7. Luther and His Catholic Readers: the Question of the Nuns

Abstract

Catholic polemicists answered the Lutheran innovation of clerical marriage and especially the marriage of nuns with harsh criticism. Our contention is that, in the process of these ab hominem attacks against Luther and his wife, Katherina von Bora, they elaborated a literary type that they used to keep condemning Luther and the runaway nuns during the whole Early Modern period. The topos thus established depicts their marriage as the depraved union of two equally depraved and incestuous ex-members of the monastic orders. Looking at the recurrence of these evocations in French discourses in the 16^th Century, we shall question the reality of the theoretical innovation hidden behind the palimpsest of insults. Why were the Catholics’ fears focused so much on nuns? And did Luther even mean to target specifically nuns and organise the break-down of convents? Although our aim is not to try to assess the positive and negative aspects of this change of paradigm on women, confronting the Catholic interpretations of Luther with his original texts on nuns shall give us, through the small window of the discourses on a specific group—religious women—an outline of what the Reformation actually changed for them.