First Wives' Club

Twenty-first century lessons from the lives of sixteenth century women

Clare Heath-Whyte

• Publisher: 10Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781909611979
• eBook ISBN: 9781909611979
• Subtopic: Christian Church

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The Reformation was a time of exciting and radical change. The leaders would have been under great pressure as they stood firmly for their convictions in the face of danger and threats. What would it have been like for the women who stood beside and supported them? Although many of these pressures are totally alien to us today, we still face the same challenge of standing firm for the gospel in a world which is against the God of the Bible. In this companion to Old Wives' Tales Clare Heath–Whyte once again shows us the importance of learning from the past. She tells the stories of six Reformation wives including Katie Luther, Katharina Zell and Idelette Calvin. She honestly portrays how they endeavoured to live godly lives during this tumultuous period in history. Get to know the fascinating stories of these six courageous, hard–working wives. Learn from their mistakes and struggles, and be encouraged by their examples.

Anyone who has ever listened to a (male) speaker and wondered about his wife will enjoyFirst Wives' Club. Stimulating, diverse and well–researched, this book isa very readable way–in to Reformation history. ~John and Ann Benton

CHAPTER ONE

Katie Luther

1499–1552

A Life-Long Learner

As time goes by it gets harder to break old habits. Even as Christians it’s easy to excuse ungodly behaviour because ‘that’s just what I’m like – I was born that way’. Whether it’s a bad temper or a sharp tongue, extravagance or negativity, we can become so used to our unchrist-like personality traits that we don’t even expect to change. As a young woman Katie Luther was known to be difficult and bossy and was determined to get her own way; by her death she was revered as a model of Protestant piety. She was still feisty, hardworking and stubborn, but these qualities had been harnessed to serve Christ and His people. As she studied God’s Word she allowed the sword of the Spirit to do its painful work – changing and moulding her to reflect God’s likeness.

In 1525 in Wittenberg, Germany, Katharina von Bora married Martin Luther, the man who had stood alone to challenge the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, and so had launched what we now know as the Protestant Reformation. Luther was one of the most famous, and infamous, men of his generation. He was adored by those who had accepted his teaching – those who had been set free from ritual and legalism to enjoy a relationship with Christ on the basis of God’s grace alone. He was loathed by those who felt he was destroying the basis of Christian civilisation by attacking Roman Catholic doctrine. He was also a monk who had made a vow of celibacy. Whoever married Martin Luther was going to be thrown into the limelight. During her twenty-one years of marriage Katie¹ would find herself copied and despised in equal measure as she tried to show that it was possible to please God as a married woman fully involved with the world around her.

That might seem obvious to us, but in the early sixteenth century women who wanted to please God were expected to join a convent, make vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, and renounce the world. In fact that was exactly what Katie herself had done – although not entirely voluntarily. She had been packed off to a Benedictine convent when she was just five years old after her father’s remarriage. That meant the family had one less mouth to feed and no dowry to pay in the future. She moved to a Cistercian cloister when she was nine, where a relative was the abbess and her Aunt Lena also lived. When she was fifteen, on 8 October 1515, Katie took her vows and became a nun. Life in a convent was not as grim as we might expect. In an age when there were few opportunities for women to be educated, Katie learnt to read and write in German and even a little in Latin. As well as prayer and study the nuns also had to manage all the practical tasks in the convent – raising animals, organising menus and doing the accounts – and these were skills that Katie would find very useful in later life. What Katie had never experienced – and never expected to experience – was family life.

