Antje Ruttgardt. Klosteraustritte in der fruhen Reformation: Studien zu Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1524. Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007. 378 pp. No price listed (cloth), ISBN 978-3-579-01645-0.

Reviewed by Beth Plummer (Department of History, Western Kentucky University)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Nuns and Monks on the Run

One of the most striking images of the early German Reformation is that of a dozen nuns from Nimbschen stuffed into herring barrels as they escaped their convent in 1523. Luther published a description of their travails in a pamphlet, Ursach und Antwort, daß Jungfrauen Klöster göttlich verlassen mögen, later that year. That one of these nuns, Katharina von Bora, would go on to marry Martin Luther, a former monk, two years later makes this particular flight the stuff of an oft-repeated story. However, what of the hundreds of other monks and nuns who left their monasteries and convents beginning in the early 1520s? Who were these men and women, and how did they come to make the often dangerous, certainly life-changing, decision that led them out of their cloistered existence and into the center of the maelstrom of the Reformation?

Anjte Rüttgardt sets out to answer these question for at least four individuals--Gallus Korn, Ambrosius Blarer, Gottschalk Kruse, and Florentina von Oberweimar--who not only fled their monasteries in the early 1520s, but also published pamphlets (Flugschriften) containing personal statements, or Apologia, to explain their actions. These four works, which Rüttgardt categorizes as autobiographical (Selbstzeugnisse), appeared from 1522 to 1524 and form the basis for her analysis. Rüttgardt builds on scholarship using published pamphlets as the starting point for analyzing the real experience of not only the major reformers, but also less well-known Lutheran authors.[1] In doing so, she studies how Lutheran teachings were being received, and subsequently transmitted, by later authors. Her work thus follows a similar tradition of some recent scholarship on the reception of early Reformation pamphlet literature.[2] She mines the four published pamphlets as well as the secondary literature to unearth a remarkable amount of information on the authors, their monasteries, and the circumstances of the publication of the documents. Her goal is to answer four basic questions: how did these individuals come to learn about Luther's teachings, specifically those on monastic vows? What were the educational, personal, vocational, even psychological circumstances that led each individual to a decision to flee the monastic life? What were the broader implications of a monk or nun leaving the cloister, and did it change based on gender? And, finally, what rationale did these individuals use to explain their decision?

Rüttgardt chooses these four individuals for the different experiences they had as well as their shared experience of leaving a convent and explaining that choice in print. Gallus Korn, a Dominican monk from a Nuremberg burgher family, left his urban monastery in June 1522, in the earliest stages of the Nuremberg Reformation. After publishing a pamphlet on his experience, Korn, of whom very little is known, quickly fell into even greater obscurity after serving briefly as a Lutheran preacher in the service of Johann von Schwarzenberg. The most well-known of the four, Ambrosius Blarer, a Benedictine monk from a patrician family in Constance, served briefly as prior in rural Kloster Alpirsbach in the Black Forest before leaving his monastery in July 1522 and fleeing to his hometown. Called before representatives of the bishop of Constance and the Constance city council, Blarer read and then published an impassioned defense of his decision to leave. While not able to study in Wittenberg as he had hoped or to serve as a pastor until later in his career, Blarer became a leading figure in the Württemberg Reformation in the 1530s and 1540s. Gottschalk Kruse, a Benedictine monk from a Braunschweig burgher family, earned his doctorate in theology at Wittenberg prior to his decision in early 1523 to leave his monastery of St. Ägidien in Braunschweig. He subsequently became a pastor and leader of the Reformation in Celle and Lüneburg. The only woman in the group, and the one about whom the least is known, is the fifteen-year-old Florentina von Oberweimar, a noble Cistercian nun. Oberweimar left her convent of Neu-Helfta near Eisleben, under the patronage of the counts of Mansfeld, in early 1524 after months of struggle and imprisonment by the abbess. After her flight and publication of a pamphlet, Oberweimar disappears completely from historical records.

