Leopold Von Ranke

Background

Ranke was born in Wiehe, then part of the Electorate of Saxony on the 21st of december in 1795 . He came from a family of Lutheran pastors and lawyers.

Education

He was educated partly at home and partly in the high school at Schulpforta. His early years engendered a lifelong love of Ancient Greek, Latin and Lutheranism. In 1814, Ranke entered the University of Leipzig, where his subjects were Classics and Lutheran theology.

Career

At Leipzig, Ranke became an expert in philology and translation of the ancient authors into German. His teachers included Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann. Ranke showed little interest in the work of modern history because of his dissatisfaction with what he regarded as history books that were merely a collection of facts lumped together by modern historians.

Between 1817 and 1825, Ranke worked as a schoolmaster teaching classics at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Frankfurt an der Oder. During this time, he became interested in history, in part because of his desire to be involved in the developing field of a more professionalized history, and in part because of his desire to find the hand of God in the workings of history.

In 1824, he launched his career with his book Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514), in which he used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses". In that sense, he leaned on the traditions of philology but emphasized mundane documents instead of old and exotic literature.

In 1825, after the minister of education was impressed with the work of a historian who did not have access to the nation's great public libraries, Ranke was given a position in the University of Berlin, where he was a professor for nearly fifty years. At the university he used the seminar system, and taught how to check the value of sources. Ranke became deeply involved in the dispute between the followers of the legal professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny who emphasized the varieties of different periods of history and the followers of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who saw history as the unfolding of a universal story. Ranke supported Savigny and criticized the Hegelian view of history as being a one-size-fits-all approach. Also during his time in Berlin, Ranke became the first historian to utilize the forty-seven volumes that comprised the diplomatic archives of Venice from the 16th century and 17th centuries. Since many archives opened up during this time he sent out his students to these places to recruit information. In his classrooms he would discuss the sources that his students would find and would emphasize that history should be told "the way it happened". Because of this he is often seen as "the pioneer of a critical historical science". Ranke came to prefer dealing with primary sources as opposed to secondary sources during this time.

When Ranke was in Italy he discovered the reports that Venetian ambassadors delivered before the Senate after their return from their diplomatic missions and realized that such materials of an official character, produced in the course of the conduct of affairs, were far superior to narrative sources as tools for discovering the truth about the past.

In 1832 to 1836, at the behest of the Prussian government, Ranke founded and edited the Historische-Politische Zeitschrift journal. Ranke, who was a conservative, used the journal to attack the ideas of Liberalism. In his 1833 article "The Great Powers" and his 1836 article "Dialogue on Politics", Ranke claimed that every state is given a special moral character from God and individuals should strive to best fulfill the "idea" of their state. Thus, in this way, Ranke urged his readers to stay loyal to the Prussian state and reject the ideas of the French Revolution, which Ranke claimed were meant for France only.

In 1834–36 Ranke published Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (The Popes of Rome, Their Church and State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) (3 vols. ).

In 1841, his fame in its ascendancy, Ranke was appointed Historiographer Royal to the Prussian court.

In 1847–48 he published Neun Bücher preussicher Geschichte (translated as Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), in which he examined the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family and state from the Middle Ages to the reign of Frederick the Great. Many Prussian nationalists were offended by Ranke's portrayal of Prussia as a typical medium-sized German state rather than as a great power.

In 1852–61 he published French History Mainly in the 16th and 17th Centuries (5 vols. ), covering Francis I to Louis XIV, gaining him more praise for his impartiality despite being German.

In 1854 in a series of lectures given before future King Maximilian II of Bavaria, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God", by which he meant that every period of history is unique and must be understood in its own context. He argued that God gazes over history in its totality and finds all periods equal. Ranke rejected the teleological approach to history, by which each period is considered inferior to the period which follows. Thus, the Middle Ages were not inferior to the Renaissance, simply different. In Ranke's view, the historian had to understand a period on its own terms, and seek to find only the general ideas which animated every period of history. For Ranke, then, history was not to be an account of man's "progress" because, "After Plato, there can be no more Plato. " For Ranke, Christianity was morally most superior and could not be improved upon. Ultimately, "History is no criminal court. "

In 1854–57 Ranke published History of the Reformation in Germany (Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation), using the 96 volumes of correspondence from ambassadors to the Imperial Diet he found in Frankfurt to explain the Reformation in Germany as the result of both politics and religion.

In 1859–67 he published the 6-volume History of England Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im XVI and XVII Jahrhundert), followed by an expanded 9-volume edition in 1870-4, extending his huge reach even farther. At this point he was eighty years old, and had shot his bolt, devoting the rest of his career to shorter treatises on German history that supplement his earlier writings.

After his retirement in 1871, Ranke continued to write on a variety of subjects relating to German history such as the French Revolutionary Wars, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Karl August von Hardenberg, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Starting in 1880 Ranke began a huge 6-volume work on World History, which began with ancient Egypt and the Israelites. By the time of Ranke's death in Berlin in 1886, at the age of 90, he had reached only the 12th century, though his assistants later used his notes to take the series up to 1453.

After his wife died in 1871, Ranke became half-blind, depending on assistants to read to him. A diary entry from January 1877 contains his mature thoughts about being a historian.

Achievements

• Building on the methods of the Göttingen School of History, Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .

Works

More photos

• book

  • Die Serbische Revolution: Aus Serbischen Papieren Und Mitheilungen (German Edition)

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (German Edition)

    (This book is a replica, produced from digital images of t...)

  • Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert. Zweiter Band. Dritte Auflage. (German Edition)

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • Neun Bücher preußischer Geschichte, Siebentes bis neuntes Buch (German Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Religion

As a Protestant, Ranke was barred from viewing the Vatican archives in Rome, but on the basis of private papers in Rome and Venice, he was able to explain the history of the papacy in the 16th century.

The papacy denounced Ranke's book as anti-Catholic, while many Protestants denounced it as not anti-Catholic enough, but he has been generally praised by historians for placing the situation of the Roman Catholic Church in the context of the 16th century and for his fair treatment of the complex interaction of the political and religious issues in that century. British Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced, and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 16th century.

Politics

Ranke, contemptuous in politics, as in history, of the men who warped facts to support some abstract theory, especially disliked the doctrinaire liberalism so fashionable at the time.

Views

Quotations: Ranke wrote "I see the time approaching when we shall base modern history, no longer on the reports even of contemporary historians, except insofar as they were in the possession of personal and immediate knowledge of facts; and still less on work yet more remote from the source; but rather on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents. "

In his book, Ranke coined the term the Counter Reformation, and offered colorful portrayals of Pope Paul IV, Ignatius of Loyola and Pope Pius V, and opined "I see the time coming when we will base modern history no longer on secondhand reports, or even on contemporary historians, save where they had direct knowledge, and still less on works yet more distant from the period; but rather on eyewitness accounts and on the most genuine, the most immediate, sources. "

Membership

In 1845 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

And also he was a member of American Historical Association

Interests

• Writers

  Thucydides, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel

Connections

In Paris in July 1843, Ranke met an Irish woman, Clarissa Helena Graves (born 1808), from Dublin. She had been educated in England and the continent. They were engaged on 1 October and married in Bowness, England, in a ceremony officiated by her brother, Robert Perceval Graves, an Anglican priest.

Father:

Gottlob Israel Ranke

Advocate

Wife:

Clarissa Helena Graves

Friend:

Friedrich von Gentz