Table of Contents

Timeline of Johannes Kepler's Life, 1571-1620
Note on Dates
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Prologue
Introduction
1: Katharina's Life
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: Katharina's Imprisonment
10: Kepler's Return
11: The Defence
12: The Trial Ends
13: Kepler's Dream
Epilogue
Notes
Further Reading and Viewing
Acknowledgements
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 edited the Oxford Concise Companion to History (2011), and, most recently, the Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformation (2016). 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

Compelling.
*Hannah Murphy, Isis Review*

Ulinka Rublack shows wonderful sensitivity about mothers, old age, and female struggles, as she unpicks the trial of Johannes Kepler's mother for witchcraft.
*Marina Warner, Book of the Year 2015, Observer*

An enthralling book.
*Jennifer Rampling, Nature*

Excellent ... meticulously researched and wonderfully readable.
*John Banville, Literary Review*

Ulinka Rublack's book about Katharina Kepler, and her sons extraordinary defence of her, is fine-grained microhistory, but it's also revealing of the larger ideas that framed their world ... Superstition and science, rather than being successive stages in the ascent of reason, co-existed so closely and dynamically that the definition of neither is reliable. The Astronomer and the Witch illustrates this complexity, and its transitions, with agility and sensitivity.
*Malcolm Gaskill, London Review of Books*

[an] important new book ... [which] offers an extended meditation on family relationships, and in particular that indelible but intangible bond between a mother and her son.
*Jan Machielsen, Times Literary Supplement*

[A] superb study ... The author wanted her book to provide a "better understanding of individuals, but also of families, a community, and an age". It succeeds triumphantly.
*Jonathan Wright, Catholic Herald*

Rublack tells [this] story with a novelist's panache. Even if you know what happened, it's a compelling book. She sketches the vivid details that make the time, place and characters come to life ... The Tale of the Witch and the Mathematician - unmissable.
*Mark Greener, Fortean Times*

In 1615, an illiterate widow is accused of witchcraft in a German town. Her son, the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, conducts her defence in a trial that drags on for six years. In this enthralling book, Ulinka Rublack reconstructs the struggle over Katharina Kepler's fate. We enter a small-town world of rivalries, friendships, deference, power and vulnerability, a world in which religious faith, scientific knowledge and folk belief are dangerously intertwined. Vividly drawn and subtly observed, The Astronomer and the Witch opens a window onto the inner life of a past that is strange and remote, but also unsettlingly familiar.
*Christopher Clark*