The Reformation.
1.--Luther.
The healthy sensuality of the middle ages found its classic exponent
in Luther. We are here not so much concerned with the religious
reformer, but with Luther, the man. In regard to all human relations,
Luther’s strong, unsophisticated nature clearly manifested itself,
and caused him to express freely and without reserve his desire for
love and enjoyment. His position as a former Roman clergyman had
opened his eyes and had taught him from experience how contrary to
all the laws of nature were the lives of monks and nuns. Therefore
he roundly condemned the celibacy of priests and monks. Luther
says: “Unless specially endowed by a rare, divine grace, a woman
can no more dispense with a man, than she can dispense with food,
drink, sleep and other natural needs. In the same way a man cannot
do without a woman. The cause is that the desire to propagate the
race is as deeply implanted by nature as the desire for food and
drink. Therefore God has given unto the human body limbs, veins,
circulation and all that serves this end. He who opposes this, and
will not let nature take her course, what does he do but seek to
prevent nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from
moistening, human beings from eating, drinking and sleeping?” In his
sermon on marriage, he says: “Just as it is not within my power not
to be a man, so it is not in thy power to do without a man, for it
is not free will or advice but a natural necessity that every man
must have a woman and that every woman must have a man.” But Luther
does not only express himself so strongly in favor of marriage and
the necessity of sexual relations, he also expresses himself as
opposed to it that the church and marriage should have anything in
common. He says in regard to this: “Know that marriage is something
extrinsic as any other worldly action. As I may eat, drink, sleep,
walk, ride and deal with any heathen, Jew, Turk or heretic, ~so to
one of these I may also become and remain married. Do not observe
the laws of fools that forbid such marriages.~... Heathens are men
and women, well and wisely created by God, just as well as St. Peter
and St. Paul and St. Luke, not to speak of any false and wanton
Christian.” Luther furthermore, like other reformers, opposed all
restrictions to marriage, and favored permitting divorcees to marry,
which was opposed by the church. He says: “in regard to matters of
marriage and divorce among us I say, ~let the jurists dispose of
them, and let them be subject to worldly rule, since matrimony is a
worldly, extrinsic thing~.” In accordance with this view, it was not
until the end of the seventeenth century that a religious ceremony
was considered essential to a legal marriage among Protestants. Until
then the so called conscience marriage sufficed, that is, a marriage
founded upon the mutual agreement to regard one another as husband and
wife and to live in matrimonial relations with one another. According
to German law such marriages were legal. Luther even went so far as
to adjudge to the unsatisfied party in a marriage contract--even if
the party were the woman--the right to seek satisfaction outside
of marriage, “in order to do justice to nature that can not be
resisted.”[38] In this matter Luther sets forth opinions that would
rouse many of our present day respectable men and women, who always
point to Luther in their pious zeal, to vehement indignation. In
his treatise “on married life,” II, 146, Jena 1522, he says: “if a
healthy woman is joined in wedlock to an impotent man and could not
nor would for her honor’s sake openly choose another, she should
speak to her husband thus: See, my dear husband, thou hast deceived
me and my young body and endangered my honor and salvation, before
God there is no honor between us. Suffer that I maintain a secret
marriage with thy brother or closest friend while thou remainest my
husband in name. That thy property may not fall heir to strangers;
willingly be deceived by me as you have unwillingly deceived me.” It
should be the husband’s duty, Luther goes on to say, to consent to
such arrangement. “If he will not she has the right to abandon him
and go into another country and marry another man. In the same way
if a woman will not perform her conjugal duty, the man has the right
to seek another woman; only he should first tell his wife.”[39] We
see, the opinions set forth by the great reformer are very radical
and even immoral, when viewed in the light of our age, abounding
with prudery and hypocrisy. But Luther only expressed the popular
conceptions of his age. The following is told by Jacob Grimm: “If
a man cannot satisfy his wedded wife, let him take her gently upon
his back and carry her to his neighbors. There let him set her down
softly, without anger or rudeness but upon mutual agreement, and
let him appeal to his neighbors to help his wife in her need. If
they will not or can not, then let him send her to the nearest fair.
There shall she appear, becomingly dressed and adorned, wearing a
gold embroidered veil as a token that she may be wooed. If after
all she returns from the fair still unsatisfied, then may the devil
help her!”
