Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper

Author:Lyndal Roper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Historical Theology, Biographies & Memoirs, History, Germany
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-03-13T23:00:00+00:00

48. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1532.

Here Luther created a bridge between monastic community and secular household. It was not only huge – certainly bigger than the home in Mansfeld where he grew up – it also soon housed an assortment of guests and lodgers. By a strange irony, the Karlstadt family had been amongst the first to arrive; and like many of the other professors at Wittenberg, Luther took in students, earning extra money by feeding and housing them. There was always an audience at his table, where the reformer would hold forth, and regale his listeners with jokes and stories.89 Hospitality was offered to visitors of all kinds, just as in the monastery. Luther valued sociability as an antidote to the melancholy he had suffered when he was a monk, and devoted considerable time to companionship. If you want any peace and quiet, Prince Georg of Anhalt was warned in 1542, don’t stay with Luther.90 Apart from the students,91 there were also servants, including Luther’s long-standing manservant Wolf Sieberger, to whom the reformer wrote an epic on his penchant for bird-catching, and a series of women servants such as the exotic Rosina von Truchsess, who first claimed to be a noble nun but then admitted she was the daughter of a peasant executed in the Peasants’ War. When she became pregnant she asked one of the other maids to ‘jump on her body’ so as to abort the child, after which Luther condemned her as an ‘arch-whore, desperate tart and sack of lies’. He also suspected her of being a papist spy and she was dismissed from her post – as unmarried servants who fell pregnant usually were – and had to leave town: the household’s famed generosity did not extend that far.92

Luther’s openness to others was legendary, however. Whole families moved into the former monastery. Simon Haferitz, a former follower of Müntzer and embroiled in disputes in Magdeburg, arrived in 1531 with his large family. ‘I don’t know in what nest I can put this bird . . .’ Luther sighed. ‘But Luther has a broad back, and will be able to bear this burden too.’93 Johann Agricola and his family of nine children came to Wittenberg in 1536, when Agricola expected to gain a position at the university, and Luther put up his wife and daughters again in 1545.94 In 1539 he took in the four orphaned children of Dr Sebald Münsterer, who had died of plague along with his wife – much to the fury of the Wittenbergers, who accused Luther of plague-spreading.95 Then there was a motley collection of relatives and friends, including Katharina’s aunt Mume Lena and the fourteen-year-old son of a Bohemian count.96 The living arrangements could give rise to tension. In 1542 Luther wrote to the schoolmaster at Torgau, telling him to beat his nephew Florian every day for three days until the blood ran: the boy had taken the knife from Luther’s son Paul as the two lads travelled to school.

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