RANKE, LEOPOLD von. — Historian, born at Wiehe (Thuringia) on 21 December 1785, into a family of Protestant pastors; died in Berlin on 23 May 1886.
At the age of eighteen he entered the University of Leipzig, where he showed an interest in questions of biblical hermeneutics and, above all, in philology. Having graduated in 1817, he became a secondary-school teacher in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1818, and in 1824 published the first part of the Gesch. der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535, arising from his reading of the Italian historians of the sixteenth century; this earned him the chair of history at the University of Berlin in 1825. Continuing his research in the archives, he was the first to recognize the importance of the reports of the Venetian ambassadors for the history of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; then, in 1827–31, in Vienna, Venice, Florence, and Rome, he collected an enormous body of material, from which arose his studies on European history in the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Returning to Germany, he directed and largely compiled the Historisch-politische Zeitschrift (1832–36). Having abandoned active politics, he devoted himself to composing his major works. Appointed official Prussian historiographer in 1841, in 1858 he founded the Historical Commission attached to the Academy of Sciences of Munich, which published, among other things, the Acts of the Imperial Diet. In 1867 he began publishing his complete works, while continuing to produce original studies; after retiring from his chair, he undertook a Universal History (1879), of which six volumes appeared up to 1885 and which remained unfinished at his death.
R. is one of the significant figures among the generation of historians of the first half of the nineteenth century. His ideal was an effort at objectivity that took the form of presenting “how things actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen); hence his decisive appeal to archival research for the history of modern Europe and, consequently, his devaluation of narrative sources, together with the conviction that an “objective” reconstruction of the facts was possible,
one that would transcend every controversial position; but he did not clearly perceive the danger of restricting history to a conflict among great leading figures and of reducing the entire course of an era to its “diplomatic history,” that is, to the activity of the chancelleries.
R. preferred to narrate rather than to discuss; for him, the work also posed a problem of style. From Romanticism, which he recognized from his youth onward, he discerned in human affairs the imprint and revelation of God. Yet in his presentation of religious movements and theological controversies, his old Protestant point of view is evident. On the Catholic side, I. Döllinger, J. Janssen, and L. V. Pastor opposed him.
Among his most important works are: Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1834–36, 3 vols.; placed on the Index on 16 September 1841); Deutsche Gesch. im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839–43, 5 vols.); Französische Gesch., vornehmlich im 16. und 17. Jahrh. (1852–56, 4 vols.); Englische Gesch., vornehmlich im 17. Jahrh. (1859–68, 7 vols.); Neue Bücher preussischer Gesch. (1847–48, reworked in 1873); Weltgesch., begun in 1879 and carried as far as the death of Otto I: volumes VII–IX, up to 1453, were published posthumously together with the celebrated lectures Über die Epochen der neueren Gesch., delivered in 1854 at Berchtesgaden in the presence of Maximilian II of Bavaria.