A History of the Wife (16 page)

found her in the company of two Gentile women, two male citizens, the auxiliary bishop, and the bishop’s chaplain. The bishops had come to encourage her to become a Christian. When the husband managed to speak to his wife privately in German, this is the conversation that ensued.

He: “Why have you come here and why don’t you return home?”

She: “I’m going to stay here and I don’t care to return, for I don’t want to be the mistress of a tavern.”

He: “You can do whatever your heart desires in this matter.”

She: “You can’t fool me again. . . . You’ve lied to me ten times and I don’t trust you.”

The bishops assured the husband that nothing would be done hastily, and that she would have forty days to make up her mind. While the husband went home weeping, the wife was taken to a convent “in which a very rigorous Christian discipline prevaled.” She stayed there all day and all night, but by the next day she had a change of heart. She sent word to the bishop that she wanted to return home, saying “I am the wife of a
cohen,
and if I stay here a day or two more I can no more return to the shelter of his home, for he must divorce me.” Cohens, descendants of the priestly caste, were apparently held to a higher stan- dard than other Jews, who were not obliged to divorce if their wives went astray. With his wife restored to his home, “weeping for her sin” and asking for forgiveness, the husband put his case to the rabbis: was he permitted to take her back? Whatever their decision, he was resigned to follow their instruction.

This tantalizing document, like those concerned with the story of Giovanni and Lusanna, does not tell us how the woman fared in the end. Did the authorities allow her to resume her role as a wife? Was she obliged to live with ongoing reproaches from her husband and the Jewish community? Did he give up innkeeping and find another busi- ness? Running away from home is something that many wives have resorted to, and that most have probably contemplated at one time or another. Sometimes it
does
take extreme behavior to change an intoler- able situation.

In medieval Europe, where marriage was the norm for almost all

adults, wives and husbands were generally bound together until the death of a spouse. Of course, married life then, given the disparity in age between husband and wife and the shorter longevity for both sexes (the average life expectancy was around thirty), usually meant that spouses were rarely together for more than ten or fifteen years.
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The remarriage of widows and of widowers was a common phenomenon— in some ways comparable to the frequent remarriages that occur today after divorce. A marriage of ten or fifteen years? Well, perhaps we should consider that time enough and not expect marriage to endure for the rest of one’s life, which today averages almost seventy-four years for an American man and almost eighty for a woman. Perhaps the institution of lifelong marriage made more sense when one didn’t expect to live so long.

And it certainly was easier to stay married when the institution was propped up by the combined force of religion, family, and community. In comparison, marriage today seems sadly lacking in such supports. But in comparison with our era, premodern marriages usually lacked the very qualities we treasure most highly: love, personal choice, and equality between husband and wife.

The medieval wife was not unaware of love. Popular songs and bal- lads, courtly poems, and narratives attest to the visibility of romantic love at every social level. But marriage was too serious a business to be dictated exclusively, and even predominantly, by love. After all, most marriages depended on the combined resources of the two spouses. It was openly acknowledged that a farmer’s wife was indispensable to the running of the farm, that a burgher’s wife was a valuable asset to her husband in the practice of his business, craft, or profession, and that a great lady was needed to preside over a castle or manor.

By the end of the Middle Ages, there are signs that the status of some wives was on the rise. Many upper-class women in such cities as Venice and Paris, English wives from the landed gentry, and burgher wives throughout Europe were beginning to enjoy a higher level of material comfort and increased authority. An indication of the wife’s enhanced position can be found in the portraits of married couples, either on sep- arate panels or together in the same painting, that began to appear from the fifteenth century onward. Paintings of couples in the side panels of religious tryptichs, such as the “Donors Engelbrechts and his wife” (circa 1425–1430) in the Merode Altarpiece at the Cloisters in New

York, had been around for some time, but many other fifteenth-century portraits were frankly secular and celebrated conjugal life.

One of the earliest in this new spirit is the portrait of Lysbeth van Du vendoorde (1430, Rijksmuseum). From information written on the back of the painting, we know that she married Symon van Adrichem, a Rhineland bailiff, on March 19, 1430, and that she died in 1472. In the painting she speaks lovingly of her husband through a scroll carrying these words: “Long have I yearned for the one who opens up his heart.” He, in turn, in a portrait that has been lost, says of her: “I have been anx- ious to know who it is that would honor me with love.” These courtly expressions of reciprocal love do honor to both husband and wife.

A self-portrait of the German painter known as the Master of Frank- furt with his wife at his side shows the spouses at the respective ages of thirty-six and twenty-seven (1491, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp). She wears a wedding ring on the third finger of her right hand, holds a flower, and is accompanied by such suggestive objects as cherries, bread, and a knife—domestic symbols of the good life.

The famous early-fifteenth-century painting,
Arnolfini and His Wife,
by Jan van Eyck, the equally famous double portrait of
The Money Lender and His Wife
by Quentin Metsys from around 1514, the less famous
Alltagsleben
engravings executed by Israhel Van Meckenem between 1490 and 1503, and other Flemish, Dutch, German, and Ital- ian works seem to imply increased respect for the married couple— especially as compared to earlier medieval attitudes, when the ideal of marriage ran a poor third to virginity and widowhood.
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This more favorable view of marriage, and concurrently of the wife, would work its way into the religious and social upheavals of the following century.

T H R E E

Protestant Wives in Germany, England, and America, 1500–1700

A wise husband and one that seeketh to live in quiet with his wife, must observe these three rules. Often to admonish: seldome to reproove and never to smite her.

