The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes about the production of the Renaissance period: As such, it has become a projection screen, and its achievements are interpreted as pointing beyond its time and space. Today, it’s still valid and almost undisputed to take »the« Early Modern Age as a reference period for the birth of Modern Europe. This text searches for a decolonial approach to history and European self-perception – following the mention by philosopher Isabelle Stengers that the term »animism« (or »magic« – note from the author) »can hardly be disentangled from pejorative colonialist associations associations with the idea of ›stages‹.« 1 A brief analysis of this trial’s circumstances, together with a wider view on the process of segregation in European systems of thought, questions the proclaimed inambiguity of that time. Katharina Kepler, the mother of the well-known mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, was one of many women prosecuted at that time for being in a pact with the devil and using witchcraft. The births of the natural sciences and the peak of femicides in the form of »witch hunts« fall into this period. Massive transformative developments in technology and science, and the brutal suppression of non-Christian beliefs, are the two known poles of an area of conflict in which realities of the early modern era are placed from our current perspective.

Anima motrix definition