Unlike the old clergy, the new clergy married, virtually en masse. From the outset they demanded the right to marry; for both Saxon and Swiss reformers, clerical marriage was as prominent a tenet as justification by faith. In making it so, the reformers attempted to set an example of Christian life for the laity in domestic as well as in spiritual matters. Nothing caught the new clergy up more personally in the Reformation's transition from theory to real life than the institution of marriage. In the new families they created these clergy found an emotional warmth and intimacy that had escaped them in the cloisters and parishes of the old church. Possessed of wives and soon with children, Protestant clerics became self-styled marriage counsellors and child psychologists, as freespoken and dogmatic in domestic matters as in divine. But marriage also put their religious thinking to a test celibate clergy had been able to avoid. Even a man as self-assured as Martin Luther discovered that life within a family had a way of rewriting theology.

When we think of Martin Luther, we understandably think first of the monk and theologian who wanted to reform the church, a great man of God seemingly obsessed with sin and the devil and lost in otherworldly pursuits. But the monk and the theologian who wrote the Ninety-five Theses and threw an inkwell at the devil was also a husband and the father of six children. Problems of marriage and family life preoccupied Luther even before he married in 1525. While still a celibate priest, he wrote extensively on the subject. He portrayed marriage as an institution as much in crisis as the church and no less in need of reform. He describes marriage as "universally in awful disrepute," with peddlers everywhere selling "pagan books that treat of nothing but the depravity of womankind and the unhappiness of the estate of marriage" - a reference to misogynist and anti-marriage sentiments popular among his contemporaries. Women and marriage were widely ridiculed in proverbs and jokes; the biblical stories of the downfall of Adam, Samson, and David at the hands of women had gained popularity; and the advocates of virginity and celibacy never missed an opportunity to remind the lovestricken of the sacrifices and suffering that marriage and parenthood entailed.

It may seem surprising to learn that Martin Luther was a leading defender of the dignity of women and the goodness of marriage. He is perhaps too well known for his famous jesting comments on the meaning of woman's anatomy. "Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips," he quipped one evening at the table; "therefore they ought to be domestic; their very physique is a sign from their Creator that he intended them to limit their activity to the home." Luther, however, also deserves to be known as the century's leading critic of Aristotle's depiction of women as botched males (Aristotle's theory assumed that a perfect generative act would always result in a male offspring). Luther also criticised the church fathers (Jerome, Cyprian, Augustine, and Gregory) for "never having written anything good about marriage."

Like the church fathers, the clergy of the Middle Ages were obsessed with chastity and sexual purity. Saint Augustine portrayed sexual intercourse in Paradise as occurring without lust and emotion, Adam and Eve calmly reflecting on God as their sexual organs chastely fulfilled the marital duty. Approximation of such self-control, to the point of suppressing human sexual desire in imitation of Christ, had inspired the monastic life. The clergy not only attempted to live up to such ascetic ideals in their own lives, they also wanted to model the private sexual lives of the laity on them.

Consider, for example, a vernacular catechism from 1494, which elaborates the third deadly sin (impurity) under the title: "How the Laity Sin in the Marital Duty." According to the catechism, the laity sin sexually in marriage by (1) unnatural acts and positions, contraception, and masturbation; (2) desiring sex with another while performing it with one's spouse; (3) desiring sex with another while not performing it with one's spouse; (4) refusing the marital duty without an honest reason, thereby forcing a spouse to enter an illicit relationship to satisfy unfulfilled sexual need; (5) having sex in forbidden seasons (periods of penance, particularly Lent, during menstruation and the final weeks of pregnancy, and when a mother is lactating); (6) continuing to have sex with a known adulterous spouse; and (7) having sex for the sheer joy of it rather than for the reasons God has commanded, namely, to escape the sin of concupiscence and to populate the earth.

