Argula von Grumbach, a Noblewoman Answers a University

In September 1523 the University of Ingolstadt, one of the most committed Catholic institutions in the German lands, arrested and threatened to execute an eighteen year old student, Arsacius Seehofer, for holding views drawn from Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. Seehofer recanted under pressure and was sent away to a monastery. What happened next was unusual: a noblewoman with no seminary training and no public standing to speak on theology, Argula von Grumbach, wrote directly to the university faculty, defending Seehofer's positions point by point from scripture and daring the assembled theologians to debate her in German rather than Latin, so that ordinary people could judge the argument for themselves. She grounded her right to speak in her own reading of the Bible her father had given her as a child, arguing that scripture belonged to every believer and not to the clergy alone. The letter was printed within weeks and went through at least fourteen editions by the end of the year, an extraordinary circulation for the time, and made her one of the most widely read authors, of either sex, in the early German Reformation. No one at Ingolstadt accepted her challenge to debate. Instead the consequences fell on her household: her husband was dismissed from his post, and pamphleteers and preachers mocked her publicly as a shameless woman meddling in matters not her own. She kept writing for a few more years, addressing open letters to the Duke of Bavaria and to the city council of Regensburg, and stayed in correspondence with Luther and other reformers, but the sustained public pamphleteering that made her briefly one of the most visible voices of the early Reformation belonged mostly to those first intense years after 1523.