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Documents - Part I: Section B – Everyday Life, Family, and Marriage
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1.   Lovers in a Time of War (July 1625)
Families begin with marriages, and marriages often begin with lovers. Letters between young people are rare, letters between young lovers rarer still. In 1625, a young woman in the town of Schmalkalden....
2.   The Wise Woman – The Gendered Ideal of Marital Virtue (c. 1525)
A 16th-century woman lived under the authority of the men in her life. Unless she lived in community with other women – a practice that survived the Protestant reformation in Catholic lands but also....
3.   Marriage as Partnership – Magdalena and Balthasar Paumgartner of Nuremberg (Correspondence, 1582, 1591, and 1592)
Wealthy Germans often commissioned diptych portraits to memorialize their marriages. The partnership....
4.   The Reformer as Son – Luther and his Mother (May 20, 1531)
Margarethe Luther (née Lindemann, 1460-1531) came from a middle-class family in Eisenach. She married Hans Luder, a miner and copper smelter, and moved with him to Eisleben in 1482. There, in 1483,....
5.   The Reformer Remembers – Luther and his Father (June 5, 1530)
Around 1482, Hans Luder (Luther) (d. 1530) brought his wife, Margarethe, from Eisenach (her birthplace) to Eisleben, where their son, Martin Luther, was born in 1483. In 1484, Hans moved with his....
6.   The Reformer as Husband – Luther and his Wife (1529, 1534, and 1546)
Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora (1499-1552) in 1525, two years after she had given up her....
7.   The Reformer as Father – Luther and his Son (1530 and 1537 [?])
Johann (Hans) (1526-75) was the eldest of six children born to the reformer Martin Luther and his wife Katharina (who also reared four orphans). He was twenty years old when his father died in 1546.....
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