Luther and the first generation of Protestant clerics rejected the patristic tradition of ascetic sexuality in both their theology and their personal lives. This rejection was as great a revolution in traditional church teaching and practice as their challenge of the church's dogmas on faith, works, and the sacraments. They literally transferred the accolades Christian tradition had since antiquity heaped on the religious in monasteries and nunneries to marriage and the home. When Saint Jerome, writing in the fourth century, compared virginity, widowhood, and marriage, he gave virginity a numerical value of one hundred, widowhood, sixty, and marriage, thirty. "Faith, not virginity, fills paradise," the Wittenberg pastor Johannes Bugenhagen retorted in the 1520’s. "Saint Jerome's unfortunate comment, 'Virginity fills heaven, marriage the earth,' must be corrected," agreed the Lutheran poet Erasmus Alberus; "let us rather say, Marriage fills heaven.' ".

The first generation of Protestant clerics did not advocate equal rights for women in all walks of life, and none passes the stern tests posed today by modern feminist scholars, who depict the Reformation as having done women more harm than good, despite, or perhaps because of, the reformers' very positive evaluation of marriage. Idealising women as wives and mothers, Protestants are accused of closing down wherever they could the contemporary institutions that allowed early modern women to have "an existence of their own in a more or less satisfying way" - namely, the cloister and the bordello. The claimed result: "an enormous impoverishment of previously provisioned women and the creation of a vast army of female beggars."

This harsh judgement is made from the perspective of the most egalitarian segment of twentieth-century society. When the domestic policies of Protestants are viewed less anachronistically against the religious culture and domestic practice of the Middle Ages, they are seen to address issues of great relevance to the well-being of sixteenth-century women and to have assisted the efforts then under way to reform the institution of marriage.

Luther and his followers regarded the cloister, with its glorification of virginity and celibacy, as the chief expression of the age's antifeminism and hostility to marriage. When Protestant towns and territories dissolved cloisters and nunneries, they did so in the sincere belief that they were freeing the women there from sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and domination by inferior and abusive male clergy and religious. Among the leaders of the Reformation, it was widely believed that in most cases women had been placed in cloisters against their will and without full understanding of the consequences. They also believed that nuns were more easily bullied by their superiors than monks, and had far greater difficulty breaking their vows and returning to the world when they chose to do so. The reformers had no concept whatsoever of the cloister as a special "woman's place," where women might gain a degree of freedom and authority denied them in the secular world, while at the same time escaping the drudgery of marriage, the domination of husbands, and the debilities of serial pregnancies and motherhood. Had such an argument been made to them, the reformers would surely have condemned it as an unnatural and unchristian attempt on the part of women to escape their God-given responsibilities in life. They would also surely have marvelled at the spectacle of modern feminist scholars identifying with the cloistered women of the Middle Ages, to the sixteenth-century Protestant mind, their age's most sexually repressed group.

Luther rejected the cloister altogether as a proper solution to the problem of unmarried daughters, especially the younger daughters of noblemen and wealthy burghers. He insisted that fathers at every social rank had a responsibility to make proper marriages for all of their children and to avoid the mismatch of the cloister. He actively encouraged fathers to remove their daughters from convents, and he tacitly approved the use of force to that end. In I S23, for example, he praised a Torgau burgher, Leonhard Koppe, who successfully plotted the escape of his daughter and eleven other nuns, among them Katherine von Bora, Luther's future wife, from the cloister at Nimbschen near Grimma. Koppe regularly delivered herring to the cloister and apparently smuggled the sisters out in empty herring barrels. Luther published a pamphlet account of the deed as an example for all parents with children in cloisters, comparing Koppe's freeing of the sisters with Moses' deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt. He admonished parents to consider the plight of women placed in cloisters while they were still "young, foolish, and inexperienced." The great majority, he believed, discovered at puberty that they could not suppress their sexual desire and need for male companionship. In light of such facts, only "unmerciful" parents and "blind and mad" clergy could permit girls to suffer and waste away in cloisters: "a woman is not created to be a virgin, but to conceive and bear children."

To document his charges against the cloister, Luther encouraged the publication of exposés by renegade nuns. One impressive example is Florentina of Ober Weimar, a noblewoman who had been placed in the cloister at age six. Discovering at fourteen that she lacked the aptitude for celibate vows, she so informed her superior, only thereafter to find herself forced to abide by the rules of the cloister and to endure ostracism, ridicule, imprisonment, and even thrashings whenever she again attempted to gain her release.