The peasant of the middle age primarily sought marriage for the
purpose of having heirs, and if he was unable to beget them himself,
being a practical man, he left this pleasure to another without
having particular moral scruples about it. The main object was to
attain his purpose. We repeat: Man does not control his property,
he is controlled by it.
The above quotations from the writings and sermons of Luther are of
special importance because the views in regard to marriage expressed
in them are diametrically opposed to those maintained by the church
to-day. Luther and the other reformers went still further in matters
pertaining to marriage but, it must be admitted, for opportunistic
reasons, in order to please such sovereigns whose lasting support
and good will they sought to win and to maintain. The landgrave of
Hessia, Philip I, who was in sympathy with the reformation, had a
legal wife, but fell in love with another woman who refused to yield
to his entreaties unless he would marry her. It was a delicate
case. To become divorced from his wife without good and sufficient
reason would imply a great scandal; to be married to two women
simultaneously was a shocking occurrence with a Christian sovereign of
the newer era, bound to create a still greater scandal. Nevertheless
amorous Philip chose the latter alternative. It only was necessary
to determine that this step was not in opposition to the teachings
of the Bible, and to obtain the consent of the reformers, especially
Luther and Melanchton. The landgrave then opened negotiations with
Butzer, who consented to the plan and promised to win Luther and
Melanchton. Butzer explained his view by pointing out that to have
several wives simultaneously was not in conflict with the gospel,
since Paul, who had mentioned many who shall not inherit the kingdom
of God, had said nothing about those who have two wives. Paul had
decreed that a bishop and his servants should not have more than one
wife. If it had been necessary that no man should have more than one
wife, he would have stated this and would have forbidden polygamy.
Luther and Melanchton declared themselves in accordance with these
views and consented to the double marriage, after the landgrave’s
wife had also given her consent under the condition “that he should
perform his conjugal duty toward her even more than heretofore.”[40]
Luther had been previously troubled by the question whether bigamy
was permissible when asked to give his consent to the double marriage
of Henry VIII of England. That can be seen from a letter which he
wrote to the Saxon chancellor Brink in January 1524. In this letter
he wrote that on principle he, Luther, could not object to bigamy
since it was not in conflict with the Holy Scripture,[41] but that
he considered it offensive when occurring among Christians, for
there were some things from which Christians should refrain even
if they were not forbidden. After the marriage of the landgrave,
which actually took place during March 1540, he wrote (April 10) in
reply to a letter of appreciation from him: “I am glad that Your
Grace is pleased by the advice we have given; but we should prefer
to have secrecy maintained. Otherwise the coarse peasants, seeking
to follow the example set by the landgrave, might present the same
or even better causes, which would give us no end of trouble.”
Melanchton probably had fewer scruples in giving his consent to the
double marriage of the landgrave, for he had previously written to
Henry VIII, that every sovereign was entitled to introduce polygamy
in his realm. But the double marriage of the landgrave caused so much
unpleasant notoriety in his country, that in 1541 he had a pamphlet
distributed in which polygamy was defended on the ground that it was
not in opposition to the Holy Scripture. But conceptions had been
greatly modified since the ninth or twelfth century when polygamy
was accepted without averse criticism. The double marriage of the
landgrave of Hessia was however not the only one that gave offense
to wide circles. Such princely double marriages were repeated both
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as will be shown.
When Luther declared the satisfaction of sensual desire to be a law
of nature, he only expressed what his contemporaries thought and what
the men claimed as their privilege. By the reformation, which did
away with the celibacy of the clergy and abolished the monasteries
in the Protestant countries, he gave to hundreds of thousands of
men and women the possibility to seek legitimate satisfaction of
their natural desires. Hundreds of thousands of others, of course,
remained excluded from this possibility by the existing forms of
property and the laws founded upon them.
The reformation was the protest of the rising bourgeoisie against
the constraint of feudal conditions in church, state and society.
This rising bourgeoisie struggled for liberation from the narrow
bonds of the guild, the court and the papal anathema; it strove for
centralization of the powers of the state, simplification of the
extravagant church affairs, and the abolition of the numerous abodes
of idle persons, the monasteries.
