Ulinka Rublack is a professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. While her primary expertise is in the history of gender roles in early modern Germany, she’s also published a history of the Protestant Reformations. Her undergraduate studies were at the University of Hamburg, but she was born in Tübingen, whose university was Johannes Kepler’s alma mater. Thus one might say she was destined to tell the story of the Kepler family and its milieu, culminating in Kepler’s half-decade struggle to save his mother Katharina from being burned as a witch. “The Astronomer & the Witch” mines the Leonberg and other local archives, as well as Kepler’s own papers, to render an immersive portrait of Kepler’s world, and the precarity of middle-class academic existence amid the religious and political upheavals that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War.
Rublack begins the book with a timeline of Kepler’s life, laying out his major life events, publications, and geographic moves. This is an effective and necessary technique against the subsequent structure of her narrative, which groups events and biographical details thematically, often entailing flashbacks and large time jumps, making it easy for the reader to become chronologically confused. This reader referred back to the timeline regularly. After setting the scene with a description of the witch craze in Germany, Kepler’s philosophy, and intellectual ferment among the ruling classes in the Holy Roman Empire, she describes the Kepler family’s history, with a focus on Katharina’s journey and the practical challenges of survival, and launching productive children, as a middle-class widowed single mother. In the second chapter, Rublack shifts to the nearly opposite end of the social hierarchy, with a portrait of the Duchess Sibylle of Württemburg, also a widow, who moved her court from Stuttgart to Leonberg (Katharina’s home) after Frederick’s death. It paints a picture of courtly intellectual life in the German principalities, and makes it clear that a phenomenon similar to Renaissance Italian city-state competition was playing out north of the Alps. The aim of Rublack’s digression into herbalism as the domain of women unable to attend university here was unclear, except perhaps to propose that the alchemical activities of highborn women demonstrate an inescapable class element in witchcraft accusations.Chapter three depicts three compounding sources of growing political and social instability at regional and local levels. First, the diplomatic efforts of Lutheran princes to secure alliances with Protestant England, pinned as they were between the Catholic Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs. Second, worsening food insecurity amid failed harvests and Little Ice Age winters; and third, a ducal governor in Leonberg newly emboldened by the death of Duchess Sibylle. Rublack provides the impression that Governor Einhorn saw witchhunts as a pressure relieve valve for a population under increasing stress. The chapter culminates in accusations against Katharina Kepler. Chapter four relates the development of Johannes Kepler’s skills as a logician, rhetorician, marketer, and early “crowd-sourcer” of experimental data. It makes a powerful case that, were these traits uncoupled from his brilliance as a mathematician, Kepler might not have been able to survive as a professional mathematician and astronomer in Holy Roman Imperial society, particularly in a confessional environment where disagreements among Protestant factions over esoteric doctrines like transubstantiation could render one ineligible for a university teaching position (as it did for Kepler). It sets the stage for chapter five, which describes the Kepler family’s reaction to the accusations against Katharina, and Johannes’ rapid appraisal of the situation. As Rublack puts it, “a towering intellectual, he [Kepler] had identified how the German persecution of witches worked”. Chapter six posits astrology as an early form of psychoanalysis, utilizing horoscopes he compiled on himself and his mother to document Kepler’s exhaustive introspection and insecurities throughout his career. These tendencies culminated in efforts to protect his academic reputation from his mother’s case — even as he labored to defend her in correspondence with the authorities — via quasi-disavowal of her in one section of his “Harmonies of the Worlds”, wherein he lays out his third law of planetary motion. This chapter is utterly fascinating, insofar as it provides some insight into Kepler’s creative process. He attempts a synthesis of astrology and free will, much as his elliptical orbits are a synthesis of dynamism and Ptolemaic stability/perfection.Chapters seven, eight, and nine lay out details of the witchcraft allegations, the credibility of the accusers, the dire situations of similarly accused defendants under the jurisdiction of Leonberg’s governor Einhorn, Katharina’s imprisonment and public interrogation, and the petition of Johannes’ younger brother Christoph for a change of venue from Leonberg, so as to limit collateral damage to Christoph’s pewtering business. Chapters ten, eleven, and twelve detail Kepler’s decision to put his life on hold, uproot his family from Linz, and move to Stuttgart full-time in order to mount a more effective defense of his mother. They also explain Kepler’s ability to transfer techniques honed in scholarly argument – meticulous analysis and refutation of details and inconsistencies in testimony – to his mother’s case. The chapter closes with Tübingen law professors deciding that, while likely not guilty, Katharina must be shown the instruments of torture, in an effort to once more induce a confession. In chapter thirteen, the ordeal ends as Katharina resists coercive methods, but dies (likely of exhaustion) six months after the trial ends. It follows Kepler to the end of his life as he settles her affairs, navigates the thicket of increasing intolerance among potential patrons in a markedly less pluralistic empire descending into religious war, struggles to self-publish important scientific work, and arguably attempts to process the trauma of his mother’s trial by publishing a bizarre science fiction story he penned in his youth containing uncanny parallels to later events (such was the foreshadowing that Kepler became convinced his own story was the seed of later accusations).Rublack’s epilogue attempts to shift the focus back onto Katharina and various historiographical perspectives on the witchhunt craze. While her intent was likely to illuminate a less luminous subject (Kepler’s mother, rather than Kepler himself, in the current fashion of social histories of under-studied demographics), the predominant effect of the book on the reader is to humanize Johannes on a profound level, and make his accomplishments all the more astonishing in the context of his stressors. Modern scholars, some of them representing the first generation in their family to attend university, vying for grant money under the weight of student loans, while remaining alert to the risk of professional immolation at the hands of Twitter mobs, can identify with Kepler’s constant need to hustle, bow, and scrape for patronage while paying off his education, finely parse religious/ideological sensitivities, tutor children of the nobility with little aptitude or interest in mathematics, and subsidize transformative theoretical work with mundane, boring applied work (in Kepler’s case, horoscopes and land surveys). Such was his grit that he managed to formulate his third law of motion while sparing his mother a painful and humiliating death.
