She is Lost: Premodern Women and the Power of the Pedestal

In february 1546 Wittenberg was in mourning; Martin Luther, the city’s most (in)famous resident and Europe’s premier religious insurgent, was dead. Almost immediately, questions were being asked about the nature of his departing, and so the rumour mills began to turn. Some said that he had committed suicide by hanging, while others told of him gorging himself to death on food and drink, but this was not the first time that false reports of Luther’s death had circulated in Europe. Almost a decade earlier, in 1537, a ‘very common rumour’ was ‘received with joy by [Italian] papists, to the effect that Martin Luther was dead and buried’.¹ On that occasion, knowing that there was fun to be had with gossip, the accidental revolutionary turned hearsay to his advantage and rose again. ‘Never before in my life have I written anything from my grave!’, he declared, snatching from his opponents their triumph and relief.² But Luther’s demise in 1546 was no dress rehearsal, and those nearest to him saw no humour in the tales doing the rounds. Instead, they considered these dangerously misleading, and so a response was mounted. Justus Jonas, Michael Coelius, and John Aurifaber, who had all been present at Luther’s death, wrote ‘vom Christlichen abschied aus diesem tödlichen leben des Ehrwirdigen Herrn D. Martini Lutheri’ (‘concerning the Christian departure from this mortal life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther’).³ Their narrative was produced swiftly – it was printed only a month or so after Luther’s passing – and therein was established the fact that it was not just Luther’s life that had been a pattern of virtue; so too was his death.

Luther and his disciples knew that dying was an art that was worth doing well, because by following certain rules individuals could be reasonably confident, or at the very least hopeful, of a rapturous reception in heaven. According to the text broadcast by his friends, Luther thought that ‘if a man contemplates God’s word with sincerity, from his heart, believes in Him and falls asleep with this thought, or dies … then he must surely pass on with a certainty in the Word he believed and valued’. So we see that in Luther’s case, ars moriendi entailed dying with one’s focus squarely on God (‘O mein Himlischer vater’), and with scripture in one’s heart and on one’s tongue. In the specific example, the words Luther was supposed to have uttered just prior to giving up the ghost were ‘In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum, Redemisti me Domine Deus veritatis’ (‘Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou has redeemed me, O Lord God of truth’), and this act of devotion – indeed, act of ventriloquism, for Luther was repeating not just Psalms 31: 5 but also Jesus’ last words in Luke 23: 46 – was taken as proof of Luther’s salvation. ‘With him’, Jonas, Coelius and Aurifaber declared, ‘the words of John came true: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death” [John 8: 51].’ To further prove the point, and because there was an assumed relationship between the spiritual and the physical experience of death, Luther’s advocates emphasised the reformer’s great forbearance (‘grosser gedult’) during his final hours. Far from experiencing ‘any kind of disquiet, bodily suffering, or pain of death’, they revealed that Luther instead ‘joined the Lord in peaceful sleep’ (1 Thessalonians 4: 13).⁴ Even in death Luther was the truest Christian.

But not everyone was persuaded that this was adequately proved. Elsewhere in Germany, in the very same year – 1546 – the exiled English reformer John Bale was charged with translating Jonas, Coelius, and Aurifaber’s text, along with a number of funeral sermons delivered on Luther’s death, for an English audience. The work he produced, The true hystorie of the Christen departynge of...