Courtney McGrailThe Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s fight for his mother
by Ulinka Rublack
(Oxford University Press, £20.00)
Christopher Moriarty
The most influential work of Johannes Kepler was to map the orbits of the planets around the sun and to predict accurately their conjunctions and eclipses.
He published this early in the 17th Century – about the time when his fellow astronomer and correspondent Galileo was giving an undertaking to the Inquisition in Rome that he would not teach or even believe that the Earth was the centre of the universe.
In 1938, a statue of a slender young woman holding a reaping hook was erected in the village square in Eltingen, Germany. It commemorates Kepler’s mother Katharina, who was born there in 1547.
Katharina led the normal life of a housewife of her time, which included farm labour on the small family holding in addition to her duties of raising and feeding the family. She was illiterate, as were most women of her social standing.
Johannes as a young man would write on the correctness of this degree of gender separation – women would concentrate on bearing children and manual work while their sons or spouses could concentrate on clerical or intellectual pursuits.
Widowed
While Johannes studied, taught, star-gazed, surveyed and wrote a truly amazing number of seminal scholarly books, his mother cared for her family in the town of Leonberg and was widowed in 1589.
Her reasonably quiet family life was shattered 25 years later when she was accused of witchcraft. Johannes heard the news on December 29, 1615 and immediately set to work to save her.
Katharina’s trial extended over six years, which included the greater part of one year in custody, chained and under constant surveillance.
Every detail of the court proceedings was meticulously recorded. A great quantity of witness statements and other supporting papers was amassed and Johannes engaged in correspondence with people in the highest places of law and government in addition to studying all the papers in preparation for the defence.
Quite apart from filial duty, his own career was at risk since simply being a relative of a witch could in itself be damning.
The unfortunate woman did not live long after her eventual acquittal – but the trial and its documentation have given her a degree of immortality by providing the material for Ulinka Rublack’s scholarly and utterly fascinating, if sometimes harrowing, book.
While the lives of Kepler and similar leading figures are well known, the details of those of lesser mortals are rarely recorded. The court papers make Katharina an exception – and in the author’s skilful hands help to open a window on day-to-day life in the Europe of the early 17th Century.
Kepler was a man of faith who believed his work was revealing God’s cosmic harmony for the benefit of mankind.
He approached his task by the employment of the scientific method based on observation rather than on acceptance of written authority.
Modern aspects of the application of the rule of law were beginning to take effect in these times – though they had not quite gone far enough to save thousands of innocent elderly women from perishing on the basis of evidence extracted from them by torture.
Katharina Kepler was one of few who survived thanks to a combination her own clear thinking and speaking, and her son Johannes’ phenomenal ability to interpret legal documents as well as the mechanisms of God’s creation.