Martin Luther: The Reformer’s Early Years Issue 34 | 1992 Click here to order the downloadable audio version

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“I am the son of a peasant,” Luther once said, “and the grandson and the great-grandson.” Martin’s father, Hans Luder, was indeed of humble peasant stock. But he became a copper-mining entrepreneur. Hans worked hard to climb the social ladder of the middle class. His motto: “A free peasant is nobody’s slave.”

Hans married Margaretha (also known as Hannah) Lindemann, daughter of an established middleclass family that included doctors, lawyers, university professors, and politicians. Martin’s career track of university education (with the goal of practicing law) was probably influenced by relatives on his mother’s side.

Hans was proud when his son earned a master’s degree. He dreamed of Martin’s future career in law and the financial rewards it would bring the family. So he was furious, at least initially, when his son decided to enter a monastery.

When Martin was ordained, Hans attended his son’s first mass. Afterward, Martin asked his father if this new career wasn’t better than being a lawyer. His father rebuked him, “Haven’t you heard the commandment to honor your father and mother?”

The older biographical portraits of Hans and Hannah were stern, based on a few stray comments from Martin’s later recollections of his childhood. He remembered his father once whipping him so badly that he “ran away and felt ugly toward him” until his father worked to regain the boy’s trust. Martin was also reported by his students to have said: “My mother once beat me with a cane for stealing a nut, until the blood came. Such strict discipline drove me to the monastery, although she meant it well.”

Comments like these led some twentieth-century biographers, influenced by modern psychological theories, to trace Martin’s ...