Luther, for instance, jests in unseemly fashion “amid laughter” on
the difference in mind and body which distinguishes man from woman,
and playfully demonstrates from the formation of their body that
his Catherine and women in general must necessarily be deficient in
wit.[869] An ambiguous sally at the expense of virginity and the
religious life, addressed to the ladies who were usually present at
these evening entertainments, was received with awkward silence and a
laugh.[870]
On another occasion the subject of the conversation was the female
breasts, it being queried whether they were “an ornament” or intended
for the sake of the children.[871] Then again Luther, without any
apparent reason, treats, and with great lack of delicacy, of the
circumstances and difficulties attending confinement;[872] he also
enters fully into the troubles of pregnancy,[873] and, to fill
up an interval, tells a joke concerning the womb of the Queen of
Poland.[874]
In the Table-Talk Luther takes an opportunity of praising the mother’s
womb and does so with a striking enthusiasm, after having exclaimed:
“No one can sufficiently extol marriage.” “Now, in his old age,” he
understood this gift of God. Every man, yea, Christ Himself, came from
a mother’s womb.[875]
Among the passages which have been altered or suppressed in later
editions from motives of propriety comes a statement in the Table-Talk
concerning the Elector Johann Frederick, who was reputed a hard
drinker. In Aurifaber’s German Table-Talk the sense of the passage is
altered, and in the old editions of Stangwald and Selnecker the whole
is omitted.[876]
Of the nature of his jests the following from notes of the Table-Talk
gives a good idea: “It will come to this,” he said to Catherine Bora,
“that a man will take more than one wife.” The Doctoress replied:
“Tell that to the devil!” The Doctor proceeded: Here is the reason,
Katey: a wife can have only one child a year, but the husband several.
Katey replied: “Paul says: ‘Let everyone have his own wife.’ Whereupon
the Doctor retorted: ‘His own,’ but not ‘only one,’ that you won’t
find in Paul. The Doctor teased his wife for a long time in this way,
till at last she said: ‘Sooner than allow this, I would go back to the
convent and leave you with all the children.’”[877]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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