Katharina Kepler’s trouble begins when a former friend, Ursula Reinbold, accuses Katharina of poisoning her with sour wine. Graphic by Jieru Ye ‘23.
By Margaret Connor ’23
Copy Chief
Don’t let the title fool you — Rivka Galchen’s second novel “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” is as far from contemporary popular fantasy as the Earth is from the sun. Based on an assemblage of historical documents from the seventeenth century, “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” is a fictionalized account of the real-life story of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s mother, Katharina Guldenmann Kepler, an accused — and acquitted — witch. Taking place during the early 1600s in Leonberg, a Protestant town in the Holy Roman Empire, “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” is an unusually nuanced portrayal of persecution, complicated by microscopic and macroscopic conflicts.
Katharina Kepler is a widowed apothecary in her seventies, kept company by her dear cow, Chamomile. Her trouble begins when a former friend, Ursula Reinbold, accuses Katharina of poisoning her with sour wine. Although the allegation is unofficial, as word spreads, Katharina’s family begins to fear for their livelihood, and encourages her to charge Reinbold with slander. This, unfortunately, has the effect of legally formalizing the accusation of witchcraft, and as the book unfolds, more and more townsfolk come forward to accuse, defend and castigate Katharina.
Galchen formats “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” as an epistolary novel — a work presented as a series of documents — reflecting the myriad of records that served as her inspiration and sources while writing this book. Told in roughly chronological order, the book comprises legal filings, court interviews and letters from her youngest son, Johannes, and Katharina’s own testimony. As she herself is illiterate, Katharina must dictate her account to her neighbor, Simon. Indeed, literacy and the tensions of a literate body of power in a semi-literate society play a powerful role in the story.
One of Galchen’s strengths is her ability to convincingly and compellingly tie her narrative into the real historical events of the early 1600s. Without becoming overly expository, she incorporates into her story the studies of Johannes Kepler and the death of his mentor Tycho Brache, the then-recent work of Martin Luther and the social and economic effects of the Little Ice Age. These color the daily lives of Galchen’s characters as much as the petty squabbles and pettier officials persecuting Katharina. Galchen’s portrayal of history never feels like a flat, matte backdrop or a showpiece spectacle — it feels like the authentic narration of a person living through troubled times.
“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” takes an unusual perspective on the witch-hunt narrative. Rather than rehashing Arthur Miller’s 20th-century play, “The Crucible,” perhaps the best-known work in the tradition, Galchen delves into the unique intricacies of her own story, exploring exactly why Katharina has been charged.
Katharina has a reputation for imposing on the other townsfolk, in large part due to asking others to read her son’s letters and help her respond to them. While her children have had enough education to read and write, this brings them a new host of problems. One of her sons’ wives reads lurid pamphlets about cannibalism and witch-burnings; Johannes struggles to find employment at a university due to a tract he wrote in his youth. Furthermore, his efforts to find “heretical” literature in a Europe divided by faith keep him away from his family for stretches of time.
Katharina’s persecution has many causes: prejudice, ignorance, fear, greed, vulnerability. The attacks attributed to Katharina are revealed to be commonplace misfortunes and illnesses easily explainable to a modern mind, but not so to her fellow townsfolk. The reader, unlike the characters, recognizes that crop failures are the fault of a changing climate and poor governmental management, physical disability is the result of dangerous working conditions and Ursula Reinhard’s mysterious illness is more gynecological than supernatural. According to Ursula’s brother, “She can’t urinate without shouts of pain. She cries in front of important guests. Her husband says she doesn’t function for him anymore”; another townsman says, “It’s tied to the moon.”
As far as its structure, the novel is well-paced. Galchen wisely elects to skip over Katharina’s long periods of travel and inactivity, focusing instead on moments that further the plot and develop its themes regarding the power of stories and the human cost of bias. The novel’s feeling of narrative progression comes less from legal proceedings than from shifts in mood and tone. Beginning with the same eccentric humor that characterized Galchen’s earlier works, the story descends into anguish and uncertainty as the case against Katharina builds.
It’s no wonder Galchen would choose to make a distinction between the early-novel catfights of the Real Housefrau of Leonberg and the later horrors of prison, pogroms and infant mortality. Over the course of the narrative, the death of children becomes as much a part of the narrative’s emotional core as Katharina’s trial. When she leaves her town to live with Johannes in Linz, a far-away town where she will not be recognized, Katharina becomes close with his young daughter, Maruschl, who loves plants and cows as much as she does. It’s a touching, humanizing moment for the oft-cantankerous widow, and Galchen’s ability to quickly flesh out her characters prevents their interactions from feeling saccharine or overwrought.
Rivka Galchen presents readers with a fictionalized narrative made real by the powerful tangibility of its setting and the emotional depth of its protagonist. Beyond simply writing an interesting historical drama, she pens an uncommonly sensitive and multifaceted meditation on persecution and the messy, multifarious forces that come together to scapegoat a vulnerable, elderly widow. Though set four hundred years in the past, “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” lays bare biases and systems relevant to this very day.