The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother is a book that chronicles the witchcraft trial of Katharina Kepler, Johannes Kepler’s mother, and the historical context of her trial. The background of the author of The Astronomer and the Witch, Dr. Ulinka Rublack, makes her a good fit for this type of historical writing. According to her faculty page at the University of Cambridge (https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-ulinka-rublack-fba), Dr. Rublack was educated in Hamburg and Cambridge and then became a research fellow at Cambridge in 1996. Her research focuses on the rise of consumerism and changes in material and religious cultures in the early modern era, which explains why a famous witchcraft trial would inspire her to write a book. Her other books include Dürer in the Age of Wonder: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World, and her current project is a new book entitled The Triumph of Fashion, which follows the rise of fashion around the world starting in 1300 CE. Dr. Rublack’s awards include the Deutsche Historikerpreis prize three years in a row for The Astronomer and the Witch and in 2018 she earned the Reimar-Lüst Prize, a lifetime achievement award from the Humboldt and Thyssen Foundations.
Before discussing Dr. Rublack’s book, it is worth highlighting her work outside of traditional academia. In www.materializedidentities.com, she explores the relationship between material objects, on the one hand, and religion and culture, on the other. As part of the project, she supervised the recreation of a Renaissance feather headdress, and the project’s blog documents interesting projects, including a workshop in which students experimented with recreating early modern perfumes and recipes. For a clip of her discussing the recreation of an outfit from 1530, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91hysO_suRo. There is also an opera that The Astronomer and The Witch inspired. This is a performance of it at St. John’s College, Cambridge from 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xg_ROgGj1U
There are two ways to approach The Astronomer and The Witch. First is to describe the main subject of the book, which is Katharina Kepler’s trial. Dr. Rublack discusses the trial in chronological order, starting with a short introduction to Katharina herself in chapter one. The next two chapters add historical context to her situation, including information about the politics of her time, disagreements between various religious groups, and the legal state of witchcraft during her lifetime. Chapter three also discusses the beginning of Katharina’s trial. The rest of the chapters discuss developments in the trial, Katharina’s son’s role in it, complications with her family, more political and cultural aspects of the time, and Mrs. Kepler’s death in 1622, six months after she had been released from prison. All-in-all, Dr. Rublack’s description of a complicated trial and its historical context is well written, engaging, and interesting.
The second way to approach The Astronomer and The Witch is to consider Rublack’s theoretical or general observations that reveal her perspective as a historian. One of these observations has to do with the type of history she is doing in her book. On page 258 in the epilogue, she writes, “[H]istorians have begun to reconstruct the lives or ordinary people like Katharina Kepler in communities across the world. Betrande Rols and Martin Guerre as well as Menocchio . . . remain the best known of these ‘micro-histories.’ The Astronomer and the Witch is designed to complement our sense of this period by taking us into a Lutheran world as the Reformation came of age.” Rublack adds that that type of history is done “from the ground up.” This means that The Astronomer and the Witch is primarily a micro-history, which makes sense since it focuses on the life and trial of one woman.
While Dr. Rublack’s book is a micro-history, she does not ignore the bigger picture. She addresses this on the last page of her epilogue, where she writes that exceptional individuals, like Katharina and Johannes Kepler, and trials reveal things of “’universal import’ about a ‘silent majority’.” By choosing a sufficiently broad context, she argues, individual, local events can reveal a bigger picture. She adds that her book attempts to understand both individuals, families, community, and an age. Thus, one of her goals in her book is to use the particulars of Katharina and Johannes Kepler’s lives to understand large-scale themes, like family and community life in early modern Europe.
An example of how Dr. Rublack relates the trial to macro-history is in her introduction, where makes a comment that world of The Astronomer and the Witch was a haunted world, where nearly everyone believed that witches and the devils exist. In such an atmosphere, population growth, bad weather, and scarce resources led to a surge in witchcraft trials and executions. Between 1500 and 1700, 73,000 men and women faced witchcraft trials and 40,000 to 50,000 were executed. This is important context to give readers a sense of why Katharina would have been put on trial and imprisoned for witchcraft.
To complicate the picture of attitudes towards witchcraft, in chapter twelve Dr. Rublack mentions moderating voices on the legal status of witchcraft in Katharina’s era. There was Johannes Kepler’s friend and godfather, Johann Georg Gödelmann, who wrote a treatise on magic, sorcery, and witches and was the great legal expert on witchcraft in Protestant Europe at the end of the 1500s. As witchcraft trials multiplied, Gödelmann insisted that legal procedures needed to be followed and that charges of witchcraft needed to be “well-established” and based on two reliable witnesses. There was also one of Kepler’s patrons, Johann Georg Herwart Hohenburg, who, as the Bavarian Supreme Chancellor in 1590, supported an anti-witch-hunting party in court. Both of these important individuals, who had close ties to Johannes Kepler, did not share in the mania over witches of the historical period in which they lived.
There are other general themes that Dr. Rublack brings up in her book, which one could discuss in a book review, such as the issue of historical memory in the discussion of the statue of Katharine Kepler in the epilogue of the book, ways that Rublack undermines accepted views of both Katharine and Johannes Kepler, and Rublack’s discussion of her sources. However, maybe the most fitting ending to this review would be to question what she means by “Kepler’s real voice.”
On page 253, Dr. Rublack writes, “entering into Johannes Kelpler’s real voice reveals aspects of human experience which are often not spoken about or seen in relation to men of science.” Then, she lists emotions and contradictory ideas about femininity as examples of these “aspects of human experience.” She adds that Kepler understood his time “in positive and hopeful terms,” and he was a man with a smile and a cheerful style. Without going back through her book again, my impression is that she complicated the image we have of Kepler in history, which, on its own, makes her book worth reading. However, I do not have the sense that I learned about the “true” Kepler. As a rule, I am skeptical about any claim that one can get to the heart of or the “real voice” of any famous historical figure. All I have to do is remind myself how difficult it is to know the “real voice” of someone I know very well in my personal life, and then my skepticism about truly knowing historical figures comes to mind. That is not to argue that The Astronomer and the Witch is not worth reading. It is an excellent book. If anything, it gives readers a more complex picture of Johannes Kepler, his mother, and the historical period in which they lived.