As far as Luther was concerned, opportunities for marriage abounded; the rapid marriage of numbers of former monks and nuns in the 1520’s was proof enough. Where the Reformation succeeded, new laws prohibited boys and girls from entering cloisters, and the majority of monks and nuns already there were either pensioned off or returned to their families, those among them wishing to marry receiving permission immediately to do so.

It was not the celibate ideal alone that Protestants believed threatening to the stability of contemporary marriage and family life. The marital legislation of the medieval church seemed to them equally menacing. Luther accused church law of encouraging immature and unhappy marriages by its recognition of so-called "secret" marriages. These were private unions entered into by youths of canonical age (at least twelve for girls and fourteen for boys) without the knowledge and consent of their parents and apart from any public witnesses. The medieval church sanctioned such unions grudgingly in an attempt to control premarital sex and to bring marriage, at its inception, under the moral authority of the church.

Luther also accused the medieval church of impeding mature marriages by defining numerous "impediments" to marriage within an exceedingly broad spectrum of biological, legal, and spiritual relationship. Traditionally the church had required a dispensation for a marriage to occur between couples related by blood or marriage as distantly as third cousins. Godparentage was treated as a "spiritual affinity" and prevented marriage between a godchild and a godparent and all of the siblings and children of the godparent. Adoption produced a similar impediment. Nor could a Christian marry a non-Christian (the impediment of "religious disparity"). Even defective eyesight and speech could prevent a valid marriage in medieval theology; a person who was blind and dumb had to obtain church dispensation to marry.

For Lutherans, the secret marriages of youth indicated a cavalier approach to the most serious of life's decisions and the most important of human institutions. "When the honeymoon is over," warned the Eisenach reformer Jacob Strauss, "and one has to contend with the body of a sick mate, then we discover how lasting is the fidelity of a marriage based on lust." Among both Lutherans and Zwinglians, new marriage laws required both parental consent and a public witnessing of the vows, normally in church, before a marriage could be deemed fully licit. As important as such measures were, they did not put an end to clandestine marriages. Confronted by youth in love who had sexually consummated their relationship and might even be expecting a child, Protestants found themselves recognising marriages undertaken without parental consent as readily as Catholics had done.

Although Luther opposed the private marriages of youth, he strongly defended the right of young people to marry whomever they pleased. Learning of parents who forced their children into unwanted marriages with unhappy consequences for all, he devoted a special tract to the subject in 1524. As the title indicates, he believed that marriage should be a family decision respecting the wishes of all family members, but especially of those most directly involved: Parents Should Neither Compel nor Hinder the Marriage of Their Children and Children Should Not Marry Without the Consent of Their Parents. He advised youth confronted with the "outrageous injustice" of a planned forced marriage to turn to their local magistrates for help when informal appeals through relatives, friends, or a sympathetic parent failed. Youth who found all such efforts frustrated were advised to flee to another land and there marry their chosen mate at will.

As for parents confronted with a marriage they could neither willingly accept nor easily prevent (or dissolve), Luther advised that they state their objections frankly, but permit the marriage to occur without their approval, thereby letting obstinate children learn by experience the wisdom of their parents. As a husband and a parent, Luther appreciated both the difficulty of separating young lovers and the futility of forcing two people to live together against their will. If, as he believed, men and women were supposed to find in marriage "the things they naturally desire, namely, sex and offspring, a life together, and mutual trust," then to force two people together (or apart) against their will threatened both the purpose of marriage and social order beyond it.

