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and it has to serve needs both of the parish and the household members, with the pastor and the
pastor’s wife as main agents. In addition, this type of household has more missions to follow, i. e.
“Innere Mission” (Home Mission) and “Äußere Mission” (foreign mission), with society and the
nation‐state as the frames of reference. Thus it is widening the sphere of action from the house to
local to national to global. The pastor’s wife is explicitly included into all these levels. This is a
transformation of the early modern “open household” 3 into a new version, adapting the household
to the modernizing processes of a society that was undergoing a re‐formation into a nation‐state in a
globalizing world.
The majority of these texts appeared in German, as a rule authored by Lutheran writers, most of
them male. Some of these texts were translated into other languages, especially for the Lutheran
readership of Scandinavia. Other versions have been created in English in the USA, mainly related to
Lutheran communities, too.
An exceptional text was also published in the USA around 1900: a spiritualist revelation where
Bora is presented as its source, after her early death appearing as a spirit to a medium, her daughter
Florence. She is described as giving testimony to her daughter about an afterlife as spirit and
transmitting all the practices necessary to make contact between the living and their dead relations.
Death does not lead to a real separation, contact can be upheld on a regular basis by means of
séances; the sphere of those contacts extends to close kin. Bora is seen as the highest authority for
this religious message, passing it down first to her daughter in a female line and through the
daughter to Florence’s father, Martin Luther, and other theologians like Melanchthon. Luther and
Melanchthon have to revise their translation of the Bible in accordance with spiritualism after their
successful conversion, brought about by Florence. Although the story told is fabulous – Florence
herself being a complete invention –, it is intended as a factual foundation of a new religious sect,
written by Henry Upsall (born 1830), a former goldsmith immigrated from England. For establishing
his new sect, Upsall tried to dethrone the Lutheran pastors as religious authorities. In order to
achieve this Bora seems to have been the obvious choice.
From the 19 th century on, a growing number of female authors were also writing about Bora, e. g.
Louise Otto‐Peters (1819‐1895), Bertha Josephson‐Mercator, Rosa Spilger (ca. 1900). Since the
1980s, there are many texts written as part of the women’s movement and with a feminist agenda.
Bora is chosen as the subject of novels and of more factually‐oriented biographical texts, many of
them literary works with popular character, e. g. by Christine Brückner, Marianne Wintersteiner, Asta
Scheib, Ingelore Winter, Ursula Sachau, Ursula Koch, Eva Zeller. Often these texts combine some
factual background with highly fictionalized details and plots, integrating sexuality as one of the
important biographical topics. Bora here becomes an exemplary person for a woman’s life seen in
general terms; along with her sexuality, also her agency and her self‐assurance are conceived as
qualities of positive value. Other texts are intended for religious education at school and in church as
well as for a more general adult audience. Historical research also has been done, much of it around
the 500 th anniversary of Bora’s birthday in 1999. In an important doctoral dissertation, Church
historian and Lutheran pastor Sabine Kramer started to collect and analyze Bora’s representations in
written sources, focusing on the 16 th century, applying feminist critical tools in order to deconstruct
traditional Lutheran gender role models.
In each case, Bora is serving as the key model, giving historical depth and religious value to these
modern and mainly secular developments and ties. She can be qualified as the center of world
history (Semmig), as a bulwark against women’s movement (Semmig, Josephson/Josephson‐
Mercator), or as a proto‐feminist – in any case, she is a gendered icon that far exceeds any value
placed in her own person in her historical 16 th ‐century context.
Four types of religious discourse have been mentioned so far: