Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother
    Unavailable
    Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother
    Unavailable
    Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother
    Ebook527 pages9 hours

    Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother

    By James A. Connor

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Set against the backdrop of the witchcraft trial of his mother, this lively biography of Johannes Kepler – 'the Protestant Galileo' and 16th century mathematician and astronomer – reveals the surprisingly spiritual nature of the quest of early modern science.

    In the style of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, Connor's book brings to life the tidal forces of Reformation, Counter–Reformation, and social upheaval. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion, was persecuted for his support of the Copernican system. After a neighbour accused his mother of witchcraft, Kepler quit his post as the Imperial mathematician to defend her.

    James Connor tells Kepler's story as a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey into the modern world through war and disease and terrible injustice, a journey reflected in the evolution of Kepler's geometrical model of the cosmos into a musical model, harmony into greater harmony. The leitmotif of the witch trial adds a third dimension to Kepler's biography by setting his personal life within his own times. The acts of this trial, including Kepler's letters and the accounts of the witnesses, although published in their original German dialects, had never before been translated into English. Echoing some of Dava Sobel's work for Galileo's Daughter, Connor has translated the witch trial documents into English. With a great respect for the history of these times and the life of this man, Connor's accessible story illuminates the life of Kepler, the man of science, but also Kepler, a man of uncommon faith and vision.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061737428
    Unavailable
    Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother
    Author

    James A. Connor

    James A. Connor is the author of Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother and Silent Fire: Bringing the Spirituality of Silence to Everyday Life. A former Jesuit priest, Connor is professor of English at Kean University in Union, New Jersey; he has also held teaching posts at St. Louis University and Gonzaga University. He is a director of studies at the Lessing Institute in Prague. He holds degrees in geoscience, philosophy, theology, and creative writing, and a Ph.D. in literature and science. He is a prize-winning essayist published widely in such places as American Book Review, Traditional Home, Willow Springs, The Critic, The Iowa Review, and The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies.

    Read more from James A. Connor

    Related to Kepler's Witch

    Related ebooks

    Historical Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Elizabeth I’s Alchemist

      Sep 12, 2019

      Elizabeth I’s Alchemist
      8 min read

    • Article

      Fear Of A Black Magic

      Mar 27, 2020

      Fear Of A Black Magic
      4 min read

    • Article

      Practising The Occult

      Sep 12, 2019

      Agrippa’s interest in the occult began early in his career and he notably studied with Johannes Trithemius, the man who wrote Steganographia. Between 1531 and 1533, he published his famous De Occulta Philosophia, which dealt with the occult and magic

      1 min read

    • Article

      Johannes Kepler

      Nov 18, 2021

      The fundamentals of astronomy for beginners A kig figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler was an astronomer, mathematician, astrologer and staunch Lutheran. He was born on 27 December 1571 into a lower middle-class fa

      3 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      Books

      May 22, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Sep 10, 2020

      The First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel & the Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet Meggan Watterson Hay House, 2019 HB, £19.99, 264pp. ISBN 9781401954901 Since the discovery in 1945 in Egypt of a library of early Christian Coptic texts – often referred t

      4 min read

    • Article

      Copernicus Blazed A Trail For Early Astronomers To Follow

      Dec 31, 2019

      Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo each played a role in furthering the study of the heavens, as L.S. Fauber amply demonstrates in “Heaven on Earth.”

      3 min read

    • Article

      Kepler's Dream Today's Reality

      Mar 4, 2020

      Kepler's Dream Today's Reality
      7 min read

    • Article

      Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton?

      Jan 20, 2021

      The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known affectionately for being called a “magnificent erection” by, before he became prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.1 When I was a graduate stude

      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 10, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      After Death We Go…?

      Nov 5, 2020

      A History of the Afterlife Bart D Ehrman Oneworld 2020 Hb, 352pp, £20, ISBN 9781786077202 Many Christians believe that their doctrines sprang fully-formed from the Jewish origins of Christianity. But if this were so, many beliefs would be very differ

      8 min read

    • Article

      Marking Time

      Oct 7, 2021

      From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era Kären Wigen & Caroline Winterer eds University of Chicago Press 2020 Hb, 231pp, £34, ISBN 9780226178590 Although we tend to think of maps as a way of representing space, we actually use them for much more,

      8 min read

    • Article

      GALILEO vs The Inquisicion

      Jul 13, 2023

      GALILEO vs The Inquisicion
      8 min read

    • Article

      Isaac Newton

      Dec 15, 2022

      The fundamentals of astronomy for beginners Tis month marks the 380th anniversary of the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most celebrated figures in scientific history, whose wide-ranging contributions touched almost every aspect of modern scien

      2 min read

    • Article

      It’s Personal: Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives: Meet the inspiring people—none named Einstein—who helped these scientists find their calling.

      Dec 1, 2016

      The Man Who Loved PhysicsBy Alan Lightman Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “retinue,” a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one me

      20 min read

    • Article

      Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton: ‘Our Universe Is One Tiny Grain Of Dust In A Beautiful Cosmos’

      Aug 27, 2022

      Laura Mersini-Houghton was born in Albania and grew up under a totalitarian communist regime which, until its collapse in 1991, cut the country off from the rest of the world. Influenced by her father, Nexhat Mersini, a mathematician, she developed a

      5 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Oct 7, 2021

      Karl PN Shuker Coachwhip Publications, 2019 Pb, 400+pp each, £16. ISBN 9781616464677 & 9781616464837 By all accounts (even his own) Dr Shuker is a prolific writer, so anyone interested in his cryptozoological articles (more than 600 at last count) mi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Jun 16, 2022

      John Nicholson was the only child of Captain W Ivan Nicholson and Eleanor (Nella) Zollner, daughter of the Danish Consul. In 1946, when John was six, the family moved to Flying Rat Cottage in Great Dunmow, Essex, where they kept poultry, plus a goat

      6 min read

    • Article

      Who killed Tycho Brahe?

      Aug 15, 2019

      Next time the Moon is close to full, grab a pair of binoculars and take a closer look. The most obvious feature of all, standing out brightly amid the grey lunar plains, is a large, prominent crater surrounded by a bright series of streaks that radia

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Lure Of Merfolk

      Jan 28, 2021

      A Human History Vaughn Scribner Reaktion Books 2020 Hb, 320pp, £20, ISBN 9781789143140 Lusty, dangerous, pious, monstrous, thought provoking, ancient, modern. These are only a few of the ways in which merpeople can be described in Vaughn Scribner’s i

      8 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Jan 5, 2023

      Graeme Milne London Publishing, 2021 Pb, £12.99, 288pp, ISBN 9781914408250 Veteran ghost historian Graeme Milne has published a number of anthologies of Scottish ghosts; this title being an amalgamation of two earlier collections of tales from Aberde

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Loneliest Genius: Isaac Newton spurned social contact but also relied on it for his greatest work.

      Nov 27, 2014

      Describing his life, shortly before his death, Newton put his contributions this way: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then fi

      20 min read

    • Article

      Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives

      Dec 2, 2020

      The Man Who Loved PhysicsBy Alan Lightman Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “retinue,” a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one me

      20 min read

    • Article

      Competing Theories?

      Mar 16, 2023

      Competing Theories?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Kepler's Legacy

      Mar 4, 2020

      Like almost all scholarly works of the 17th century, Kepler’s Somnium was written in Latin, making it inaccessible to the general public. But the small community of scientists interested in alien life and spaceflight took note of the book from the mo

      1 min read

    • Article

      On My Radar: Carlo Rovelli’s Cultural Highlights

      Oct 28, 2023

      Born in Verona, Italy, in 1956, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is known for his writing on the philosophy of science. His books include the bestselling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time and Helgoland and have been translated into

      3 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Mar 23, 2023

      Folklore and the world of forteana lost a rising star with the untimely death of Kai Roberts following a short illness. He was the son of my friend and long-time FT contributor Andy Roberts. I first met Kai when he was just four years old at his home

      4 min read

    • Article

      Nicolaus Copernicus

      Feb 24, 2022

      Nicolaus Copernicus
      2 min read

    Reviews for Kepler's Witch

    4/5

    45 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      While Johannes Kepler was breaking ground in the field of astronomy, he was also fighting to save his mother from a charge of witchcraft. This book gives an account of that struggle along with a biography of Kepler's life in general. Sounds pretty fascinating, no? Welp. Apparently not, at least as Connor tells it. Bone dry and so disappointing.