Johannes Kepler: Revisiting the Life and Letters (The 2025 Bithell Memorial Lecture)

Ulinka Rublack gives the 2025 Bithell Memorial Lecture. 


Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most important scientists of all time. This lecture argues that his inspired thinking was rooted in his unconventional life and career. In contrast to his famous contemporary Galileo, this was a man who had to learn everything from scratch about how to behave in academia. His father had not attended university and was a soldier; his mother was illiterate and from a peasant background. Kepler’s father, Heinrich, appears from the records to have been badly suited to institutions, such as the household he was meant to govern and to the many constraints of German communal life – he frequently got into arguments and never adapted to a settled burgher’s existence, leaving his wife Katharina to bring up their children very much on her own. In this the Keplers were outsiders in the small town of Leonberg near Stuttgart, where Johannes mostly grew up. We might say that it was easier for him to think outside the box because he had not been firmly socialised into thinking within one. The lecture tracks how Johannes Kepler’s emotional and scientific thinking evolved in the course of his career and during the period when his mother was accused of witchcraft – when he wrote his masterpiece, The Harmony of the World.  Ulinka Rublack argues that we need to understand his life and legacy through his emotional relationships and letters as much as through his theoretical insights and laws.

Professor Ulinka Rublack, FBA, is a cultural historian at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. 

Attendance is free and open to all who are interested. Refreshments will be available following the lecture. Advance online registration is essential. 

Image: Detail from the portrait of Johannes Kepler in the Kepler Museum in Weil der Stadt. Painted in 1920 by August Köhler (1881-1964). (Wikimedia Commons/public domain).