Katharina von Bora

1499–1552GermanLutheran

The runaway nun who married Luther and invented what a Protestant pastor's household would look like.

Summary

Katharina von Bora lived 1499–1552, and was German. This wing places Katharina von Bora in The Reformation, 1500–1600.

Lived 1499–1552, German.
Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
Hangs on The Reformers.
Tradition: Lutheran.

The life

Katharina von Bora was placed in a convent as a child and left it as a young woman, smuggled out at Easter 1523 with eleven other nuns; the tradition says they hid among empty herring barrels on a merchant's cart. Two years later she married Martin Luther, partly because no one else could be found for her and partly because both of them decided the point should be made.

The former monastery they were given became a working household she managed herself: fields and cattle, a fish pond, a brewery, a garden, students boarding upstairs, sick people nursed downstairs, and six children of their own. Luther, who joked about her endless talking, also called her his lord and rewrote his will to leave her everything, which the law did not expect. Their home became the picture Protestant Europe copied for the pastor's family.

After Luther died she lost most of what they had to war and plague, and died at Torgau in 1552 after her cart overturned as she fled an outbreak.

What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1500–1600

1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
1555–1556The Oxford firesUnder Queen Mary I, roughly 280 Protestants were burned in under four years. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley died together at Oxford on October 16, 1555; Foxe records Latimer telling Ridley they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Thomas Cranmer, who had signed recantations under pressure, took them back at the stake on March 21, 1556, and held his right hand in the fire first.

The Reformation: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Katharina von Bora at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Walked out of a convent, married Luther, and built the household that every Protestant parsonage after her copied.

Hangs on The Reformers: The men who put the Bible back into the people's hands and the church back under it.

Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall

John Wycliffe1330–1384

Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.

Jan Hus1372–1415

Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.

Martin Luther1483–1546

Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.

Miles Coverdale1488–1569

Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.

Thomas Cranmer1489–1556

Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.

William Tyndale1494–1536

Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.