Rüttgardt divides the main section of her work, part 2, into four major sections, each dealing with the experience of one of the pamphlet authors. For each individual, she begins by outlining some of the previous research and problems confronting a study of this person. She then gives a basic outline of their family situation, education, experience in the monastery or convent, and the immediate circumstances prompting their choice to leave and their experiences after exiting their monastic life (although much of this information is missing for Kruse and Oberweimar). Rüttgardt then gives a general historical background of the monastery and/or the city and territorial officials involved in the case. After providing the publication history and outline, she adds some contextualization of each work within its genre, discussing influences on style and content, and placing the work in the context of related literature. In the case of the three male authors, Rüttgardt also presents a section summarizing each author's ultimate attitude to cloistered life.

Rüttgardt concludes her work with a brief chapter pulling these four separate sections together, in which she also provides a comparative look at four other defenses written by nuns and monks published within the same time-frame. She notes that almost all were initially published in Wittenberg, which she argues was not necessarily evidence of a larger "propaganda offensive" since this was merely one of the few locations where such a work could have been published (p. 319). Instead, she concludes that each of the authors had his or her own very individual reasons for leaving the cloister as well as for writing about the decision, ranging from attempts to advance careers to concerns about loss of honor. She also suggests that not all of the authors intended these self-defenses to be published. As her final analysis demonstrates, the individuality of the works and their authors makes them hard to sum up in definitive statements.

Rüttgardt's work joins a growing list of works on the experience of monks and nuns during the early Reformation.[3] Her study asks interesting questions and highlights research and documents that have received little previous attention. Rüttgardt resourcefully weaves available published research, especially regional studies, into the larger story. However, her work also suffers from some of the same narrowness of the regional histories she exploits because of the limited sample of individuals and pamphlets used. Her discussions are often bogged down in the factual detail she has managed to uncover. The detailed footnotes can be both overwhelming and distracting, providing what is nearly a separate story from the main text. Part of the challenge Rüttgardt faces derives from the lack of broadly defined research on monks and nuns in the Reformation era, with few scholars having yet moved much beyond the experience of individuals or single cloisters. The task is further complicated by the fragmentary nature of documentary evidence on cloisters, with even the number of cloisters and religious affected by the Reformation still uncertain.[4] In her last, most successful chapter, however, Rüttgardt hints at some of the larger issues such as media reception and the process of the Reformation that her analysis touches on, suggesting implications that go beyond merely a microstudy of four individuals. This study certainly will be of interest to individuals working on the history of monks and nuns and pamphlets during the early Reformation. Much still needs to be done on the impact of the Reformation on monastic life and the lives of individual monks and nuns and in understanding how Reformation ideas were spread. The questions Rüttgardt outlines at the outset of her work point in some interesting directions.

Notes

[1]. For instance, the analysis of twenty-three pamphlets written by recently married priests in the early 1520s by Stephen E. Buckwalter, Die Priesterehe in Flugschriften der frühen Reformation (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

[2]. For instance, Thomas Hohenberger, Lutherische Rechtfertigungslehre in den reformatorischen Flugschriften der Jahre 1521-1522 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996).

[3]. Most recently, Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Barbara Steinke, Paradiesgarten oder Gefängnis? Das Nürnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen Klosterreform und Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Manfred Sitzmann, Mönchtum und Reformation : zur Geschichte monastischer Institutionen in protestantischen Territorien (Brandenburg-Ansbach/Kulmbach, Magdeburg) (Neustadt a.d. Aisch : Degener, 1999); and Johannes Schilling, Klöster und Mönche in der hessischen Reformation (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1997).

 [4]. For a recent attempt to provide at least a list and basic data on the major monastic orders in Germany during the Reformation, see Friedhelm Jürgensmeier und Regina Elisabeth Schwerdtfeger, eds., Orden und Klöster im Zeitalter von Reformation und katholischer Reform: 1500–1700, 3 vols. (Münster: Aschendorff, 2005-07).

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Citation: Beth Plummer. Review of Ruttgardt, Antje, Klosteraustritte in der fruhen Reformation: Studien zu Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1524. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23829

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