Far From Every Strife: Kepler's Search for Harmony in an Age of Discord

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Johannes Kepler's all-encompassing notion of harmony. By exploring Kepler's place within different kinds of communities--astronomical, religious, and political--it highlights his efforts both to reveal the harmony in nature and to work toward a worldly harmony that might follow from it. The project situates Kepler alongside the varying ways to imagine community in early modern Europe, from religious utopianism to irenicism, and from the scholarly Republic of Letters to the nascent scientific society. In so doing, it not only illuminates Kepler's larger context and goals, but also the broad relationship between science, religion, and politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.