Abstract
Completing this Kepler edition has taken more than a century. In 1914, at a meeting of the German scholarly academies, Walther von Dyck, mathematician and influential science organizer in Munich, called for a new edition of Kepler’s works, to expand and improve the nineteenth-century edition prepared by Christian Frisch. Manuscripts were collected, funding was secured from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the German Research Foundation, and Dyck and Max Caspar began publishing some preliminary works. After Dyck’s death in 1934, Caspar and Franz Hammer were enlisted to launch the edition. From 1937–1960, these editors produced volumes 1–10 of the printed works and volumes 13–18 of the correspondence. From 1975–1990, Martha List, Volker Bialas, and several others edited the printed ephemerides, calendars, and prognostications (10–11); manuscript biographical materials (19); and a miscellany of poems, theological writings, and legal transcripts of Kepler’s mother’s trial for witchcraft (12). Finally, from 1988–2009, a team led by Bialas and Friedericke Boockmann produced volumes 20–21 (in 5 codices) of the astronomical, astrological, mathematical, and other manuscripts. Together the 22 volumes fill more than a metre of my bookshelf.
Registers to such multi-year, complex editions inevitably embody compromises. The individual volumes were mostly prepared with indices but only of persons. And little effort was exerted to keep names and work titles consistent. As the editors in 1988 started preparing a General Register, they realized that some of the earlier volumes would require new or reworked indexing. And reworking one volume often required returning to and revising a previously indexed volume. Thus, the “scholarly public is here given a nearly 500-page register that is not free from variations in quality” (p. 10).
The index of persons fills nearly 250 pages, the subject index (both Latin and German terms) about 200 pages, the geographical and historical index 30 pages, the biblical passages index 25 pages. The latter three indices are new and provide tools not available in the earlier individual volumes. Users of the Gesammelte Werke will now be able, for example, to follow Kepler’s Bible reading, to notice that he cited the Old Testament and apocrypha much more frequently than the New. His knowledge of ancient geography is nicely displayed in the geographical index. Most useful will be the subject index, especially for studies of the diachronic development of Kepler’s rhetoric, interests, and conceptual tools. Tracing terms like “cantus,” “experientia,” “lux,” “mundi systema Copernici,” or “numerorum philosophia” may prompt new understandings of Kepler’s intellectual life.
The volume also contains a 200-page catalog of the Kepler manuscripts found in more than 90 archives and libraries scattered across the globe. Especially detailed are descriptions of the so-called Pulkowo Manuscripts, now held at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. These 22 codices mix together letters, notes, drafts, computations, and texts, often undated and often only obscurely related to the printed works or other manuscripts. The editors list the contents folio by folio, including much “varia” that has never been published. Future researchers seeking to glean material from the Pulkowo Manuscripts will be much indebted to this detailed record.
The volume ends with a chronological register to the biographical scraps of manuscripts published in volume 19, an alphabetical list of all the “works” in the edition, and a volume-by-volume record of “errata, corrigenda, addenda.”
Not until 1951 did Isis (vol. 42, 252–255) review the Gesammelte Werke. The reviewer, C. Doris Hellman, guessed that “the confusion of the war years” had made it difficult for the books to circulate beyond Germany. “I was unable to locate a copy in New York City!” Nonetheless, she had seen six of the eight volumes published by that time and offered an enthusiastic resumé of their contents. “What I have, indeed, missed,” she concluded, is an index of subjects. I hope one will be provided for the entire collection in a final volume. From it, Kepler’s treatments of any one subject could be readily found, or it could be quickly ascertained if he did not deal with a particular matter.
With the appearance of JKGW volume 22, Hellman’s wish finally has been granted. Kepler scholars must thank the editors, the Bavarian Academy, and the Verlag C.H. Beck for seeing this project to its completion.