Luther represented these endeavors of the bourgeoisie upon the
religious field. When he stood for the freedom of marriage, it was
the bourgeois marriage that was realized only in our day by the civil
marriage laws, and the freedom of migration and freedom of choice
in trade and domicile. We will see to what extent the position of
woman was modified by these changes. During the reformation this
change of development had not yet been reached. While on the one
hand the reformation made marriage possible for many people, on the
other hand free sexual intercourse was subjected to the most bitter
persecution. While the Catholic clergy had maintained a certain
tolerance toward sexual excess, the Protestant clergy, having been
provided for itself, declaimed against it with redoubled zeal.
War was waged against the public brothels that were declared to
be the devil’s dens. Prostitutes were persecuted as daughters of
Satan, and every woman who had “fallen” was considered a paragon of
wickedness and was subjected to relentless persecution. The merry,
life loving townsman of the middle ages became a bigoted, austere,
sombre philistine, who lived miserly that his later day bourgeois
descendants might live all the more extravagantly. The honorable
citizen with his stiff cravat, his narrow intellectual horizon, his
severe but hypocritical morality, became the prototype of society.
Legitimate wives who had not favored the sensuality tolerated by
the Catholicism of the middle ages, were generally better pleased
by the Puritan spirit of Protestantism. But other causes that had
an unfavorable influence on conditions in Germany generally, also
influenced the position of women unfavorably.
[38] Dr. Carl Hagen--Germany’s Literary and Religious Conditions
during the Reformation.
[39] Dr. Carl Hagen.
[40] John Janssen--History of the German People.
[41] This is true and can be explained from the fact that the Bible had
its origin at a time when polygamy prevailed both among the Eastern
and Western people; but in the sixteenth century it nevertheless
was in direct opposition to custom.
2.--Results of the Reformation.--The Thirty Years’ War.
Transformations in the conditions of production, exchange and finance,
that were brought about especially by the discovery of America, and
the discovery of the passage to India, resulted in a great social
reaction for Germany. Germany ceased to be the center of European
commerce. The German trades and manufactures declined. At the same
time the religious reformation had destroyed the political unity of
the nation. Under the cloak of the reformation, the German princes
sought to emancipate themselves from imperial rule. On the other
hand, these princes oppressed the nobility and favored the cities
to serve their own ends. Some of the cities voluntarily placed
themselves under the rule of the princes, driven to this step by
conditions that were steadily growing worse. The bourgeoisie upon
seeing their income threatened, tried to make the restrictions that
were intended to guard them against undesirable competition more and
more rigorous, and the princes willingly conceded their demands. The
ossification of conditions increased, but the general impoverishment
increased likewise.
Another result of the reformation were the religious struggles and
persecutions--used by the princes to serve their own political and
economic ends--that raged in Germany with some interruptions for
over a century, and finally ended with its complete exhaustion at
the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Germany had become a vast field of
corpses and ruins. Entire countries and provinces had been devastated,
hundreds of cities and thousands of villages partly or completely
destroyed, and many of them had been wiped from the surface of the
earth forever. In many places the population had been reduced to a
third, a fourth, a fifth, even an eighth or a tenth of its original
number. Such was the case in Nuremberg, and in the entire Franconian
province. In this utmost need, in order to increase the population
in the depopulated towns and villages, the unusual measure was
occasionally resorted to of permitting one man to have two wives. Men
had been decimated by the wars, but there was a superabundance of
women. On the 14th of February 1650, the Franconian district council
at Nuremberg decreed that “men under 60 should not be admitted into
monasteries”; it furthermore decreed that “those clergymen who were
not members of an order should become married.” Moreover, “every
man should be permitted to wed two wives, but the men should be
frequently reminded and exhorted from the pulpits to employ good
judgment and discretion, that a married man who ventured to maintain
two wives should not only provide well for both of them, but should
also endeavor to avoid ill feeling between them.” So even the pulpits
were employed to make propaganda for the double marriage and to lay
down rules of conduct for the men.
Commerce and industry almost came to a standstill during this long
period; in many instances they were almost completely destroyed and
picked up but very gradually. A large portion of the population had
become demoralized and brutalized and disaccustomed to all regular
work. During the wars, troops of mercenary soldiers had crossed
Germany from one end to the other, plundering, destroying, ravishing
and murdering, a terror alike to friend and foe. After the wars
countless numbers of beggars, robbers and vagabonds maintained the
population in constant terror and made commerce and all traffic
difficult or impossible. To the female sex especially it was a time
of great suffering. In this period of dissoluteness the contempt
of woman had increased to the utmost, and the general condition of
unemployment weighed most heavily upon her shoulders. Like the male
vagabonds, thousands of women populated the highways and forests
and filled the alms-houses and prisons. All these sufferings were
still increased by the forcible expulsion of numerous peasant
families by the greedy nobility. Since the reformation the nobility
had become more and more subjected to princely rule, and by holding
court and military positions their dependence on the princes had
constantly increased. Now they tried to reimburse themselves for
the losses sustained through the princes by robbing the peasants.
