he years 1519 and 1560. With the beginning
of the Reformation the brotherhood of humanistic scholarship was
disrupted. To German women the national unrest brought heartache and
soul bewilderment.

Charitas Pirkheimer was not the only woman to "forget her sex and mix in
an unseemly manner in disputes about which only men are properly
qualified to express an opinion." Argula von Grumbach, friend of
Spalatin and wife of an officer at the Bavarian court, also brought much
sorrow upon herself by writing a spirited letter, which was printed by
her friends and rejoiced in by her enemies.

Seehofer, a young Lutheran master at the university of Ingolstadt, was
accused of proselyting the students. He presented to his classes
seventeen propositions which he had deduced from the writings of
Melanchthon. The rector of the university, by imprisonment and by
threats of the Inquisition, compelled the too zealous young Lutheran to
recant. At this point, Argula an emotional, warmhearted, and talented
woman took a hand in the affair. She wrote the rector an impertinent
letter, in which she spoke of Seehofer as a "mere child of eighteen,"
and, with refreshing confidence in her own powers of oratory, offered to
come to Ingolstadt to defend, publicly, both the young master and his
theses. The university authorities ignored this offer, but the Catholic
cartoonists of the time made the most of it. From every quarter of
Germany Argula was assailed in mocking rhymes, to which she replied in
counter rhymes. The verses on both sides are rather bad, though the
plucky little baroness holds her own fairly well. For her
"indiscreetness" Argula was banished from court; and her husband, "for
not controlling his wife properly," was dismissed from his lucrative
position at the palace.

The real strength of Protestant women, however, lay not with its
excitable Argulas, but with firm, steady, sensible women like Catharine
von Bora, who became Luther's wife. It seems almost unjust that a girl
possessed of sufficient spirit and courage to propose to the man she
loved should, for posterity, be forever submerged under the appended
title, "his wife." Catharine von Bora's individuality was marked. Her
wise management, as wife and mother, seems phenomenal when we remember
how suddenly she was transplanted from conventual to secular life, but
no healthy young tree ever better stood removal from shade to sunlight.

Catharine von Bora was descended from a noble b