Ulinka Rublack. The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother . xxxii + 359 pp., illus., maps, index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. £20 (cloth).
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/690801
ISSN1545-6994
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeUlinka Rublack. The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother. xxxii + 359 pp., illus., maps, index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. £20 (cloth).Hannah MurphyHannah Murphy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 1620, halfway through the publication of Epitome Astronomiae Copernicae and a year after completing Harmonices Mundi, Johannes Kepler left his position as mathematician in Linz and traveled almost three hundred miles to the small town of Güglingen to defend his mother against the charge of witchcraft. The Astronomer and the Witch is a compelling account of an extraordinary event at the intersection of the history of science, religion, and witchcraft that knits together fine-grained archival research with broad consideration of the scientific, local, and courtly communities in which Kepler and his mother moved. It is a testament to the possibilities of microhistory for the history of science and a book for specialists, students, and interested readers of all kinds.The accusation against Katharina Kepler was not the result of a witch-hunting “craze” but a relatively slow-moving local affair. Katharina was accused of witchcraft first by her son Heinrich and then, more damningly and more persistently, by a neighbor, Ursula Reinbold. The way in which Reinbold’s accusation gained heft and moved toward a criminal case against Katharina reveals the place of witchcraft in both local and learned knowledge networks and demonstrates how the accusation of witchcraft served to change female participation in local, traditional knowledge practices into suspicious evidence of sorcery. Katharina gave the local governor a gift; it was recast as a suspicious attempt to bribe him. Her intention to cast her dead father’s skull appeared heretical, sorcerous, and damning. Her remedies were spells. The Keplers sued the Reinbolds for defamation and lost. By 1620, a criminal trial loomed.Before traveling to Linz, Kepler had defended his mother via skillfully written petitions to the local duke. Once he arrived in person, he insisted that the court follow the Formular-procedure, which meant that documents had to be presented in writing. As Ulinka Rublack puts it: “Kepler did not descend from an elevated life of the mind to dirty details of a criminal trial. Years of arguing his case in science had prepared him to mount an exceptionally effective defence” (p. 247). His close scrutiny allowed him to pick up inconsistencies in statements and facts—for example, the fact that at least two of the witnesses would have been just children (under the age of twelve) at the time of their accusations and so could not be relied on. However, while Kepler was clear-headed about the various causes of witchcraft charges—“A towering intellectual, he had identified how the German persecution of witches worked” (p. 128)—neither his observations about the cause of witchcraft accusations nor his nitty-gritty defense of his mother were demonstrations of principle. Kepler discredited witnesses like Ursula Reinbold through graphic sexual slander and insisted that testimony from women be discounted. His briefs included detailed medical arguments—but also the more startling claim that the medical advice his mother dispensed was valid and traditional. (This contradicted his own work, which had previously condemned her.) As elements of his defense, hearsay and gossip, a fascination with psychology, and an adept ability with language were just as persuasive as his legal arguments. The latter he was careful to buttress with precedent, and his reasoning hewed, in the main, to the arguments made by contemporaries like Martin Delrio or his friend Johann Georg Goedelmann. Both before and during the trial he drew on the dense network of German scholarship, seeking advice from friends and correspondents, such as Christoph Besold, who taught law at Tübingen, Matthias Bernegger, and Wilhelm Schickard. Their participation, especially that of Besold, who sat on the board that ultimately decided the case, is an example of the way in which scholarship on witchcraft, law, and science developed interdependently in the early modern period.If Kepler’s ideas about gender, harmony, and the epistemic importance of observation were evident in his defense of his mother, the effect of the witchcraft trial in turn could be seen in his scholarship, on which he continued to work throughout. Harmonices Mundi addressed this openly. Kepler’s ideas about the implications of his third law of planetary motion for the development of human character were mediated by his own problematic relationship with his mother. He bolstered his defense of Katharina by simultaneously providing horoscopes for the duke’s younger brother, Julius Friedrich (of Württemberg), and dedicating a treatise on the eclipse of October 1605 to John Frederick. His work eventually secured his mother’s release, but it became evident after the trial that Kepler feared it had also been the cause of her imprisonment.It is clear that Kepler was “anything but the cold, reclusive scholar he has often been portrayed as” (p. 124). To understand his scholarship, we must look at his relationship to his family and the way in which its ramifications were put to the test.And what about Katharina herself? Her defense was not her creation, and it warped her legacy. In an epilogue, Rublack reviews the way in which Katharina’s legacy has come to take shape in folk culture and popular memory, where she is still portrayed as witch-like, crone-like, haggard. In these brief moments, the glimpses of Katharina evoke other silences—the suffering of her accuser Ursula Reinbold, the women executed for witchcraft in the same year as she was arrested, her daughter Margaretha. In this sense, we see a rehabilitation of Katharina too and, for historians of science, a suggestion of the complex world in which she moved and its relationship to the sometimes remote realm of scholarship. Notes Hannah Murphy is a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Her research focuses on medicine, politics, and artisanal practice in sixteenth-century Germany. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 108, Number 1March 2017 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690801 Views: 43289Total views on this site © 2017 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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