The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother

ISBN-13: 9780198736776 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 400 str.

Ulinka Rublack

Opis

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived and a key figure in the scientific revolution. A defender of Copernicus' s sun-centered universe, he famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, and defined the three laws of planetary motion. Perhaps less well known is that in 1615, when Kepler was at the height of his career, his widowed mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft. The proceedings led to a criminal trial that lasted six years, with Kepler conducting his mother's defense.

In The Astronomer and the Witch, Ulinka Rublack pieces together the tale of this extraordinary episode in Kepler's life, one which takes us to the heart of his changing world. First and foremost an intense family drama, the story brings to life the world of a small Lutheran community in the centre of Europe at a time of deep religious and political turmoil--a century after the Reformation, and on the threshold of the Thirty Years' War.

Kepler's defense of his mother also offers us a fascinating glimpse into the great astronomer's world view, on the cusp between Reformation and scientific revolution. While advancing rational explanations for the phenomena which his mother's accusers attributed to witchcraft, Kepler nevertheless did not call into question the existence of magic and witches. On the contrary, he clearly believed in them. And, as the story unfolds, it appears that there were moments when even Katharina's children wondered whether their mother really did have nothing to hide...

Recenzje

In 1615, an illiterate widow is accused of witchcraft in a German town. Her son, the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, conducts her defence in a trial that drags on for six years. In this enthralling book, Ulinka Rublack reconstructs the struggle over Katharina Kepler's fate. We enter a small-town world of rivalries, friendships, deference, power and vulnerability, a world in which religious faith, scientific knowledge and folk belief are dangerously intertwined. Vividly drawn and subtly observed, The Astronomer and the Witch opens a window onto the inner life of a past that is strange and remote, but also unsettlingly familiar.

O autorze

Ulinka Rublack is Professor at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on early modern European history as well as approaches to history. She has edited, most recently, the Oxford Concise Companion to History (2011), and her Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations is forthcoming. Her monographs include Reformation Europe (2005), The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (1999), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize.