Description

At the dawn of the Thirty Years War, Europe was divided religiously and politically, to be sure, but also philosophically and scientifically. The Pursuit of Harmony focuses on Johannes Kepler and his efforts to establish harmony over a range of issues tearing apart his times. It offers not only a new perspective on a pivotal figure of the Scientific Revolution but a powerful new account of the relationship between religious confessions and philosophical creeds in seventeenth-century Europe. Like his contemporary Galileo, Kepler was directly engaged in the struggle to establish Copernicanism as the standard view of the cosmos. Yet despite his scientific importance and extensive body of work, few biographies exist, and the best of them reflect an outdated understanding of Kepler’s world, which in fact included the havoc of war, exile, his own excommunication, the loss of his students, his child, and his first wife, and even the grueling witch trial of his mother. Aviva Rothman is the first to reveal how through all this Kepler tried to create a unified enterprise of his own, one which he hoped might bring his crumbling world together. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Kepler, the Scientific Revolution, or seventeenth-century Europe.