As for the church's many impediments to marriage, Luther condemned them as "only snares for taking money," and he derided those who imposed them as "merchants selling vulvas and genitals." He recognised as valid only those impediments of consanguinity and affinity set forth in Leviticus 18:6- 18. This position made it possible for Lutherans to accept such previously forbidden marriages as those between first cousins, step-relations, and the siblings of deceased spouses and fiancées, and to deny altogether impediments based on contrived spiritual and legal grounds such as godparentage and adoption. According to Luther, "one may take as (one's) spouse whomsoever (one) pleases, whether it be godparent, godchild, or the daughter or sister of a sponsor (i.e., a godparent)… and disregard those artificial, money-seeking impediments.' The politicians of the age were not as bold in domestic matters as the new theologians, and the laws and institutions of marriage did not in fact change as rapidly or as radically during the sixteenth century as the reformers had decreed they might in the 1520’s and 1530’s. The biblical impediments for the most part remained, and newly created marriage courts, which became predictably more conservative with age, rigidly supervised domestic morality. Still, it is a gross exaggeration to say that Luther removed the pope from the bedroom only to put the state there. Foundations were laid in Protestant lands for both a more realistic and a more charitable treatment of marriage. On the one hand, new laws made immature marriages more difficult to contract, while, on the other, mature and disciplined marriages became less vulnerable to arbitrary spiritual harassment. The domestic surveillance encouraged by the Reformation had the stability of marriage and family, not impossible religious ideals, at heart.

Luther liked to turn traditional criticisms of women and marriage back onto the clerical critics themselves. He once described marriage, for example, as the only institution in which a chaste life could be maintained, and he insisted that "one cannot be unmarried without sin," arguments that could only have baffled the defenders of celibacy. Nothing seemed to Luther to be a more natural and necessary part of life than marriage. "Marriage pervades the whole of nature," he disarmingly points out; "for all creatures are divided into male and female; even trees marry; likewise, budding plants; there is also marriage between rocks and stones." Living at a time in which most people married comparatively late (women in their early twenties, men in their mid- to late twenties), he praised the early marriages (at nineteen) and high fertility of the Israelites. He condemned women who shunned motherhood because children might diminish their leisure and pleasure. "Our saviour Christ did not despise motherhood," he reminded the advocates of the solitary life, "but took flesh from the womb of a woman."

Luther had a high regard for the ability of women to shape society by moulding its youth and civilising its men through the institution of marriage. He joined the moralists of his age in praising women as mothers, for filling the earth with life, and as wives, for taming the beast within their husbands. "A companionable woman brings joy to life," he told his table companions one evening; "women attend to and rear the young, administer the household, and are inclined to compassion; God has made them compassionate by nature so that by their example men may be moved to compassion also." Even when Luther seemed in jest to denigrate women, he could still bestow on them a high compliment. Once at table he declared, "Eloquence is not to be praised in women; it is more fitting that they stammer and babble." These unkind comments came after he had told a visiting Englishman (possibly the reformer Robert Barnes), who knew no German, that he should learn German from Luther's wife Katie because she was the more fluent, indeed, "the most eloquent speaker of the German language". On more than one public occasion, Luther described Katie as his "lord": "I am an inferior lord," he would say, "she the superior; I am Aaron, she is my Moses." He bore her outspoken criticism of his poor business instincts and misplaced charity with respect and good humour. Once he compared "household wrath," by which he meant a fight with his wife, with the wrath of God in politics, where war and death threaten, and in religion, where the soul and heaven are at stake, and drew the following conclusion: "If I can survive the wrath of the devil in my sinful conscience, I can withstand the anger of Katharine von Bora." He also acknowledged his respect for her abilities in his last will and testament. Ignoring the traditional German practice of appointing a male trustee to administer a deceased husband's estate on behalf of his widow and children, he directly designated her "heir to everything."

Katharine von Bora earned such respect from her husband, whom she surpassed in virtually all worldly matters. Modern feminist scholars who today praise the cloister as the ideal place for women in the Middle Ages may do so because the cloistered life seems at a distance to have been so much like the modern academic life of women-that is, a protected and privileged life, free from the cares of the real world, allowing educated women both power and the leisure to pursue their own thoughts. Katharine von Bora fled that life for one she believed held even greater opportunities for the women of her age. She became a model housewife and an accomplished businesswoman. To increase their income, she remodelled the old cloister in which she and Martin lived so that it would accommodate up to thirty students and guests. She also expanded the cloister garden and repaired the cloister brewery. She became locally famous as a herbalist, and her beer was so renowned that Luther once took samples to the electoral court. He dubbed her "the morning star of Wittenberg," as her day began at 4:00 A.M., much like that of the wife of a butcher or a merchant. As the Luthers' example indicates, Protestant women could work outside the home as readily as women in previous centuries, despite increasing restrictions in the sixteenth century on women's vocational opportunities as a result of growing inflation and new state bureaucracy.

