2.7. Continuities in Kepler scholarship: the European Kepler symposia in historiographical perspective

Abstract

BETWEEN August and October 1971 many conferences in honor of Kepler were held across Europe? Several of these symposia (reviewed in this paper) took place in a number of cities where Kepler lived and worked and where many others have since labored to uncover the significance of his writings: in Weil der Stadt, Kepler's birthplace; in Linz, where he was district mathematician from 1612 to 1626; in Leningrad, where Kepler's manuscripts were brought in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great; in London, at a meeting of the British Society for the History of Science held at the Warburg Institute; and in Zag~in, where Kepler spent the last two years of his life in great loneliness before his death in Regensburg. Special displays of Kepleriana could be seen not only at the various symposia, but also in Prague, where Kepler succeeded Tycho Brahe as Court Astronomer to the Emperor Rudolph II and where he composed his great Astronomiae pars opticae (1604) and the Astronomia Nova (1609); and in Tiibingen, the site of Kepler's university training, his work with Michael M/istlin and his adoption of the Copernican theory. A series of lectures on Kepler's life were given at Graz, location of the young astronomer's