Katie and some of the other nuns somehow managed to get their hands on a number of Luther’s writings. His teaching criticised not only the immorality of many monks and nuns but also questioned the biblical basis of the whole system. He was very critical of enforced celibacy and argued that being shut away in a convent or monastery was less pleasing to God than living for Him in the outside world. Around Germany monks and nuns were leaving their cloisters – some freely, others after daring escapes. Unfortunately for Katie her convent came under the jurisdiction of Duke George of Saxony, who had recently had a man executed for helping some fleeing nuns. It looked as though Katie was destined to live out her life in the convent. However, after a group of the discontented nuns had been refused help from their families, they decided to write directly to Luther. In April 1523 an escape plan went into action. Leonhard Koppe was a fish merchant who regularly delivered to the convent. The nine nuns were hidden among the barrels in the back of his cart and smuggled back to the safety of Wittenberg, Luther’s home town. Soon four had been taken back by their families, but the rest needed to find homes as soon as possible. Wolfgang Schiefer, who lived in the town, wrote to a friend, ‘Several days ago a wagon arrived here with a load of vestal virgins, as they are now called. They would like to marry as much as to stay alive. May God provide them with husbands so that in the course of time they won’t run into greater need!’²

Some found husbands more easily than others – and Katie was particularly difficult to marry off. For an ex-nun, abandoned by her family and forced on the charity of strangers, she was extraordinarily fussy. She was not considered beautiful, and her personality was too forceful for some. An early suitor was warned off by his family, who were horrified by the idea of a respectable man marrying a nun. Although she didn’t expect to marry for love, she was not prepared to marry just anybody – particularly not the elderly Dr Glatz, who Luther had in mind for her. Luther’s friend Amsdorf wrote bluntly, ‘What in the devil are you up to that you try to persuade good Kate and force that old skinflint, Glatz, on her. She doesn’t go for him and has neither love nor affection for him.’³ Luther replied unsympathetically, ‘If she doesn’t like this one, she will just have to wait a while for another.’⁴ Amsdorf knew that Katie had other plans when he wrote to another friend that Katie was ‘complaining that Doctor Martinus⁵ was trying every which way for her to consent to Doctor Glatz. Yet for him she had neither interest nor love. Rather (if it could so happen and be God’s will) she would marry either Doctor Martinus or Domine Amsdorf.’⁶ Ideally Katie wanted to marry Luther, the great man himself!

Luther didn’t want to marry anybody. Just four years earlier he had been appalled by the very idea of a monk marrying, exclaiming, ‘Good heaven! will our Wittenberg friends allow wives even to monks! Ah! at least they will not make me take a wife.’⁷ Even after Katie had arrived in Wittenberg in 1524, he wrote, ‘God may change my purpose, if such be his pleasure; but at present I have no thought of taking a wife.’⁸ He explained why in a letter to Argula von Grumbach: ‘It is not that I do not feel my flesh or sex, since I am neither wood nor stone, but my mind is far removed from marriage, since daily I expect the death and punishment due a heretic.’⁹ Even though he had encouraged colleagues, such as the young Philipp Melanchthon, to marry to make a point to the Catholic authorities, Luther, at forty, seemed to be a confirmed bachelor.

So how come Katie and Martin Luther were married just a few months later in June 1525? It seemed to take Luther himself by surprise as he wrote, ‘Suddenly, while I still had other thoughts, God in a wondrous way threw me into matrimony with Katharina von Bora, the nun.’¹⁰ It certainly wasn’t for romantic love. Politics definitely played a part. With the Peasants’ War raging, the Reformation and Luther’s life were in danger. By marrying, Luther would make the point that he had no intention of turning back to the Catholic Church, whatever happened. There were other more personal reasons. Luther wrote to his friend Amsdorf, who had encouraged the match, explaining, ‘I married to gratify my father, who asked me to marry and leave him descendants … I was not carried away by passion, for I do not love my wife that way, but esteem her as a friend.’¹¹ Katie had not even been his first choice of the run-away nuns. Years later he wrote, ‘Had I wished to marry fourteen years ago, I should have chosen Ave von Schonfeld, now wife of Basil Axt. I never loved my wife but suspected her of being proud (as she is), but God willed me to take pity on the poor abandoned girl…’¹² (Katie at the time was twenty-five.) Luther’s friend Melanchthon, perhaps in a huff at not being invited to the small private ceremony, was less generous: ‘The man is very facile and the nuns tried to inveigle him. Perhaps the much intercourse with the nuns softened and inflamed him, noble and magnanimous as he is.’¹³ Henry VIII attributed even worse motives to him: ‘At the instigation of the devil, the suggestions of the flesh, and the emptiness of your understanding, you have not been ashamed to violate with your sacrilegious embraces a virgin devoted to the Lord.’¹⁴ It seems that other friends did support the marriage, but not his choice of wife! Seven years later Luther wrote, ‘If I had not married secretly, all my friends would have cried, “Not this woman but somebody else!”’¹⁵ Katie’s strong personality did not go down well with some of the older generation.

