Kepler's Attitude to His Mother

Attention has recently been directed again to the attitude of Johannes Kepler toward his mother. Their relationship is especially interesting because it was only through the eminent scientist's intervention that she barely escaped being burned to death as a witch. An investigation of the son's attitude toward his mother is made possible by the unusually rich documentation which has survived. The records of the mother's trial have been published,4a as has also the son's correspondence.3a A careful study of these voluminous materials permits us to disentangle the separate strands in his statements about his mother.

A recent book about Kepler tells us that “in various petitions to the Duke of Württemberg, he stated that he realized she was a trouble maker, ‘garrulous,’ ‘fickle and even malicious.’”5 In support of this assertion that Kepler made these derogatory remarks about his mother in his appeals to her ruler, the Duke of Württemberg, not a single passage is adduced from any of his petitions. Instead, a previous book about Kepler is cited. But this book in turn likewise failed to provide any documentary foundation for its statement that he “frankly admitted in his numerous petitions to the Duke of Württemberg that his mother had been for many years a difficult person, ‘garrulous,’ ‘fickle and even malicious,’ a real trouble maker and above all, extremely inquisitive.”1

Evidently neither of these modern writers was aware of the gravity of one of their allegations. Had Kepler indeed stated in a petition to the Duke that he “realized” his mother was “fickle and even malicious,” or had he “frankly admitted” in such a document that “for many years” she had been “fickle and even malicious,” he would thereby have aided her adversaries, who wanted to compel her to submit to interrogation under torture.

In fact the Duke's prosecuting attorney tried very hard to convince