7. “From Katie, a Little Heathen”: Motherhood At the Manse
My baby. Mine . . . There was a fierceness to the love that was born the instant I saw him,” writes Sue Hubbell. “It was uncivilized, crude, unquestioning, unreasoning. I first began to understand it when . . . we were on a family camping trip, and during the night were awakened by an old sow bear . . . Her baby had strayed on the other side of our tent. She was frantic, fierce, angry, and . . . dangerous.” Hubbell speaks of her own maternal instincts and then comments, “I had to learn to keep the old sow bear under control.” Sow-bear mothers are not necessarily the most lovable. They may not be known for baking cupcakes and singing sweet lullabies. My mother was in some ways a sow bear, myself also. So was Katie. She was protective and stern.
Growing up on a farm as one of five children, I resonate in many ways with the Luther children. My mother had a strong personality and ruled the family, sometimes with an iron fist. She worked in the fields and gardens while managing the house full of kids. She canned fruits and vegetables, butchered chickens, sewed and mended clothes and curtains, all the while being active in the community and, while not being particularly religious, attending church every week. She was a strict mother whose unqualified devotion to her children often seemed to be all that mattered.
Katharina von Bora brought those same qualities to motherhood, the most essential facet of her life. We easily focus on her role as wife of the great Reformer because he has been such a central figure in Christianity, and truly she did fill a prominent place in that realm. But her own focus was primarily on her children from the time of her pregnancy in 1525 to her death in 1553. One of the reasons her role as mother is overlooked is that none of her children became famous—especially famous sons. From biblical times into the twentieth century, the test of motherhood has rested on that achievement.
Katie pales in comparison to Susanna Wesley, the ultimate Christian mother. Indeed, Susanna was the mother of all reality shows—an eighteenth-century version of nineteen kids and counting. Katie had only six children, although when we count all the orphans and others under her roof, she was not far behind Susanna. There are other significant similarities, however. Both women were married to ministers and presided over a manse with farm and acreage that doubled as a home school. Both were proficient in gardening, herbal remedies, and animal husbandry. Both were accused of being prideful and both talked back to their husbands.
Katie, however, was not a stay-at-home mother. She was often absent for days or weeks at a time to handle business at her properties, sometimes leaving Martin in charge of the children. Susanna stayed put while her husband left home, accused by some of being little more than a ne’er-do-well. Susanna preached on occasion when her husband was away, something Katie never would have done. And unlike Susanna, Katie didn’t write her rules of child rearing, nor did she write letters that are today available to our prying eyes.
But the most important difference was that Susanna, unlike Katie, was the mother of two famous sons, John and Charles Wesley. John spoke of his mother as a “preacher of righteousness” who had a profound influence on his ministry.
If we could bring Katie and Susanna together, I think they would find they have much in common and a lot to talk about. Would Susanna confide to Katie that, with all her fame as a superwoman, her husband abandoned her for a time and her children one after another had serious problems in adulthood, including mental instability and broken marriages—even son John himself? Would Katie share her own difficulties with children and her fears for her husband’s physical and mental well-being?
Despite the 170 years that separated their birth dates (1499–1669), living conditions had not changed significantly. This is a major point to ponder as we consider Katie and other historical figures. If we jump to 170 years after Susanna’s birth, we arrive at 1839, where we would find ten-year-old Catherine Mumford, who would grow up to marry William Booth. She would also have a slew of children—and would also talk back to her husband. Here again we would discover lower-and middle-class women still living not so differently from Katie and Susanna, toiling from dawn to dark with few modern conveniences. In fact, the Industrial Revolution was driving families to the cities, and the standard of living often took a serious dive.
But jump ahead (in Germany, England—or North America) another 170 years to 2009, and we see a dizzying display of progress for mothers and daughters. Education, transportation, communication, medical breakthroughs, cheap manufactured goods—all of these things tangled up in the crazy concept of gender equality. For a woman today, sitting down with Katie, Susanna, and Catherine would be looking from the outside in. They would resonate with each other, while we would be seen as aliens from a distant future.
Yet women today, myself included, want to claim Katie as our own. “Sisters of Katie Luther,” a website with several contributors, views Katie as one who would today support traditional gender roles. In a post titled “Why I Am Not a Pastor,” Katy Schumpert writes:
I hope that when you read the title of this piece, you said to yourself, “Well, of course she’s not a pastor—she’s a woman!” But in these (shades of) gray and latter days, when we have discarded all the “traditional gender roles” God has ordained and which have served us for so many millennia, not only do fewer and fewer people react that way, but more and more people get downright apoplectic that anyone would have such a reaction. I used to be one of them.
