Abstract
Descartes account of urban images in his visions of a stove-heated room in southern Germany, at the turn of the 30-Year War, had been a milestone on the road to modernity. So were the laws of planetary motion discovered a decade earlier by Johannes Kepler, triggered as well by urban imagery. Descartes’ whereabouts at the time were in the same jurisdiction, duchy Württemberg, as the place where a witchcraft trial were to proceed, at the same time, against Kepler’s herbalist mother. In the story of the concurrent location of Katharina Kepler, a silent victim of medievalist persecution, and René Descartes, a flamboyant founder of modernity, we have two protagonists who, both in their own way, helped shut down the Middle Ages and usher modernity.
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Akkerman, A. (2016). From Cartesian Doubt to Heroic Design: The Late LIA and the Myth of the Grand Designer. In: Phenomenology of the Winter-City. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26701-2_12
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