nathanael Butzer, was stricken. Knowing that she was about to die and hearing of Wibrandis’s loss Elisabeth had her summoned to her bed- side. Wibrandis came at night (ashamed to be seen in public during the day, since she had been so recently widowed) and listened to Elisabeth’s appeal. Would she marry the soon-to-be-widowed Butzer? This deathbed appeal from one woman to another says something about the kind of people they must have been: a wife concerned for the future well-being of her husband, a widow whose reputation for goodness and hard work had preceded her. Wibrandis married Butzer the follow- ing year.

While Butzer mourned his deceased wife, he was simultaneously learning to appreciate his new one. He expressed both of these senti-

ments in a letter to a friend: “There is nothing that I could desire in my new wife save that she is too attentive and solicitous.... I only hope I can be as kind to my new wife as she to me. But oh, the pangs for the one I have lost!”
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The new household consisted of the married couple, Wibrandis’s mother, and Wibrandis’s five surviving children; it was aug- mented by the birth of two more children (one dying at an early age) and an adopted niece. In toto, Wibrandis gave birth to eleven children from four different beds.

The Butzer home in Strasbourg, like the Luther home in Wittenberg, offered refuge to embattled Protestants, such as the Italian Vermigli, who wrote of his stay with them in 1542: “For 17 days after my arrival I was entertained in Butzer’s home. It is like a hostel, receiving refugees for the cause of Christ.”
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No mention is made of Wibrandis, the person responsible for seeing that he and the others were properly cared for. Indeed, for an entire year, Wibrandis was left alone in Strasbourg to manage the household, while her husband was assisting the archbishop of Cologne. And on several occasions, while Butzer was away on busi- ness, she held down the fort, caring for her sick mother, sick children, and a continuing stream of refugees.

Nathanael Butzer left for England in 1548 at the invitation of the archbishop of Cranmer to work on biblical translations and to teach at Cambridge. Meanwhile in Strasbourg, Wibrandis was not amused to hear from one of her husband’s colleagues that “she had better come to care for Butzer else he might marry some one else. The Duchess of Suf- folk would have him. She is a widow.”
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Eventually Wibrandis came to England with the whole family, but Butzer, exhausted by his labors, died in February 1551. It was then the responsibility of Wibrandis to return with her family to Strasbourg. Her surviving letters from this period, some in German, some in Latin, attest to her ability to manage financial matters on her own. One letter was to Archbishop Cranmer, asking him subtlely for help. It brought in a grant of one hundred marks.

After the family returned to Strasbourg, Wibrandis and her children moved back to her home city of Basel. It was here that she died during the plague of 1564, and here that she was buried beside her second husband, Oecolampadius.

The German-speaking Protestant wives of Basel, Strasbourg, and Wittenberg added significantly to the Reformation: they made it possi-

ble for their husbands to survive and prosper. They helped create a new model of familial relations, one in which the wife—however sub- servient to her husband’s needs—was nonetheless his acknowledged partner in molding the moral character of their children and in creating a Christian community around them. Encouraged to read the Bible available to them in Luther’s vernacular translation, they began a tradi- tion of mixed-gender discourse on Scriptural matters that has lasted for four centuries. The word
Hausfrau
does not begin to suggest the varied nature of their activities within the house, nor those other activities, such as letter-writing and traveling for family and business reasons, that brought them into the wider sphere of religious and social reform.

MARRIAGE IN TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND

In Germany and Switzerland, the Reformation moved very quickly. By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the right of the clergy to marry and the nonsacramental status of marriage became common Protestant doctrine. This was not the case in England, where both issues took longer to be resolved. Henry VIII, whose desire to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, would eventually lead to a rupture with the papacy and to the establishment of the Church of England, initially attacked Luther. He called for a bonfire of Luther’s books in May 1521, and then wrote his own work in defense of the sacrament of marriage
(Assertio Septum Sacramentorum
.) Henry’s conservative theol- ogy contrasted sharply with his subsequent personal behavior. While he got rid of his wives by means more foul than fair and successively married a half dozen, he and his spokesmen continued to delay the reli- gio-legal transformations of marriage that had already been effected by Protestants in Germany and Switzerland.