From Katie, the “sisters” draw support for homeschooling and being stay-at-home mothers, though she herself was hardly “traditional” in that regard. We do clearly see her hovering over sickly children, her husband, and other members of the large extended family. But these are natural responses in routine family life. She was by nature fierce and protective of her children. What we don’t see is motherhood drawn from traditional gender roles—a motherhood “God has ordained,” ruled by a theological or biblical perspective.
With most mothers, there is a primal love that comes naturally with the birth of a child. Martin Luther, observing Katie, likened this to God’s love for the sinner—God, who sees beyond our sins, even as a mother loves her child in spite of grunge and dirty diapers.
We cannot assess Katie as mother apart from Martin as father. Unlike the circumstances relating to Susanna Wesley, there is scant record of Katie’s child-rearing philosophy or practice. She is full of deeds as a parent, as Martin is, but he is also full of words. He reportedly said on one occasion, “Child what have you done that I should love you so? What with your befowling the corners and bawling through the whole house?” In 1538, he commented, “Christ said we must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. Dear God, have we got to become such idiots?”
For Katie, such humorous remarks from her husband were commonplace, and there is no evidence that she would have disagreed with him. But for her, there was work to do. His reputation was largely based on his words; hers was based on her work. She was always at work, and child care was accomplished amid other tasks and always, by today’s standards, under primitive circumstances. It was a time when medical care and matters of hygiene had not advanced beyond medieval customs. Childbirth was a perilous endeavor, and babies and mothers who survived were considered fortunate indeed. Katie, a healthy bride in her mid-twenties, was an exception. Except for one instance, childbirth for her was essentially routine—routine, that is, for the sixteenth century.
The record shows that she gave birth to six children in the years 1526, 1527, 1529, 1531, 1533, and 1534 (three sons and three daughters, though only one daughter would survive beyond her teen years). Although certainly not a record of rapid births, we can imagine Katie had her hands full. A natural form of birth control was assumed to be breastfeeding. She was still nursing little Martin, however, when she became pregnant with Paul. At the end of her childbearing came the most difficult of all her pregnancies—one resulting in a miscarriage. Miscarriages in the early months are often not even recognized, so we assume she was well along in her pregnancy. So severe were the complications that she nearly died, a situation that allowed the couple no time to mourn or to hardly acknowledge the little one they had lost.
But life did not wait for her while she was recovering. For a time, she crawled on the floor to go from room to room, making sure the children were cared for. Only after several months was she finally fully restored to good health. The fact that she was past forty at the time and beyond normal childbearing age likely contributed to the miscarriage and her slow recovery.
Although wealthy women often employed wet nurses, breastfeeding was the custom of the day. For Martin, however, the matter was more than a cultural norm. It was a God-ordained expectation: “It is therefore unkind and unnatural for a mother not to nurse her child, for God gave her her breasts and her milk for that purpose; unless she is unable to do it.” Apart from breastfeeding, there were servants who helped out and, above all others, “Auntie Lena” von Bora. The little ones apparently clung to her with great affection so that their father became almost jealous of her.
Katie and Martin had wasted no time in getting their family started. Hans was born in June 1526, less than a year after they married. In a letter to a friend, he announced the blessed news. It might have been a time for him to wax eloquent, except for the fact that he had to cut the letter short because the ailing Katie was calling for him to come to her aid.
As soon as she was notified, Martin’s mother traveled from Mansfield to help out her new daughter-in-law. The birth had gone well, not so nursing the infant. Like so many new mothers, she simply did not have enough milk. Martin lamented the fact, saying God should charge for all the good things he gives people—a wife, a child, eye, foot, hand, etc.: “I’d pay [God] 100 florin if he’d give Katie more milk.”
Martin placed no blame on her, but rather praised her for motherly capabilities, observing that a mother could obviously manage child care better with one finger than a father with clenched fists. Martin was a doting father, often making mention of his firstborn son in correspondence. He was proud as a peacock when he announced, “Hans is cutting his teeth and beginning to make a joyous nuisance of himself. These are the joys of marriage of which the pope is not worthy.” Later, Katie must have found his antics to be less than joyous. “When little Hans,” writes Martin Brecht, “first ‘shit’ on his own—a facility which he soon tested in every corner—it was worth mentioning in one of his father’s letters.”
