SOURCE: "Kepler's Scientific and Astronomical Achievements," in Kepler: Four Hundred Years: Proceedings of Conferences Held in Honour of Johannes Kepler, edited by Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, in Vistas in Astronomy, Vol. 18, Pergamon Press, 1975, pp. 109-17.

In the essay below, Morando provides a concise overview of Kepler's career that includes a brief discussion of his upbringing and early years.

Johannes Kepler lived in a Germany still shaken by religious warfare and soon to be plunged into the Thirty Years War. His genius, which today seems so profound and so naïve, his personality, by turns self-doubting and aggressive, his work, full of mysticism and rigour—all these are very much in the image of the European society of his time. Kepler was mid-way between the Aristotelianism and superstition of the Middle Ages and the proud confidence in reason of the Enlightenment, and we see him picking his way...