The charges against her [says Janssen] were "that she had been brought up at Wilderstadt by a cousin who was burnt there as a witch; whereas as a widow she should have lived alone, she had gone about to places where she had no business to be, and had thus incurred the suspicion that she was a witch; she had given a girl a devil as paramour; she had killed two children of a burgher; had passed through locked doors; had bewitched cattle which she had never touched nor even seen." . . . Kepler defended his mother, and had hard work to save her from the rack and the stake. Casting reserve aside he depicted in the darkest colors the brutality of the proceedings in these witch trials. But he was himself a proof that the witch superstition governed the most intellectual and learned men of that time; he emphatically acknowledged the existence of witches and of the supernatural diseases which they produced.¹

¹Janssen, J.n/an/an/an/an/a, , 16: 440–441; 487–488 (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. By permission).