The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for His Mother by Ulinka Rublack (review)
- The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for His Mother by Ulinka Rublack
Some 73,000 people, mostly women, were put on trial in Europe for witchcraft between 1500 and 1700, and almost two-thirds were executed. Only one could claim to be the mother of the man who defined the three laws of planetary motion, showed that planets move in ellipses, and defended the solar system of Copernicus. Katharina Kepler was an illiterate widow in a small town in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg when she was brought to trial in 1620, accused of being a witch. Her son, Johannes, having just published his Harmony of the World, dropped everything. Marshaling Kepler's spirited courtroom defense to illuminate contemporary values of justice, jurisdiction, piety, community, gender, truth, medicine, and politics, Ulinka Rublack helps us better understand Kepler's own underlying, fiercely independent and optimistic, cosmic and natural philosophy—his world of "irregular regularity." Arthur Koestler judged Katharina a "hideous little woman," but rehabilitated, her ordeal emerges here to recast Reformation morality, as well as to place the great astronomer in a seldom considered light: as a loyal, loving son.
Oren Harman is the author of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, which received the Los Angeles Times book award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction; The Man Who Invented the Chromosome; Evolutions; and (with Michael Dietrich) Outsider Scientists: Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology. A frequent writer for the New Republic and Haaretz, he chairs the graduate program in science, technology, and society at Bar-Ilan University.
