The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother

"I wanted to include something from the field of history of science and magic. You could say this is not a book on the Holy Roman Empire as such, but it is very characteristic of another way of writing history, on the basis of legal proceedings. Especially in the early modern period, it is very difficult to grasp what common people did or thought, but legal proceedings are a very valuable source for giving us a glimpse. This is really an ingenious idea to thematize Johannes Kepler, one of the most famous astronomers of all time—next to Copernicus, a big actor in what we call the Scientific Revolution , who discovered the laws of planetary motion. Every school kid will have heard his name at least once. What is less well known is that Kepler’s widowed mother was accused of being a witch in 1620. So, Kepler gave up his research for some time and took over the legal defence of his mother. This is an extremely interesting case, because, on the one hand, it is about witchcraft and the way the legal proceedings worked. On the other hand, it is about Kepler, who used all his methodological skills, his new ways of producing scientific knowledge, to defend his mother. What’s really stunning is that he either believed in witchcraft, or, if he didn’t believe in it, he didn’t call it into question. So, he reckoned with the possibility that there was something like witchcraft, but he tried to prove why, in the case of his mother, it wasn’t involved. This shows something very important about what we are used to calling the Scientific Revolution, namely, that in early modern times, you could not separate magic from science . Actually, what we today would call experimental science was called ‘natural magic’ then. It is only with hindsight that you can distinguish what proved to be scientific knowledge and what proved later to be superstition. A lot of recipes—what we would today call medicine or pharmacy—were then considered to be a kind of magic knowledge. This interrelatedness of what we call magic and what we call science is very nicely shown in the book by Kepler’s arguments. The book also does justice to his mother, who represents a characteristic figure of the time, the wise woman who had this specific knowledge of healing, a role that became almost extinct in the process of the professionalization of medicine in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The book is also a very good read, fascinating like a criminal story. Ulinka Rublack is the only German among my four authors. She is an expert of the Reformation era as well as a historian of gender, of fashion and of the art market, so she looks at the Empire with a very different perspective than the others. Yes. She was not condemned as a witch in the end but died shortly after the trial. Maria Theresa was born in 1717 and died in 1780, so her life span covered almost the whole 18th century. She is a very famous figure, part of the Austrian national narrative as well as the Habsburg imperial narrative. For me, she was interesting as a key figure to the whole century, and writing her biography gave me the opportunity to describe a lot of things that I find interesting about the 18th century, which is not only the Age of Enlightenment, but also the late Baroque period. Maria Theresa mirrors in her life and her reign the ambiguous, even contradictory character of the whole century. So, you can see her as an enlightened monarch in many ways, but you can also consider her a traditional Baroque ruler. To be honest, I don’t really like her. As a very strict defender of the one and only true Catholic faith, she persecuted the Protestants. And she expelled the Jews from Bohemia. So, she was radically intolerant on the one hand, but on the other she was, in some respects, an enlightened ruler, too. She fought, for example, the belief in vampires that was flourishing in her territories at the time. In her old age, she even considered abolishing serfdom in Bohemia. There are a lot of features that, from the present point of view, seem contradictory. She is also an interesting figure in gender history. She was the heir of the Habsburg lands, which was quite unusual for a woman. She ruled her territories herself, which nobody had expected. She was also the mother of 16 children. Being a woman, a mother, and a sovereign ruler, she challenged the gender order of the time. It is fascinating how she managed this complicated situation. She had to defend her territories against a lot of enemies— Frederick II of Prussia was by no means the only one—and she did so quite successfully, which nobody would have expected. She is not only an interesting figure in herself but also a key to understanding things like, how a court functioned, and what the social logic of the time was like. She helps to understand the conflict between enlightened ideas and Baroque religiosity, the changing relationship between church and state, but also, for example, how warfare changed during this period or how new media emerged. Her family life is also interesting, the rigid way she controlled her adult kids, the mercilessness with which she sacrificed her daughters to the dynastic principle, such as Marie Antoinette or Maria Carolina. The book is also about the history of sexuality, the history of the body, the history of clothing; all of this can be explored through Maria Theresa. It is a kind of all-encompassing history of the 18th century through the lens of this individual’s biography. She couldn’t wage war. She was almost always pregnant. This was, of course, a handicap, but the most important thing was that her enemies denied her legitimacy from the very beginning, when she ascended to the throne. A female ruler was considered a ‘state disease’, and that gave her dynastic rivals a welcome pretext to invade her countries. Exactly. The female rule was just a pretext; the weakness of her predecessor’s rule was a more important reason. But the common belief that women are inferior to men in body, mind and soul made it easier to legitimize the attack. Interestingly, at her coronation—she was queen of Bohemia and of Hungary—she was crowned in a very elaborate ritual, as King of Bohemia and King of Hungary. She underwent a male ritual, riding on horseback and wielding the sword against the enemies of Christendom. The master of ceremonies explicitly said that as the heir to the throne, she was being treated and regarded as a man. So, her female body was distinguished from her male political role. This is very telling about the way one coped with this challenge in the 18th century. She was defined as a male person, although she gave birth to 16 kids. Her father had chosen her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine. He had lost his own principality and dynastic power, so there was no rivalry between the two houses, and he was absolutely dependent on her. Everyone expected him to take up the government and actually to rule. But she disappointed all these expectations and ruled herself, which was very unusual. They were cousins, since all of the European dynasties were closely related. But these two grew up together, which was very uncommon. Noble couples usually met for the first time at their wedding. Some intimate love letters have been preserved, so it seems that she really loved him, which was extremely unusual. Contemporaries said that they behaved like peasants, sleeping in the same bed."