Fiolxhilde

Johannes Kepler measured the heavens. His three laws of planetary motion, published in 1609 and 1619, hold today. He also, around 1608, wrote a short story for fun.

In the story, an Icelandic boy named Duracotus travels to the Moon with his herb-woman mother, Fiolxhilde, who summons a lunar daemon to carry them across the ether.

A manuscript leaked around Württemberg in 1611, possibly via a barber. In Württemberg, an herb-woman with an astronomer son was not hard to find.

Katharina Kepler, seventy-four, refused all forty-nine charges (turning into a cat, slipping under doors, riding a calf to death) from the stone floor she was chained to for fourteen months. Her son, from Linz, wrote a 128-page legal brief and spent over 900 gulden, two years of Imperial Mathematician's salary, keeping her alive. She was acquitted in 1621 and died six months later.

Kepler spent the rest of his life burying the Somnium under 223 explanatory footnotes, more annotation than text, insisting the daemon was really an allegory for the scientific method.

He never published it.