To the princes, on the other hand, the reformation offered the
desired excuse to acquire the property of the church, which they
proceeded to do on a large scale. Prince August of Saxony, for
instance, had, at the end of the sixteenth century, acquired no
less than 300 ecclesiastical estates.[42] His brothers and cousins,
the other Protestant sovereigns, above all those of the House of
Hohenzollern, did likewise. The nobility followed their example by
appropriating the remaining communal property, and by driving both
free peasants and serfs from hearth and home and taking possession of
their estates. The unsuccessful peasant revolts during the sixteenth
century gave them the desired pretext for such action, and after the
attempt had once succeeded, new pretexts were constantly found to
continue this forcible method. Various schemes and distortions of
justice were resorted to, made easy by the Roman law which had been
established in Germany in the meantime, to increase the property of
the nobility by forcing the peasants to sell theirs at lowest prices,
or by simply expropriating them. Entire villages and the farms of
entire districts were usurped in this manner. To quote just a few
examples: Of 12,543 knightly peasant estates which still existed
in the province of Mecklenburg during the Thirty Years’ War, only
1,213 remained in the year 1848. In the province of Pomerania 12,000
farms were abandoned since 1628. The transformations in the methods
of farming that took place during the seventeenth century gave a
further impulse to the nobility to expropriate the peasants and to
transform the last remnants of communal property into their private
estates. The rotation of crops had been introduced, which provided
for changes in the cultivation of the soil in definite periods of
time. Tilled land was occasionally transformed into pasture which
favored cattle-breeding and made it possible to diminish the number
of workers.
In the cities conditions were not much better than in the country.
Formerly women had been permitted to acquire the title of
master-workman and to employ journeymen and apprentices without any
opposition from the male craftsmen. They were even compelled to join
the guilds to force them to meet the same conditions of competition.
So there were independent women workers among the linen-weavers, the
cloth-weavers, the carpet-weavers and tailors. There were female
gold-smiths, girdle-makers, harness-makers, etc. We find women employed
as furriers in Frankfort and the Silesian cities; as bakers in the
cities along the Rhine; as girdle-makers and embroiders of coats
of arms in Cologne and Strassburg; as harness-makers in Bremen; as
cloth-shearers in Frankfort as tanners in Nuremberg; as gold-smiths
in Cologne.[43] But as the circumstances of the craftsmen grew more
and more unfavorable, a sentiment of ill will against the female
competitors arose. In France, women were excluded from the trades
at the close of the fourteenth century; in Germany, not until the
close of the seventeenth century. At first they were forbidden to
become master-workmen--with the exception of widows--later on they
were also excluded from becoming assistants. Protestantism, by
abolishing the ostentatious Catholic cult, had seriously injured or
entirely destroyed a number of artistic crafts, and these were the
very crafts in which many women had been employed. The confiscation
and secularization of church property resulted in a decline of
charitable work, and widows and orphans were the main sufferers.
The general economic decline that manifested itself during the
sixteenth century, as a result of all the enumerated causes, and
lasted through the seventeenth century, caused the marriage laws
to become more and more severe. Journeymen and people employed in
menial service (men and maid servants) were prohibited entirely
from marrying, unless they could prove that there was no danger of
their future families becoming a burden to the community in which
they lived. Marriages contracted in opposition to the legal premises
were punished frequently severely, sometimes barbarously. According
to Bavarian law, for instance, the penalties were imprisonment and
public flogging. Illegal marriages, that became more frequent as
the marriage laws became more severe, were subjected to especially
violent persecution. All minds were ruled by the prevailing fear of
over-population, and to diminish the numbers of beggars and vagabonds,
the various rulers enacted one law upon another, and each was more
severe than the preceding one.
[42] John Janssen--History of the German People.
[43] Dr. Carl Buecher--The Woman Question in the Middle Age.