This must have been around the time baby sister Elizabeth was born on December 10, when Hans was eighteen months old. It was a frightful time to give birth—in the midst of a raging plague, but all went well, and Katie quickly bounced back. But deep sorrow came soon enough. The death of baby Elizabeth ten months later was a dark hour at the Black Cloister. There is no record that she was a sickly child. Death apparently came suddenly. Imagine the absolute heartbreak. She’s crawling across the floor after big brother Hans. She’s standing and taking her first steps, smiling and cackling that baby laugh. And then in August, she’s gone. Martin was startled by his own sorrow and deep sentimentality, “almost like a woman.” His only comfort was that his daughter was being cared for by God, a perfect father. Whether Katie found such comfort we do not know. How, we wonder, does she move on?
Two months later, however, Katie is pregnant again. On May 4, 1529, daughter Magdalena is born. Here, in 1529, is a point at which we are stopped dead in our tracks. She is thirty years old, three adored little ones, one dead, and what does this year bring? More children and extended family members than any ordinary woman could possibly handle. The Black Cloister was often filled to the brim with relatives and hangers-on, including a half dozen children of Martin’s deceased sister. There were also relatives of Katie who were in and out, the most appreciated and permanent being her Aunt Lena, whom Katie had come to know well when they were both nuns at the Nimbschen convent. Of course, students, visiting pastors, professors, and sometimes refugees made up the bulk of the residents who found temporary housing.
Though Katie today is remembered primarily as a wife, her responsibilities as mother to this large brood were truly astounding.
When Luther was residing at Coburg in June 1530, he received mail from home. We know this only from his response to Katie: “I have received Lenchen’s picture with the box. At first I could not believe the little lock—it seemed to me so black.” At this time, little Magdelena (Lenchen) would have been just over a year old. Her father was away, missing some of her delightful toddler months due to his nearly six-month (from April 23 to October 4) involvement in the Diet of Augsburg. His letter continues: “If you want to stop breast-feeding the baby and wean it, it would be good to do it gradually.” On this point he cites Argula von Grumbach, who had recently shared a meal with him. Did Katie really need the advice of a distant noblewoman, having already nursed three babies?
We wonder if, despite his difficult negotiations, she may have begrudged the apparent good time her husband was having in Coburg. She was home during these months, responsible for a full house without him. After he returned, she would soon become pregnant again.
Luther’s breezy reflections almost seem to dismiss the costs involved in his rapidly growing immediate and extended family, an outlook that could not have been voiced by Katie: “I am rich. My God has given me a nun and three little children. I don’t care that I have a lot of debts, for when my Katya counts them up, another child comes along.” Yes indeed. Little Martin, her fourth child, was still breastfeeding in the spring of 1532 when Katie became pregnant with her fifth.
Fortunately, she had household help, servants, and particularly Aunt Lena. But family matters were her responsibility. Although Martin did not regard it beneath him to take charge of household tasks, he referred to Katie’s toil and her expertise time and again. She was the one in charge, though they together disciplined the children—discipline with both “rod and apple” side by side. When Katie had time, she joined in games and made music with the children. Indeed, they sang as a small choir. For this very purpose, Luther wrote a well-known Christmas hymn, “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come”:
To you, this night, is born a child
Of Mary, chosen mother mild;
This little child, of lowly birth,
Shall be the joy of all your earth . . .
Ah, dearest Jesus, holy child,
Make thee a bed, soft, undefiled,
Within my heart, that it may be
A quiet chamber kept for thee.
Speaking for both Katie and himself, he wrote in his “Preface to the German Mass” that discipline and playfulness should go hand in hand. A child psychologist of sorts, he challenged parents to get down on the floor and be one with them.
That Katie revered marriage, family, and home to the degree her husband did can only be inferred. Both emphasized the critical importance of child rearing and good works. Martin repeated the saying that parents could attain eternal life in heaven by doing no more than properly training their children. Caring for children is, in his mind, serving the least of these—as it were, the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, and sick. “O what a blessed marriage and home . . . where such parents were to be found! Truly it would be a real church, a chosen cloister, yea, a paradise.” Salvation, paradise, marriage, home.
