ABSTRACT

Women who married priests against local mandates, regardless of family connections or economic circumstances, shared the fate of their husbands, becoming truly the "partner in calamities" that Friedrich Myconius named Katharina von Bora for Martin Luther. In addition, reformers envisioned the pastor's wife assuming a significant spiritual function by assisting her husband in reforming their congregation and by serving as a female moral model to the community. During the 1520s and 1530s, however, when the evangelical movement was still in flux, most of the first marriages were to marginalized women such as concubines, nuns, or widows, and many pastors married women who were of much lower social status or reputation than they publicly advocated. Many women who married former priests and monks during the early Reformation had been their concubines, housekeepers, maids, and cooks. Throughout the mid-1520s, evangelical pastors, theologians, and polemicists emphasized clerical sexual misconduct and its resulting civic disorder as a justification for reform.