 Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben in the Holy Roman Empire, not into the peasantry as he liked to claim, but into a relatively prosperous mining  family.[2]  His father, Hans, gave him a good education, intending for him to become a lawyer and thus assist the family business. In 1501 Luther went from school to the University of Erfurt, where in 1505 he became a Master of Arts, a degree which included the study and teaching of Aristotle, while he was also exposed to nominalism and to humanism. However, rather than continuing with his legal training, later in the same year Luther chose instead to enter the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, much to the annoyance of his father—and as Luther explained it later, on the basis of a vow made in a violent thunder storm to St Anna (the patron saint of miners), that this is what he would do if he was spared. Whatever the truth in this story, in his own mind at least Luther seems to have understood his change of direction as a kind of conversion experience, and the entry into a new type of spiritual life.