Originally shared by Kevin Clift
Johannes Kepler
In the days before the Internet made knowledge so easy to come by, I stood bewildered in this square in a small village near Leonberg in Germany, astonished to see this monument and to read that Johannes Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt, where his Father was the mayor. The adjacent Kepler museum seemed the only other monument to him there, and was closed all the time, and so the one available reference to Johannes Kepler was a handful of words on the plinth (http://goo.gl/M6eW3a).
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630). Although he is overshadowed today by Isaac Newton and Galileo, he is considered by many to be one of the greatest scientists in history. The three laws of planetary motion Kepler developed transformed people’s understanding of the Solar System and laid the foundations for the revolutionary ideas Isaac Newton produced later. Kepler is also thought to have written one of the first works of science fiction. However, he faced a number of challenges. He had to defend his mother from charges of witchcraft, he had few financial resources and his career suffered as a result of his Lutheran faith.
The expert guests include Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College, who was born in Tübingen near Stuttgart and Kepler’s birthplace, Weil der Stadt.
Professor Ulinka Rublack wrote a book, The astronomer & the witch : Johannes Kepler’s fight for his mother, which tells the story of how Kepler’s Mother was accused of witchcraft by Ursula Reingold in the village of Eltingen (https://goo.gl/yQD4vG) near Leonberg, who was, by the way, arguing with his brother Christoph about money.
Kepler’s widowed mother Katharina was incarcerated for over a year, sometimes chained-up, verbally tortured with territio verbalis (terrifying descriptions of the physical torture in-store for her) and then tried for six years. Professor Rublack explains how Johannes had to drop what he was doing and return without explanation to save his Mother and his own reputation.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived and a key figure in the scientific revolution. A defender of Copernicus’s sun-centered universe, he famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, and defined the three laws of planetary motion. Perhaps less well known is that in 1615, when Kepler was at the height of his career, his widowed mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft. The proceedings led to a criminal trial that lasted six years, with Kepler conducting his mother’s defense. In ‘The Astronomer and the Witch’, Ulinka Rublack pieces together the tale of this extraordinary episode in Kepler’s life, one which takes us to the heart of his changing world. First and foremost an intense family drama, the story brings to life the world of a small Lutheran community in the centre of Europe at a time of deep religious and political turmoil– a century after the Reformation, and on the threshold of the Thirty Years’ War. Kepler’s defense of his mother also offers us a fascinating glimpse into the great astronomer’s world view, on the cusp between Reformation and scientific revolution. While advancing rational explanations for the phenomena which his mother’s accusers attributed to witchcraft, Kepler nevertheless did not call into question the existence of magic and witches. On the contrary, he clearly believed in them. And, as the story unfolds, it appears that there were moments when even Katharina’s children wondered whether their mother really did have nothing to hide …
The astronomer & the witch : Johannes Kepler’s fight for his mother (local library): https://goo.gl/7pXLP2
Johannes Kepler (Wikip): https://goo.gl/3Cz9mI
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In Our Time: Johannes Kepler (listen here): https://goo.gl/tXRCyy
(Stream, download MP3, podcast, links, reading)
Image: https://goo.gl/MZYcjv
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