Katharina von Bora

Katharina entered a convent as a child and later became one of a group of nuns influenced by Reformation ideas who escaped their convent in 1523. In 1525 she married Martin Luther, a union that publicly demonstrated the reformers’ rejection of compulsory clerical celibacy.

She managed the former Black Cloister household, its farming, brewing, students, guests and finances while raising six children. After Luther’s death she faced legal and economic difficulties and died in Torgau in 1552 after an accident during flight from plague.

In Jody Hedlund’s Luther and Katharina, A Christy Award-winning novel chronicling the forbidden romance between Martin Luther and his wife, Katharina von Bora, set against the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.