At the start of her married life Katie had to cope not only with an indifferent husband and his unsupportive friends but also a vitriolic pamphlet campaign against her. One, which was widely distributed, was addressed to Katie and went like this:

Woe to you, poor fallen woman, not only because you have passed from light to darkness, from the cloistered holy religion into a damnable, shameful life, but also that you have gone from the grace to the disfavour of God, in that you have left the cloister in lay clothes and have gone to Wittenberg like a chorus girl. You are said to have lived with Luther in sin. Then you have married him, forsaking Christ your bridegroom. You have broken your vow, and by your example have reduced many godly young women in the cloisters to a pitiable state of body and of soul, despised of all men.¹⁶

Such hostility could have destroyed a weaker woman. Only someone as strong willed as Katie could possibly have turned the situation, and her reputation, around to become, within a few years, the much-loved role model for women of her, and future, generations.

Katie was certainly strong willed. Luther wrote, ‘If I were to marry again, I would carve an obedient wife out of a block of marble, for unless I did so, I should despair of finding one.’¹⁷ She hardly seems the model of a submissive wife. A few days after her wedding Amsdorf reported that she said, ‘I have to train the doctor a little differently, so that he does what I want.’¹⁸ Both Katie and Luther had lived in single-sex communities for many years and had little, even second-hand, experience of married life. Both were used to doing things their way, and were equally determined. Initially Katie’s attitude alienated others in Luther’s circle. A contemporary wrote, ‘She was of a lofty spirit, wilful and proud; so that she did not cultivate much acquaintance and friendship with other wives, because she accounted herself above them, on account of the fame of her husband.’¹⁹ Humanly speaking the marriage did not have great prospects. It had its unromantic origins in theology, politics and family duty, and, with two such powerful personalities involved, the relationship was never going to be conflict-free. However, within a year Luther wrote, ‘She is gentle and in all things obedient and agreeable, thank God much more than I had dared hope, so that I would not exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus.’²⁰ In time Katie even managed to win over most of her husband’s friends and colleagues. In 1536 the Reformer Wolfgang Capito wrote, ‘She has been created to keep up your health so that you may serve the church born under you, that is, all that hope in Christ … She is deservedly esteemed because as Hausfrau she cares for our common teacher with gentleness and diligence.’²¹ Over the years the marriage became far more than just a practical arrangement as Martin and Katie came to love each other deeply and delighted in the joys of family life that neither had ever expected to experience. Towards the end of his life Luther wrote, ‘I love my Kate; yes I love her more than myself; that is really true; I would die rather than she and the family should die.’²²

From such an unpromising start how was it that Katie was able to make the marriage a success and in the process become a role model for biblical womanhood? First she was determined to base her life on her growing understanding of God’s Word. She wrote, ‘Wedlock grounded on God’s Word and a house in which God’s Word comes upon the table like the daily bread, that is a blessed house.’²³ In the convent she had not been brought up to study the Bible – in fact the practice was frowned upon by the Catholic authorities. Her Latin was minimal so, until Luther himself translated the Bible into German, her access to Sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One – Katie Luther: A Life-Long Learner
• Chapter Two – Anna Zwingli: A Downtrodden Disciple
• Chapter Three – Argula von Grumbach: A Battling Believer
• Chapter Four – Katharina Zell: A Compassionate Co-worker
• Chapter Five – Wibrandis Rosenblatt: A Wonderful Wife
• Chapter Six – Idelette Calvin: A misguided marriage?
• Epilogue
• Notes