Kepler Wagging his Tail

Description

Scholars have been protesting for centuries that they have no time. Humanists’ par-ticular appreciation of time has often been noted and one even spoke of the human-ist ‘discovery of time’. The paper seeks to embed such observations within an explo-ration of scholars’ way of life between 1480 and 1630. It suggests that thorny issues of time management should be comprehended in the context of the particularities of scholarly labor, especially in the philological mode, and illustrates this with a few ex-amples from Kepler's life.

GADI ALGAZI is professor of medieval history at the Department of History at Tel Aviv Univer-sity and associate research fellow at the International Research Center Re:Work – Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He is member of the editorial board of Past & Present, and past senior editor of the journal History & Memory. He was fellow at the Max Planck Institute of History (Göttingen), the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science (Berlin) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) and the Free University (Berlin). His research interests include late medieval and early modern social and cultural history; historical anthropology; the history and theory of the social scienc-es; settler colonialism and frontier societies.