Search results
What Ranke Meant. Modern historical scholarship begins Here forces with work in human existence and Leopold von Ranke, and ever since social his life, time whereby ideas attain realization; historians have appealed to his name and the task and of the historian is to show the writings to justify their approach to relationship the study of the ...
- Overview
- Education.
- Early career.
Leopold von Ranke (born Dec. 21, 1795, Wiehe, Thuringia, Saxony [Germany]—died May 23, 1886, Berlin) leading German historian of the 19th century, whose scholarly method and way of teaching (he was the first to establish a historical seminar) had a great influence on Western historiography. He was ennobled (with the addition of von to his name) in ...
Ranke was born into a devout family of Lutheran pastors and lawyers. After attending the renowned Protestant boarding school of Schulpforta, he entered the University of Leipzig. He studied theology and the classics, concentrating on philological work and the translation and exposition of texts. This approach he later developed into a highly influe...
The typical features of Ranke’s historiographical work were his concern for universality and his research into particular limited periods. In 1824 he produced his maiden work, the Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514), which treats the struggle waged between the French and the Habsburgs for Italy as the phase that ushered in the new era. The appended treatise, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber, in which he showed that the critical analysis of tradition is the historian’s basic task, is the more important work. As a result of these publications, he was appointed associate professor in 1825 at the University of Berlin, where he taught as full professor from 1834 to 1871. Many of the students in his famous seminars were to become prominent historians, continuing his method of research and training in other universities. In his next book, Ranke, utilizing the extremely important reports of the Venetian ambassadors, dealt with the rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and Spain in the Mediterranean (Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert); from 1834 to 1836, he published Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (changed to Die römischen Päpste in den letzen vier Jahrhunderten in later editions)—a book that ranks even today as a masterpiece of narrative history. Rising above religious partisanship, Ranke in this work depicts the papacy not just as an ecclesiastical institution but above all as a worldly power.
Before this work appeared, Ranke the historian had been drawn briefly into contemporary history and politics. A disillusioning experience, it produced, however, a few short writings in which he expressed his scholarly and political convictions more directly than in his major works. Disregarding his real talents and misjudging the contemporaneous political dissensions, which in 1830 were intensified by the liberal July revolution in France, he undertook to edit a periodical defending Prussian policy and its rejection of liberal and democratic thinking. Only two volumes of the Historisch-politische Zeitschrift were published from 1832 to 1836, most of the articles being written by Ranke himself. While he tried to explain the conflicts of the times from a historical—and for him that meant nonpartisan—viewpoint, in essence he sought to prove that the French revolutionary development could not and should not be repeated in Germany. Ranke believed that history evolves in the separate development of individual men, peoples, and states, which together constitute the process of culture. The history of Europe from the late 15th century onward—in which each people, though sharing one cultural tradition, was free to develop its own concept of the state—seemed to him to confirm his thesis. Ranke dismissed abstract, universally valid principles as requirements for the establishment of social and national order; he felt that social and political principles must vary according to the characteristics of different peoples. To him the individual entities of greatest historical importance were states, the “spiritual entities, original creations of the human mind—even ‘thoughts of God.’ ” Their essential task was to evolve independently and, in the process, to create institutions and constitutions adapted to their times.
Britannica Quiz
History Buff Quiz
- Rudolf Vierhaus
Leopold von Ranke (German: [fɔn ˈʁaŋkə]; 21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. [3] [4] He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of historical documents.
Mar 18, 2020 · One the one hand, the received conception of history as a magistra vitae was being challenged by the likes of August Ludwig Schlözer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Leopold von Ranke. The idea that history should serve as a repository of “examples” from which timely moral and political lessons could be drawn seemed incompatible with the ...
- Katherina Kinzel
- 2020
Oct 1, 2014 · rethink the idea of history as it was known to the German historian Leopold. von Ranke (1795 – 1886) and reflect whether it is still relevant today. For a. number of years, I have examined the ...
- Andreas Boldt
May 23, 2018 · Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is one of the great figures of European nineteenth-century scholarship and a founder of modern historical science. The son of a lawyer in a small town of Thuringia, he graduated from Schulpforta, one of the most renowned public schools of Germany, and studied philology and theology at the University of Leipzig.
People also ask
Who was Leopold von Ranke?
Who was Harry Liebersohn Leopold von Ranke?
How did Ranke contribute to history?
Why did Ranke call for an objective historiography?
This chapter contends that the historicism of Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt was formulated in the idealist and romanticist idiom of the 1820s and 1830s, which can no longer satisfy us in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Their argument therefore needs to be translated into more contemporary terms.
