History of the Popes [Christmas Summary Classics]

LEOPOLD VON RANKE
Leopold von Ranke was born at Wiehe, on December 21, 1795, and died on May 23, 1886. He became Professor of History at Berlin at the age of twenty-nine; and his life was passed in researches, the fruits of which he gave to the world in an invaluable series of historical works. The earlier of these were concerned mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--in English history generally called the Tudor and Stuart periods--based on examinations of the archives of Vienna and Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as of Berlin. In later years, when he had passed seventy, he travelled more freely outside of his special period. The "History of the Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" here presented was published in 1834-7. The English translation by Sarah Austin (1845) was the subject of review in one of Macaulay's famous essays. It is mainly concerned with the period, not of the Reformation itself, but of the century and a quarter following--roughly from 1535 to 1760, the period during which the religious antagonisms born of the Reformation were primary factors in all European complications.