A nice quote from "The Scientists" about Kepler and Galileo:

He was a man of his time, poised between the mysticism of the past and the logical science of the future, but whose stature as a voice for reason stands even higher in the context of a world where princes and emperors still depended on the prognostocations of astrologers, and where his own mother was tried for witchcraft. At the same time Kepler was carrying out his great work, an even more powerful voice of scientific reason was being heard further south in Italy, where although there was as mutch superstition and religious persecution as in central Europe, at least there was some measure of stability and the persecution always came from the same Church.