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| http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2012/06/the-kepler-defense.html |
Mother/son movie idea...
"Kepler's mother was taken away in the middle of the night in a laundry chest. It took Kepler six years of unremitting effort to save her life."
"Part of the basis of the charge of witchcraft was that, in his Dream, Kepler uses mother's spells to leave the earth..."
"Part of the basis of the charge of witchcraft was that, in his Dream, Kepler uses mother's spells to leave the earth..."
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| http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/1268227 |
"Summoned by his frantic sister, Kepler
rushed back to Leonberg to find his mother lying in chains...They gave him
six weeks and (pointing out her advanced age) wondered whether one
guard wouldn't do instead of two, and whether the court might not
help the defense pay, if not the guards' whole keep, at least for
part of the huge stacks of firewood they consumed to keep warm. The
judges' discomfort at this onslaught was recorded by a tiny slip of
the clerk's pen preserving for posterity one off-the-record word: 'The accused appeared in court, accompanied, alas, by her son,
Johannes Kepler, mathematician.' (Caspar, quoted by Arthur
Koestler p 386)
She was charged with 49 counts of
witchcraft, not counting numerous 'supplementary' charges.
Item: 'The accused has failed the 'weeping test;' didn't
even shed a tear when read admonitory texts from Holy Scripture' (a sure sign of a hard-headed, unrepentant, devil-possessed witch).
To this Katharina burst out: 'My life has been so full of tears,
I have none left to shed.'"
"Mrs. Kepler wasn’t the first member of the family to run into trouble with the witch-hunting authorities. She had been raised by an aunt who had herself been burned at the stake, and she dabbled in herbal concoctions she believed to be magical. Nor was she particularly well-liked (her own son described her as “small, thin, swarthy, gossiping and quarrelsome, of a bad disposition”). In 1615, one of Mrs. Kepler’s customers – a nasty piece of work named Ursula Reinbold, who’d fallen out with the Kepler family over a series of business transactions – accused the old lady of having poisoned her with a witch’s brew. Mrs. Kepler had had enough. She not only denied the charges (even when Mrs. Reinbold’s brother pressed a sword to her throat and demanded that she produce an antidote), she filed a libel suit against her accuser.
Mrs. Kepler was not the only woman accused of witchcraft in Leonberg (Lutherus Einhorn, who served as Vogt – something like a town bailiff – from 1613-1629, had 15 women arrested for witchcraft, and eight of them were executed for it), but she was the only one whose son was Imperial Mathematician to Rudolph II."
http://www.popbunker.net/2010/08/week-odd-history-keplers-mother-arrested-witchcraft-august-7-1620/
"Commuting back and forth from his work in Linz (showing an admirable capacity for keeping his head while others about him were in danger of losing theirs, Kepler discovered his third law of planetary motion in 1618; apparently he also read Galileo’s father on one of the trips between Linz and Leonberg), he organized his mother’s defense and wrote her briefs in his own hand.
It finally paid off."
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