https://dev.jessicaotis.com/2023/02/13/the-astronomer-the-witch-a-review/ HIST 615/635 Spring 2023 Wed, 15 Feb 2023 03:26:22 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://dev.jessicaotis.com/2023/02/13/the-astronomer-the-witch-a-review/#comment-20 Wed, 15 Feb 2023 03:26:22 +0000 https://dev.jessicaotis.com/?p=531#comment-20 Hi, I really liked your review of The Astronomer & the Witch. Your review focuses heavily on the summary of the contents of the book. In doing this, you provide a very detailed account of different chapters and their contents. For the first half of the book, you provide an in-depth recounting of the examples used throughout the first half of the book. During the second half of the book, you further provide a much quicker summary of the chapters and their contents, but it still provides enough information for a reader to understand the topics. I felt that your review could have provided more information on the various themes of the book as well as the more general thesis of the book. I also felt as though the summary was not as evenly distributed as it could have been. Overall you provided a good review of the contents of The Astronomer & the Witch and the relation of the book to the author.

]]> https://dev.jessicaotis.com/2023/02/13/the-astronomer-the-witch-a-review/#comment-17 Tue, 14 Feb 2023 16:53:05 +0000 https://dev.jessicaotis.com/?p=531#comment-17 I really enjoyed this review and the book. Your point about astrology as an “early form of psychoanalysis” made me think of how sixteenth-century people looked to dreams in order to interpret the subconscious mind. Hundreds of years later, Sigmund Freud would state that dreams were a path to interpreting the unconscious mind. I enjoyed this book because it gave me a perspective on why there were so many witch trials in early seventeenth-century Germany. I also enjoyed the fact that Kepler wrote a science fiction novel centuries before H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds. Your point about the book humanizing Kepler resonated with me. In high school, we’re taught about all of these big names in science, but the teachers never delve into who they were or what motivated them. To many people, the big names in science are just that: big names with dates in long-past centuries attached to them. The book doesn’t just humanize Kepler, though; it brings a human face to the witch trials in early modern Germany.

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