ABSTRACT
During the 1528 visitation of Electoral Saxony, the Lucka city council informed the visitors that their preacher Michael Kramer had “three living wives.”1 Pressed by the visitors, Kramer told a complex tale of his troubled conscience, his marital misadventures, and the obstacles he faced as a newly married cleric in a region bordering between evangelical and Catholic control in the 1520s. After his first marriage, subsequent arrest by the Bishop of Naumburg, and dramatic escape from episcopal custody in 1523, Kramer’s situation became even more difficult and absurd in 1524 when his first and then his second wife abandoned him. In 1525, Martin Luther advised Kramer to consider his previous wives spiritually “dead,” and to remarry if he could not live a celibate life.2 Concern about Kramer’s “many wives” followed him through several parishes. The evangelical visitors found themselves balancing their obligation to enforce moral conduct among the clergy, Luther’s teachings on marriage, local concerns about bigamy, and territorial attempts at regulation of marriage in deciding this case.
