In , Luther marries Katharina von Bora, a former nun. But that was only one of his actions that allowed the clergymen to reconstitute a relation to women β albeit an ambiguous one. Martin Luther liked and respected women. Luther had at least three sisters, but we know almost nothing about them. He must have witnessed their upbringing in accord with the gendering principles prevailing in his day. He interacted regularly with those who were at home when he wasβthough as a male child on whom the rise of the family depended, he was early sent away to school.
We do not know of his interaction with women while he attended and took two arts degrees at the University of Erfurt. He called upon a woman, St. Anne, when he was frightened in a summer storm and altered the direction of his life.
Luther appears not to have absorbed the more hateful forms of clerical misogyny that intended to aid monks and priests in their fleshly renunciations. He was capable of committed intimacy with his wife Katharina von Bora and of caring deeply for his daughters Elisabeth, Magdalena, and Margarete as well as his sons Hans, Martin, and Paul. Women, too, were frequent guests at the Luther tableβthough they were mainly relatives and the wives of colleagues and friends, and certainly not intellectuals and authors in their own right.
Adam, too, was culpable, for with his superior rationality he knew that his beloved wife had transgressed. Out of love for her, he accepted the proffered apple and became complicit. Original sin now infected the first pair and all their descendants, and their embodiment of the image of God was henceforward distorted.
The Wittenberg Reformer taught that God nonetheless had mercy on his beloved creatures, inflicting a lesser punishment on Eve than on Adam. Not only would she bear children with worry and pain, but her subjection to her husband now deepened. She was to obey her spouse in all matters except orders that were manifestly opposed to the divine will.