The most painful sorrow Martin and Katie shared together was the death of Magdalena on September 20, 1542, having celebrated her thirteenth birthday the previous May. If we can trust Lucas Cranach the Elder in his portrait of the girl, she looks like her mother. Although her expression is serious, we can imagine her having inherited her father’s quick wit. Yet we know so very little about her, despite all the letters and “table talk” of her famous father. And she seems almost absent in the scenes of sorrow as she nears death. She responds to her father that she is prepared to die and go to heaven, but who was this delightful girl when she was bouncing a little brother in her lap or singing in the family choir as her father played the lute? Who was she when her mother talked to her about her menstrual periods or showed her for the first time how to mend her stockings or bake a batch of strudel?
Apart from the sorrowful death scene, we know very little about this teenage girl from old Wittenberg. Thirteen years earlier, when Luther had asked his friend and pastor Nicolaus von Amsdorf to be her godfather, he endearingly spoke of her as a “little heathen” who needed Nicolaus “to help her [enter] holy Christendom through the heavenly, precious sacrament of baptism.”
Here as elsewhere, the biographer of Katharina longs for some insight from her own pen. What were her words—or was she not even able to formulate them—during that time of deep despair when their dear child was dying? As it was, Lenchen breathed her last in her father’s arms.
Even in his deepest sorrow, he reportedly prayed and rose above the inevitable loss. If it were God’s will, then she should die. Indeed, he told God he would “gladly give her up” to him. And to his daughter he reportedly said, “My dearest child, my own sweet and good ‘Lenchen,’ I know you would gladly stay with your father here, but there is a better Father waiting for you in heaven. You will be equally glad to go and stay with Him, would you not?” She knew what he desired in her response, and she affirmed that she wanted God’s will. And then, happy in spirit, he comforts her with his oft-quoted words, “Ah, thou dear Lenchen, thou wilt rise again, and shine forth as a star, nay, as a sun!”
It would be difficult to imagine Katie saying such words as “happy in spirit”—or of such words being put into her mouth. Only those who have lost children can truly comprehend her complete and total devastation. God must have seemed distant or silent (if not cruel) as she stood helplessly by as her beloved daughter faded away.
In a letter to his close friend, Justus Jonas, Martin spoke from the heart in expressing his and Katie’s feelings of desolation—desolation as though they were “experiencing death” themselves. But in a seeming effort to excuse his actual sorrow, he insisted that he and Katie should be rejoicing that she “escaped the power of the flesh, the world, the Turk, and the devil.” In actuality, however, they were “unable to do this without crying and grieving in our hearts.” He adds a comment that truly shows the depth of their grief: “The features, the words, and the movements of the living and dying daughter remain deeply engraved in the heart.”
What he confides next to Jonas, only Katie could have thought and Luther in his unabashed honesty could say: “Even the death of Christ . . . is unable to take this all away as it should. You, therefore, give thanks to God in our stead. For indeed God did a great work of grace when he glorified our flesh in this way. Magdalena had (as you know) a mild and lovely disposition and was loved by all.”
Hans, three years older than Magdalena, away at school in Torgau, had been summoned home when it seemed certain that his sister would not recover. In fact, he did not arrive home until after she had died, and he would not return, apparently at his mother’s insistence, to continue his schooling at such a distance. In the ensuing years, he continued his schooling in Wittenberg, a decision that suggests Katie’s strong influence. Luther, holding to the convention of the day, believed boys should be sent away from home for their studies.
Understanding Katharina as a mother comes primarily through inference, that is, until she becomes a widow. It is then that we distinctly hear her voice and have a sense of certainty that her voice, though unrecorded, had always spoken with a deep primal love. She may not have always been the sweetest and tenderest of mothers, soothing every scratch on the knee, but she fiercely protected her children, even into their adult years.
Hans, born in 1526, the year after his parents married, had not yet celebrated his twentieth birthday when his larger-than-life father died in 1546. Although he “was obviously not too gifted intellectually,” writes Martin Treu, Katie was bound and determined to get him through his course work at the University of Königsberg. Too strapped for money to pay for his education herself, she begged for money from various well-connected friends of her late husband. At university, he became a perpetual student of sorts, supported by Duke Albrecht of Prussia. And like others before and since, Hans, “in spite of his long-term studies, never held a position.”
