Someone sticks up for a university student accused of heresy. This starts the public career of one of the most assertive, formidable voices of the early Protestant Reformation, a voice that would probably be better remembered if not for the fact that they were a woman.
Sources
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2003).
Mark, Joshua J. “Argula von Grumbach’s To the University of Ingolstadt.” World History Encyclopedia. 23 March 2022. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1971/argula-von-grumbachs-to-the-university-of-ingolsta/
Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
Transcript
In the year 1523, an 18-year-old student at the University of Ingolstadt named Arsacius Seehofer was accused of having Lutheran views and harboring heretical pamphlets. Seehofer was expelled and imprisoned and was nearly condemned to be burned at the stake, if not for the intervention of his powerful father who pulled strings to get his case transferred to the secular courts. In tears, Seehofer made a public renunciation.
However, Seehofer’s father wasn’t his only advocate. In September of 1523, a noblewoman, Argula von Stauff von Grumbach, wrote a letter demanding a meeting with the rector and governing council of the university. In the letter she declared rather imperiously, “How in God’s name can you and your university expect to prevail, when you deploy such foolish violence against the word of God… I am compelled as a Christian to write to you.” A genuine sympathy for Seehofer also comes through in the words: “You have forgotten one thing: that he is only eighteen years old, and still a child. Others won’t forget.” She did not hesitate to take no aim at the faculty and administrators of the University of Ingolstadt themselves: “Are you not ashamed that Seehofer had to deny all the writings of Martin, who put the New Testament into German, simply following the text? That means that the holy Gospel and the Epistles and the story of the Apostles and so on are all dismissed by you as heresy. It seems there is no hope of a proper discussion with you.” Nor did she shy away from the fact she was writing to them as a woman: “What I have written you is no woman’s chit-chat, but the word of God; and I wrote as a member of the Christian Church, against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.” Her letter was a tour de force of theological argument, drawing on 80 quotations from Scripture.
Her letter did not sway the authorities although eventually Seehoffer was released and continued his academic career, later becoming a professor himself. In another sense, though, Stauff’s letter was a success. She had a copy of it published and it appeared in the stalls of booksellers, becoming an instant bestseller that went through 14 editions in only two months. In her own time her name became as well-known as those of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, or Jean Calvin. Yet, today she’s mostly known only to scholars and people with a vested interest in the history of Protestantism, at least in the anglophile world. Few of her prolific writings have been translated into English to this day. And yet, she was a celebrated and decisive advocate for the Protestant Reformation from the beginning. The historian Kirsi Sjirnaasserts, “Had she been a man, the past centuries would have recognized her as one of the important personalities of the German Reformation.”
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To use her full name, Argula von Stauff von Grumbach was born near the top of the pyramid. She was born into the Stauff aristocratic clan of Bavaria, who were prestigious in their own right but they also claimed to be related to the famous and infamous Hohenstauffen dynasty of medieval Holy Roman Emperors. Grumbach would sometimes sign her name in a way that would call attention to her birth name rather than her marital surname of Grumbach. She was well aware of how much political and social capital her name got her, and she was going to use it.
Most historians’ guesstimates hold that she was born sometime around 1492. Despite her family’s social weight, they represented the relatively poor branch of the family since her father Bernhardt lost much of his inheritance and lands in a legal dispute with his brother. At least, her father was entrusted with a governorship by the Duke of Bavaria which brought with it a generous income. Although Grumbach claimed she never learned Latin, her education was apparently up to par, and her father provided her with a German translation of some of the books of the Bible along with various theological tomes. Like many girls from prominent aristocratic households, she had to serve time as a lady-in-waiting for an even more prestigious family, in her case Kunigunde of Austria, sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and the Duke of Bavaria’s mother. At the Bavarian court, Grumbach happened to get to know Martin Luther’s former confessor, Johann von Staupitz. Although Staupitz remained a respectable Catholic until his death, it was probably through Staupitz that Grumbach became familiar with Luther and started becoming interested in his ideas.
It’s tempting to speculate that tragedy sharpened the appeal of Lutheranism in Grumbach’s eyes. Her mother and father died within a little over a week of each other, victims of an outbreak of the plague. She was married off to a nobleman and administrator from northern Bavaria, Friedrich von Grumbach. We know very little about the marriage, but it was almost certainly not a happy one, since Friedrich was always a staunch Catholic and was poorly educated compared to his wife. A reference in a letter she wrote to a cousin gives the hint that she felt, in her own words, persecuted by her husband. Even so, Grumbach did her duty as a noblewoman and had four children. Nor was her husband able to stop her. She struck up correspondences with not only early supporters of Luther like Andreas Osiander, who was even allowed to tutor her children, but with Luther himself. From her contacts, Grumbach received recommendations for early Protestant writings. By 1523, she declared that she had read everything Luther had ever written in German.