A Godly Form of Household Government,

London, 1614

I
t should not surprise us that the history of the wife has been so intricately linked to the history of reli- gion. Even today, in many parts of the world, married women’s des-

tinies are determined by religious systems. To take an extreme case, think of such countries as Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where Islamic law requires all adult women to be covered from head to toe in public and can still punish the adulteress by stoning or execution. Western secular laws on marriage, relatively more favorable to women, are rooted in a canon that is essentially Judeo-Christian. We tend to for- get that early New England was a theocracy formed by Puritans whose religious beliefs shaped the conduct of every inhabitant. Although many of their beliefs can be traced back to the Bible, others were formed during the tumultuous period of the Protestant Reformation.

This chapter will examine the mutations of marriage that arose from the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century and spread to North America via Germany, Switzerland, and England. It asks three basic

questions: How did Martin Luther’s pronouncements on marriage and his own marriage affect his generation and subsequent generations to come? How did the changes initiated by Henry VIII and refined under Elizabeth I help shape the Anglican vision of holy matrimony? How did English Protestants and especially Puritans create a model of appropri- ate behavior for American wives?

MARRIAGE IN LUTHER’S GERMANY

Few people influenced the institution of marriage more than the Augustinian monk Martin Luther. When he posted his ninety-five the- ses on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, his immediate objective was to question the church practice of selling indulgences (papal dis- pensations that reduced or eliminated the need for penance). He subse- quently raised a host of other stormy subjects, including the question of whether priests needed to be celibate. Today, while indulgences are seen as a quaint anachronism, the celibacy of priests is still controversial. On this matter, the Catholic church continues to be as intransigent as it was in 1525 when Luther married the former nun Katherina von Bora.

Luther’s opposition to the tenet that priests could not marry was grounded in Scripture. He couldn’t find any statements by Jesus in the New Testament condemning the marriage of the apostles—indeed, the Apostle Peter had been married, and it was possible, Luther thought, that Saint Paul and Jesus himself might have been married as very young men. Saint Paul had allowed for a priest to have a wedded wife (1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6), and that was good enough authority for Luther. Moreover, since numerous clergymen lived with concubines, many of whom bore children, he deemed it better for them to be mar- ried than to live in sin. He expounded these ideas in his 1520 “Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” concluding with three characteristically blunt assertions:

“
First,
Not every priest can do without a woman, not only on account of the weakness of the flesh, much more because of the neces- sities of the household. . . .” (Note that women were seen as necessary for the satisfaction of men’s sexual and housekeeping needs.)

“
Second,
The pope has as little power to command this, as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural movement of the bowels or grow- ing fat... .” (Here sex was seen as “natural” alongside other bodily

activities.)

“
Third,
Although the law of the pope is against it, nevertheless, when the estate of matrimony has been entered against the pope’s law, then his law is at an end, and is no longer valid; for the commandment of God, which decrees that no one shall put man and wife asunder, takes prece- dence of the law of the pope... .”
1
(Divine law overrides papal law.)

That same year, in his “Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Luther argued that marriage is not a sacrament—a religious ceremony of sacred significance. He and like-minded reformers reduced the seven Catholic sacraments to three; only baptism, penance, and the Eucharist remained, since they were mentioned in the Bible and considered necessary for salvation. But this did not mean that mar- riage was to be any less significant in the life of a Christian. On the basis of Scripture—always his ultimate test in matters of faith—Luther rec- ommended it to everyone, both priest and layman. He also expressed his personal abhorrence for divorce, though he allowed that “it is still a question for debate.”
2

While Luther departed from orthodoxy in his unequivocal support of marriage, even for priests, he did not depart from the Catholic church’s view of women as inferior beings, valid primarily for repro- duction. For Luther, as for most of his predecessors and contempo- raries, women had been “created for no other purpose than to serve men and be their helpers.”
3

Family relationships were therefore intrinsically hierarchical, with the husband at the head of the household, the wife second in rank, and children duty-bound to obey their parents. Luther’s writings, and espe- cially his
Small Catechism,
which was standard reading in Lutheran homes for centuries to come, articulated his view of the family. The obligations of the spouses to one another followed gender-specific lines, with the husband required to give “honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel” and the wife to submit herself to her husband “as unto the Lord.” Yet, following the words of Saint Paul, Luther also insisted that mutual love between husband and wife was a God-given mandate.
4

Lutherans throughout the world, in America as in Germany and the Scandinavian lands, have integrated into their faith this lesson of reci- procity in conjugal love and inequality in matters of authority. They also have abided by Luther’s view that a fully realized Christian voca-

tion included conjugal, as well as religious, responsibilities.

In 1525 at the age of forty-two, Luther was willing to practice what he preached. By marrying Katherina von Bora, aged twenty-five, he joined the growing ranks of Reformation clerics who had taken a wife. His was by no means the first marriage of a former Catholic priest, but it was probably the most influential.

And who was this woman, Katherina von Bora, who has come down in history as Luther’s wife? What we know of her derives exclusively from Luther and some of his contemporaries, since virtually none of her own writings, not even her letters to Luther, have survived. What a pity we cannot know her better! The energetic personality that emerges even through the filter of male observers is unforgettable.

Katherina came from a noble family of modest means. Her mother died when she was a baby, and when her father remarried, he placed her in a cloister school. At nine, she was designated for the religious life in the Cistercian convent of Nimbschen in Saxony, where her cousin was the abbess. At sixteen she took the veil and would have lived per- manently as the bride of Christ, had not Reformation history caught up with her.

In 1522 her kinsman, the prior of an Augustinian monastery near Nimbschen, renounced his vows and joined the Lutherans with a num- ber of his brethren. Katherina and her sister nuns were profoundly affected by his decision. They sent out letters to their families, asking to be able to renounce their vows as well. But their families had no inter- est in restoring these young women to secular life—after all, most of them had been sent into the convent so as to avoid paying a marital dowry, and many had already paid some form of dowry to the convent. Why should their families want to take these women back?