Argula von Grumbach

She is most known for directly challenging the University of Ingolstadt's faculty when she wrote a letter to them speaking out against the arrest of a Lutheran student.

As one of the few women at the time openly speaking out her views, her writings sparked controversy and often became bestsellers, with tens of thousands of copies of her letters and poems circulating within a few years of their publication.

The von Stauff family were Freiherren, who were lords with independent jurisdiction only accountable to the Emperor, and they were among the pre-eminent leaders of Bavarian nobility.

At the age of sixteen, Argula joined the court in Munich, where she became a lady-in-waiting to duchess Kunigunde, daughter of the Emperor Frederick III.

She refuted others’ suggestions that she was neglecting her duties as a wife in the poem she wrote in 1524, although she also said ‘May God teach me to understand/ How I should act towards my man’, indicating that it could have been a difficult marriage.

Bavarian authorities had forbidden reception of Lutheran ideas at the time, and the city of Ingolstadt enforced that mandate.

In 1523, Arsacius Seehofer, the young teacher and former student at the University of Ingolstadt, was arrested for Protestant views and forced to recant his beliefs on the Bible.

The incident would have occurred quietly, but Argula, outraged over it, wrote what was to become her best-known epistle, a letter to the faculty of the university objecting to Seehofer's arrest and exile.

The letter urged the university to follow Scripture, not Roman traditions and to explain what heresy Seehofer was guilty of.

An excerpt from her letter as follows: To the honorable, worthy, highborn, erudite, noble, stalwart Rector and all the Faculty of the University of Ingolstadt: When I heard what you had done to Arsacius Seehofer under terror of imprisonment and the stake, my heart trembled and my bones quaked.

In the long letter she cited over 80 Scriptures with which she made logical comparisons to the behaviour of the university theologians, to argue her case that they were wrong.

Her letter, which was turned into a booklet, provoked a huge reaction, greatly angering the theologians and became nearly an overnight sensation.

Argula wrote more letters and copies of the first one to other significant figures, including when Duke Wilhelm was to argue her case.

If something sold well, like early Protestant writings, many printers would create their own editions, spreading often-subversive ideas like wildfire.

Unable to control the spread of her ideas, theologians wanted Argula punished, and her husband lost his position at Dietfurt over the controversy.

Argula was also called by many offensive epithets by her critics, especially through the sermons of Professor Hauer, who described her as a “shameless whore” and a “female desperado.” Argula wrote poems in response to the slander of her, including when a poem apparently written by an Ingoldstadt, accusing her of being a neglectful wife and mother.

She was praised by the Anabaptist preacher Balthasar Hubmaier in nearby Regensburg, who wrote that she "knows more of the divine Word than all of the red hats" — canon lawyers and cardinals — "ever saw or could conceive of" and compared her to heroic women in the Bible.

Although her challenges to the university were largely ignored, and her efforts to promote her Protestant beliefs unsuccessful, Argula was undeterred, continuing writing pamphlets until that final incident.

She engaged in other exceptional activities in this cause, like travelling alone to Nuremberg — which was unheard of for women at that time — to encourage German princes to accept Reformation principles.

Argula von Grumbach was reported in a local chronicle to have died in 1554, but there was some evidence from correspondence of the Munich City Council indicated that she could have been alive as late as 1563.