Luther obviously meant it when he said, "there is no bond on earth so sweet nor any separation so bitter as that which occurs in a good marriage." His comments on marriage leave the impression of an experienced husband who had given the matter considerable thought. Take, for example, the following analysis: "In the beginning of a relationship love is glowing hot, it intoxicates and blinds us, and we rush forth and embrace one another." But once married, we tend to grow tired of one another, confirming the saying of Ovid: "We hate the things that are near us and we love those that are far away.

"A wife is easily taken, but to have abiding love, that is the challenge. One who finds it in his marriage should thank the Lord God for it. Therefore, approach marriage earnestly and ask God to give you a good, pious girl, with whom you can spend your life in mutual love. For sex [alone] establishes nothing in this regard; there must also be agreement in values and character."

Luther here expresses a point of view broadly shared by the moral authorities of his day, both Protestant and Catholic. Physical attraction may well play a role in the creation of a marriage, but it is no foundation for a lasting relationship. A mutual willingness to make sacrifices is what holds a marriage together over time. So when seeking a spouse, the most important question was always whether the object of one's desire was also a person worthy of respect and trust, that is, a person with companionable qualities and the ability to keep his or her word. According to Luther, both he and his wife to be had "begged God earnestly for grace and guidance" before they married. They had in fact long been associated in Wittenberg between 1523 and 1525. Their relationship had engendered much gossip, as Luther was a constant visitor at the home of Lucas Cranach, where Katharine, a renegade nun under Luther's supervision, lodged. Luther twice attempted unsuccessfully to arrange other marriages for her. According to Catholic pamphleteers, they "lived together" in Wittenberg before they married. Whatever the truth of this particular gossip, such practices were not uncommon among clergy at the time. Zwingli made public his secret marriage to a widow only a short time before the arrival of their child.

Because of the importance attached to companionship in marriage, the reformers tolerated bigamous attachments as a solution to loveless marriages, particularly among powerful rulers, whose protection they needed and whose reckless behaviour they could not curb anyway. They also endorsed for the first time in Western Christendom genuine divorce and remarriage. Although the reformers viewed marriage as a spiritual bond transcending all other human relationships, it did not in their opinion create a permanent state. A marriage could definitively end this side of eternity and a new one begin for separated spouses. In his earliest writings on such matters, Luther expressed "great wonder" that the church forbade people to remarry who were irreconcilably separated and living apart because of one partner's adultery. "Christ," he pointed out, "permits divorce for adultery and compels none to remain unmarried [thereafter]; and Saint Paul would rather have us [re]marry than burn [now with lust and later in hell]."

In the medieval church, divorce had meant only the separation of a couple from a common bed and table, not the dissolution of the marriage bond and the right to marry again. As long as both lived and the marriage was not annulled, a "divorced" couple remained man and wife in the eyes of the church and were so treated by law where the church prevailed. In practice, this situation meant that the turmoil of a failed marriage might never end for a couple.

Protestants, by contrast, generally permitted divorce and remarriage on five grounds: adultery, wilful abandonment, chronic impotence, life-threatening hostility, and wilful deceit (such as when a presumed virgin is discovered after marriage to have given birth previously to an illegitimate child or to be pregnant by another man). Most Protestant writers sympathised with the position of the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who declared no proper marriage to exist where affection was not regularly shared and all conversation had ceased.

Luther personally preferred secret bigamy to divorce and remarriage, when a marriage had irretrievably broken down. He sanctioned such an arrangement for women with impotent husbands as early as 1521. If a woman in such a situation could not take her case to the divorce court out of fear of notoriety, he advised that she enter with her husband's consent a secret marriage with his brother or another male mutually agreed upon, and raise any children of this second union as if they were those of the impotent husband. Luther preferred such an arrangement to outright divorce because he believed it ensured continuing companionship and support for each spouse (in this case, psychological for the husband and financial for the wife), while at the same time it prevented whoring and adultery on the part of the healthy spouse (in this case, the wife), who gained from it a regular sexual outlet.

Bigamy obviously required exceptional tolerance on the part of the incapacitated person, and Luther knew that such charity of spirit would not always be readily forthcoming. If the incapacitated spouse refused to enter into such an arrangement, and the sexual desires of the healthy spouse remained overpowering, he instructed the healthy spouse to marry another and flee to a land where they might live together as man and wife without being prosecuted for bigamy.

Protestant marriage courts did not permit divorce and remarriage to occur without first making every effort to reunite an estranged couple and revive the dead marriage. All concerned deemed reconciliation preferable to divorce in every case. Despite lip service to harsh biblical punishments, pastors actually discouraged extreme penalties for adultery, lest an estranged couple be driven even farther apart, as might happen when an adulterer was punished by exile or by fines that impoverished him. When a table companion once expressed to Luther the belief that adulterers should be summarily executed, Luther rebuked him with a local example of how harsh punishment had done more harm than good to a couple. A pious wife, who had borne her husband four children and had never been unfaithful, one day committed adultery. For the transgression, the enraged husband had her publicly flogged. Afterward, Luther, Pastor Bugenhagen, and Philipp Melanchthon tried to persuade the couple to reconcile. The husband was willing to take her back and let bygones be bygones, but the wife had been so humiliated by the flogging and the resulting scandal that she abandoned her husband and children and wandered away, never to be seen again. "Here," Luther comments, "one should have pursued reconciliation before punishment." Chronic and wilful public adultery, however, was treated harshly and without regret.

Both spiritually and socially, Lutheran theology held the community formed by a husband and a wife to be society's most fundamental. The marriage bond was too important to be allowed to stand when all conversation, affection, and respect between a husband and a wife had irretrievably broken down. And the same bond was also too important to allow a marriage to dissolve without a fight to save it. Protestants gained the right to divorce and remarry in the sixteenth century, but it remained a difficult one to exercise.

Luther prized fertility and seems to have been barely sensitive to the physically debilitating effects of multiple pregnancies on women. Overpopulation did not threaten his age, and both sexes then viewed childbearing and child rearing as womankind’s natural and divinely ordained vocation. Perceiving pregnant women to be both healthier and happier than barren women, Luther urged wives to be constantly pregnant: "Even if women bear themselves weary or ultimately bear themselves out," he declared while still a bachelor (1522), "this is the purpose for which they exist." As an ex-monk who discovered the joys of marriage and parenthood late in life, at age forty-two, when he was financially secure and internationally famous, he may be forgiven for scorning parents who did not view children as a blessing and for having so little appreciation for the economic burdens placed on less fortunate families by too many children." His role in domestic matters was always that of an advocate for the family against the defenders of virginity and celibacy. Believing that his age maligned marriage and parenthood, he exalted the family in all its dimensions and utterly without qualification.

His comments on children and his behaviour as a parent belie modern critics who associate Protestantism with negative feelings about children because of its teachings on original sin and the bondage of the will. Luther, who fondly referred to his new-born as "little heathens," praised infancy as the most perfect state on earth. "The life of the infant is the most blessed and best," he declared once at table. "Infants have no temporal cares... They do not… perceive the terror of death and hell, but know only pure thoughts and happy speculations." "(Whereas) we old fools… argue over the Word of God, infants believe it in pure faith without argument." Observing his own children at play, arguing and fighting with one another one minute but reconciled and embracing the next, he comments, "How pleased God must be with the life and play of children; all of their sins against one another are forgiven sins."

Luther looked on children less than six years old as being especially susceptible to moral education and religious virtue, something he attributed to the immaturity of their reasoning powers. By such a point of view he did not intend to disparage reason so much as to recognise that its advancement brought with it the entrenchment of self-will and the cunning to plot against God. Lutherans steeped their children in catechetical and moral instruction, apparently sceptical of the possibility of Significantly shaping moral character after a child had reached puberty. By age fourteen - in the moral life of a person, beginning adulthood - the twig, for good or ill, was bent as the tree would forevermore grow.