When Martin Luther heard that the monks joining in his reformation had begun getting married, he rejected the idea for himself: “Good heavens! They won’t give me a wife!” But time would prove otherwise. In 1523, Katherine von Bora and eleven (some say eight) other nuns wanted to escape their cloister, and they wrote to Luther, whose radical new ideas had filtered into their convent. Though liberating nuns was a capital offense, Luther devised an ingenious plan with Leonhard Koppe, who regularly delivered herring to the cloister. On Koppe’s next delivery, twelve nuns were smuggled out—inside empty herring barrels. As a man in Wittenberg put it, “A wagon load of vestal virgins has just come to town, all more eager for marriage than for life.” Luther found husbands for most, but he struggled to find a suitable match for Katherine, a feisty redhead in her mid-20s, far beyond the usual age for marriage. He proposed ...

FREE E-Newsletter Sign up for the ChristianHistory.net e-mail newsletter. Discover more about your Christian heritage with this weekly e-newsletter that features key people, topics, and events from the history of Christianity.      RSS Feed   RSS Help