Table of Contents

Timeline of Johannes Kepler's LIfe
1: 2: Introduction
2: A Lutheran Court
3: The Year of the Witches
4: Kepler's Strategies
5: A Family Responds
6: Movements of the Soul
7: The Trial Continues
8: Other Witches
9: Katherina's Imprisonment
10: Kepler's Return
11: The Defence
12: The Trial Ends
13: Kepler's Dream
Epilogue
Notes
Further Reading
Index

Promotional Information

Shortlisted for the 2017 Dingle Prize

About the Author

Ulinka Rublack is Professor at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on early modern European history as well as approaches to history. She has edited, most recently, the Oxford Concise Companion to History (2011), and her Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations is forthcoming. Her monographs include Reformation Europe (2005), The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (1999), and Dressing Up: Cultural
Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize.

Reviews

`This book takes you right to the heart of life in the seventeenth century, with all its sense of intellectual possibility, its dreams and its fears. Rublack tells a shocking story. How was it possible for the mother of the famous scientist Kepler to be accused of witchcraft, and why did she come to trial? In gripping prose, Rublack shows how the case destroyed those involved in it. She makes us understand how witchcraft could be credible and why people
feared it so much. She makes us understand the psychological wellsprings of Keplers work. And she presents a whole new account of scientific thinking and its relationship to natural knowledge at the dawn of
a new era. The most compelling book I have read for a long time.'
Professor Lyndal Roper, University of Oxford
`... an enthralling, many-sided book... at once a vivid introduction to a fascinating social and cultural world; a profound analysis of a witch trial... and a deep study of one of the greatest scientists who ever lived...'
Professor Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
`Gripping and inspiring, this tale of the six-year battle to clear Katharina Kepler of the charge of witchcraft yields striking new insights into the personalities and families involved, their communities and their culture... The past, with its hopes and fears, comes wonderfully to life in this scholarly masterwork.'
Professor Nicholas Jardine, University of Cambridge