Fourteen when his father died, Martin Jr. was the most deeply troubled of the five adult children. He remained in Wittenberg, close (at least in proximity) to his mother until she died in 1552, when he was nineteen. After that, his life began to go off the rails, and at the age of thirty-four, he died of alcoholism. Critics claimed Katie was too indulgent with the children, ever fearful that, out of her sight, one of them might fall ill and die.
Paul, never having been away from home on his own, was a mere boy of twelve when his father died. His adolescence lay ahead of him—a difficult time to be so soon fatherless. Yet he flourished in the decade that followed, earning a degree in medicine at the age of twenty-three. His services were in demand by some of Germany’s biggest names of the day: Duke Johann Friedrich of Saxony, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, and Elector August of Saxony.
Youngest of the four surviving children, Margarethe was eleven at the time of her father’s death, old enough to remember well when the family joined together in singing or sitting at table with students in the evening while her father held forth on various topics. She married a man of noble blood, and they lived together near Königsberg, where brother Hans was pursuing his career as a student. Like her mother, her pregnancies followed one after another. She died when she was in her mid-thirties of complications from her ninth childbirth.
During the two decades of their marriage, Katie may have heard time and again her husband’s views on motherhood. Perhaps she sometimes felt she did not measure up to his biblical standard. But it is more likely that much of what he said from his biblical and philosophical perspective did not really resonate with her—perhaps in one ear and out the other. “Bring the child forth and do it with all your might!” he had declared. “If you die in the process, then pass on over, good for you! For you actually die in a noble work and in obedience to God.” She obviously knew he was spouting off and didn’t really mean what he was saying. He worried about her in every childbirth—and despaired that he was losing her in her last. Why would he say something so heartless? He obviously didn’t mean such things.
“Men have broad chests and narrow hips, and for that reason they have more understanding than the women,” Luther blabbed. Women “have narrow chests and wide hips and lower bodies, so that they ought to stay home and sit still in the house [and] keep house and bear and raise children.” This was said in 1531, when Katie, who hardly had a moment to sit still at all, was pregnant with her fourth child. What a lout!
But to Katie, Martin was a good husband who likely did not believe his own slurs against women. She was certain not only of his high personal regard for her but also of his esteem for women in general—esteem he drew directly from scriptural foundations. Motherhood was sacred in his mind, and there never had been a mother so worthy of honor as Katie—unless it were Eve. It is interesting how Luther’s understanding of Eve evolved over the years. In the 1520s, he offered a standard negative portrait of her.
[The younger Luther] faulted the first woman, “talkative and superstitious,” for speaking with the serpent in the first place . . . He imagined her as a woman “simple,” “weak,” and “little,” who had no business engaging in a “disputation” that from the outset was over her head; instead, she ought to have referred the devil’s questions to the man, her superior . . .
The younger Luther also connected Eve’s failing in this case to her subjection to her husband’s ecclesial authority.
During his marriage to Katie, however, Luther’s views changed. He looked at the text more dispassionately, his hermeneutic no longer shaped by a chauvinistic culture. Indeed, by the mid-1530s and early 1540s, he no longer saw Eve as Adam’s inferior.
The elder Luther—a married man who had fathered six children—offered a strikingly altered and imaginative portrayal of Eve, making her a great saint, a woman whose heroic faithfulness merited attention and emulation. Rather than weak, superstitious, and talkative, she is now a “heroic woman” . . . who engaged in conversations with the serpent because she recognized it instantly as one of the creatures over which she had been set, as a “partner in the rule” . . . with her husband, as ruler and keeper. She was, moreover, an excellent philosopher, “in no part, that is, neither in body nor in soul . . . inferior to her husband Adam.”
Eve is Adam’s equal partner. For Luther to recognize that is striking in itself. But in a larger realm, Eve is far more than just Adam’s equal. She is mother—mother of all living. Eve was no mere incubator with wide hips. She was mother of all living—and she was a mother all of her life. So also Katie. Motherhood was far more than merely giving birth. With that understanding, Luther’s rendition of Eve is extravagant—overspiritualizing what God had set in place as procreation. This is vintage Luther, not how Katie would have described the biblical scene. Nevertheless, she would have honored his effort to honor Eve and to honor her at the same time: “When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva, that is to say, the mother of all. He did not style her wife; but simply mother—mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory, and the most precious ornament of woman.”
Like Eve, Katie was styled by God and by her husband, not primarily as wife, but simply mother. “In this,” Luther proclaimed, “consists the glory, and the most precious ornament of woman.”