The Arsacius Seehofer scandal was her debut into the growing conflict between traditional Catholics and the reformers who would become known as Protestants. Her letter never received a response from its intended readers. Indeed, a faculty member at the University of Ingolstadt, Professor Hauer, gave a ser,on that were clearly aimed right at Grumbach, calling her an “arrogant fool”, “shameless whore”, and “heretical bitch.” The Ingolstadt faculty wrote to the Duke of Bavaria, urging him to outlaw any further publications of her letters and calling upon him to, in their words, “tame the hag.” Despite the ammunition her gender gave her enemies, though, her writings did strike a chord among sympathizers. Not only did published copies of her letter enter wide circulation around Germany, further letters she wrote urging tolerance of Lutherans to the Duke of Saxony and the Count Palatine of Simmern were somehow copied and published without her permission. Grumbach herself was very well aware of the particular rage her opponents had for her as a woman. In a letter she wrote to the city council of Ingolstadt, she remarked, “I hear that some are so angry with me that they do not know how best to speed my passage from life into death. But I know for sure that they cannot harm me unless the power to do so has been given them by God. He will keep me safe, for His name’s sake…I would dearly like to know what they have to gain if they were to murder me right now.”
Despite the threats from her husband and the wider world, Grumbach continued to publicly identify with the Lutheran cause. While Luther did praise her bravery and happily asked her for advice on how to wean a baby—since he and his wife Katarina had their first child—he did not cite her writings in any of his endless theological disputes with his enemies. Stjernasuggests that Grumbach’s outspokenness on religious matters made even Luther uncomfortable.
On the contrary, Grumbach did not think she was all that unique. Her writings mention a “school of women” that she thought held similar criticisms of the Church’s persecution of so-called heretics and how it pressured the German princes into allowing such oppression to take place. She knew the First Epistle to Timothy in the New Testament attributed to Saint Paul stated that women should be silent in church. Yet, Grumbach argued that Christian women had an obligation to speak up when men failed to do so, and that there was a “school of women” who will proclaim the truth with the full backing of Scripture. More radically, Grumbach’s letters constantly assumed or asserted her own right to read the Bible for herself and form her own interpretations and conclusions…not unlike the subject of another of our episodes, Marguerite of Navarre.
In her own life, she went further and made her own views known. She made efforts to bring prominent reformers together to debate theological issues, lobbied reformers and princes to dedicate more effort to social problems like poverty, and urged the German princes and city councils to do more to protect reformers from persecution. She even personally attended the diets at the cities of Nuremberg and Regensburg in 1523 and 1524, where political matters related to the Lutherans and their persecution were hotly debated. However, she was disappointed by the experience, complaining in one letter that some of the reformers spent more time getting drunk than convincing the German princes to do more to back their cause.
After the diets, by 1524 Grumbach for whatever reason started to step away from the public spotlight. Her last act was publishing a poem firing back at a satirical poem mocking her by, among other things, telling her to go back to weaving and suggesting she was sleeping with Luther. After that, Grumbach rarely made a public appearance until 1530 when she made an appearance at the Diet of Augsburg and met with Luther himself at the Bavarian city of Coburg. After that, she slipped back into obscurity, although a few accounts claim that she continued advocating for Protestantism, especially by funding the establishment of new churches and even preaching to crowds of people herself. Sometime in or around 1530, her husband died and she soon found a new husband, a Protestant man, Count Poppo von Schlick. This marriage does not seem to have been terribly happy either despite their shared religious values. The couple may have even informally separated not long after her marriage. In any case, he died only several years afterward. Throughout her life Grumbach was overshadowed by death; she had also outlived three of her four children.
The year of her own death is not clear. She may have lived well into the 1560s. If a letter written by the Duke of Bavaria is any indication, she may have kept up as a Protestant agitator to the very end, distributing banned books and even officiating at funerals. If this woman being referenced is her, then she was imprisoned but quickly released due to her old age. One source vaguely suggests she ended up becoming a martyr, but there is no concrete evidence she was ever killed for her beliefs, and it’s quite possible she was only remembered as a martyr because she was a woman at the mercy of a Catholic husband.
Her appearance in the drama of the Protestant Reformation was dramatic but short-lived. This made it all the easier for her to be forgotten, in spite of her involving herself in one of the first public controversies of the Reformation, her letter to the University of Ingolstadt representing one of the first popular pieces of Protestant writing outside the works of Luther, and her advocacy for the German princes to defend the Reformation. Perhaps, though, as her reactions to the diets she attended suggest, in her own life Grumbach herself chose obscurity, disappointed by the men whose cause she tried to defend.
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