What do we do with Katie Luther? What kind of historical character can we paint her to be?
Studying a historical figure like Katharina Von Bora was a tricky business for me. As I talked with Jared Kennedy, who was writing the Martin Luther companion to my book on Katie Luther, we joked we had opposite problems. He had an abundance of primary sources on Martin Luther to wade through and decide what to include. I had very little to work with and had to reach for some cultural and theological surroundings to get a clearer picture of the woman who would become Martin Luther’s wife.
We don’t have a lot of her writing—just a couple of letters asking for money from the end of her life. Some of the information we have on her is sketchy. Almost all of the sources on her are secondary. Luther talked about her a lot, but well, you know Luther. He was sometimes sincere and sometimes making crass jokes. We have some things from his table talks when scholars and students would write down the discussions at the Luther dinner table. But to me, these read like watching a reality show on television and calling it research. What’s included in those accounts could easily be tainted by the scribe and their intentions.
Then there’s the abundance of gossip written about her. She was such an unusual woman that it seemed people either loved or hated her. Of course, given his background as a monk and the part he played in the Reformation, Martin Luther’s marriage would be controversial no matter who he married. I don’t think it’s too controversial to say he may not have been the easiest person to be married to.
But they somehow worked together. In fact, by Martin’s own pen, they were perfect for each other. They also drove each other crazy, and she had a stubborn will to match his. Sometimes, that annoyed him; sometimes, he appreciated and depended on it.
And, of course, everyone in proximity to this “celebrity couple” had an opinion of her. Studying Katie Luther sometimes felt like figuring out who she was by reading tabloid articles and cartoons left behind about her.
I went to biographies written about her. It seemed everyone wanted to turn her story into some moral message. One book had the tone: Katie was oppressed, all the women were oppressed, the church just oppressed, oppressed, oppressed. In another read, Katie escaped from the convent so she could be a wife and mother, as God intends all women to be. It felt like there was an agenda behind what various people wrote about her as they tried to fill in all the blanks you find when you try to sift through the scraps of what we know about her.
Everyone wanted to turn her story into some moral message.
A few years ago, for Christmas, my parents gave me Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God: the Wittenberg School and its Scripture-Centered Proclamation by Dr. Robert Kolb. My mom teased me because I’m a nerd, and it was at the top of my wish list. I had requested it because I was feeling the vacuum of information about what I didn’t know about Luther. I had overheard it as a recommendation to understand Luther’s writings' influence on the people around him. I went through the book slowly, underlined a lot, had to look up multiple terms on every page, and ended up reading several other primary documents it cited. I turned the book into a syllabus for my own little self-study class on Luther. It took me about a year to get through, and I made an even longer reading list of primary documents that I'm still working on. My main takeaways from the Kolb book were that Luther's writings felt “dangerous" because common people understood them, they impacted tangible issues of the day, and they also directly impacted how they lived their lives.
No one would have minded if Luther’s writings hadn’t impacted people and were all theoretical or philosophical. And to be honest, when he posted his ninety-five thesis, I think he was just looking for an exclusively academic debate on the issues. Maybe his famous saying "I did nothing, the word did everything" is more of a sheepish: "Yeah, I had no idea that people were going to take this all to heart so much.”
So, when filling in the blanks about Katie’s life, I started holding up the timeline of dates that we knew about her to the timeline of Luther’s writings and interactions I found in Dr. Kolb’s book. When I compared those two timelines, I saw Katie’s life as an embodiment of Luther’s, The Freedom of the Christian.
She believed everything Luther said and assumed his writing applied to her, too. While most women may not have the audacity to believe such a thing, she was married to Martin Luther, who, himself, was the embodiment of audacity. I believe she took her Christian freedom seriously, perhaps best encapsulated in the first page of The Freedom of the Christian:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
Katie understood the depth of her duty to her neighbor and got up so early every morning to work that Martin called her “the Morningstar of Wittenberg.”
Katie understood the depth of her duty to her neighbor
I remember reading in one criticism of her that she was too generous with the orphans in her care. In addition to Martin and Katie’s six children (two died in childhood), the Luthers took in an estimated eleven orphans for varying lengths of time. Some of them were sibling groups of relatives whose parents died in the plague. The criticism was that she was frivolous for adding gold thread to the wedding dress of an orphan who grew up in their care. Who, in 16th-century Europe, would add something so indulgent for…just an orphan? Maybe that’s something to splurge on for your own daughter, but not a beggar. It almost feels like she didn’t care about what people thought—or perhaps an understanding that some people wouldn’t like her became a normal part of life she had to work through.
There’s another story involving Katie tells about a pastor from a few towns over who wanted to court one of the orphans in the Luther's care who was of marrying age. Luther sent Katie to go investigate. She visited his church and came back saying he had poor theology, and so they denied the match on those grounds. This speaks not only to how they looked out for the orphans as their own, but Luther’s trust in Katie’s judgment on theological matters.
Katie had a reputation for opening her home to whoever needed it and perhaps even prioritized the needy over the distinguished. The Black Cloister (the former monastery where they lived) had plenty of room to host dignitaries from around Europe who traveled to meet with Martin Luther. But Prince George of Anhalt once received a letter from his friend who had already made the pilgrimage to the Luther house who advised him against staying there: "The lodging place is a motley group of young people, students, girls, widows, old women, and quite young boys." In other words, their house is loud and boisterous, and perhaps the Prince should consider staying someplace quieter.
These accounts established my growing admiration and respect for her story. She had escaped from a silent convent, and yet from several accounts, she spoke her mind in her marriage to such an extent that it made people uncomfortable. Sometimes, Martin got a kick out of her sass, and sometimes, he was annoyed by it. There were several people who didn’t like how much he consulted with her over issues of politics and issues of the church. Many thought she had too great of an influence on him.
What do we do with Katie Luther? What kind of historical character can we paint her to be? Was she an oppressed victim? Was she the ideal wife? Was she an obedient stay-at-home mom? Was she a powerful working woman? Was she quiet and submissive? Was she a loudmouthed feminist? The data doesn’t allow her to fit in any one box of our modern constructs. I love her for this.
She was a woman who lived out her Christian freedom. And logistically, what that looked like was serving the neighbors God placed in her life. She served them with her hands, doing dishes and making food. She served them with her mind as she kept financial accounts, considered fields, and leased them so that she would have more food to serve her guests. She served her children and didn’t just tend to their needs but also tended to their hearts. She served the orphans. She served the sick. She served her husband with her respect, and she served him with her sass. Whether people loved her or hated her for these things seemed to be of no consequence to her, or at least there is no record of it slowing her down. The deep assurance she had in Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone leaps off the few pages of history we have of her and her life. Katie lived a life free of the boxes and, therefore, free to love her neighbor.
Gretchen Ronnevik’s new book, The Story of Katie Luther: The Nun Who Escaped to True Freedom (Lives of Faith and Grace, Crossway, 2023), is now available.
