History of the Popes

The Protestant Reformation was one of the great crises of Western history. For a thousand years before that time, the Roman Catholic Church had been a central force  perhaps the central force  giving shape to Western civilization. But early in the sixteenth century, Rome was challenged more fundamentally and forcefully than ever before. Within a generation, half of Europe had fallen out of the Roman orbit, and it might well have seemed that the rest would, in one way or another, follow. But by midcentury, the Church had marshalled its energies and forces in the CounterReformation. While Protestantism survived in Northern Europe, it was effectively eradicated in the South, and both the Catholic Church and a Catholic culture survived.

Leopold von Ranke, in his History of the Popes, made a close survey of the leading figures of the CounterReformation  their character as individuals, how and why they adopted the policies they did, how they put those policies into action, and with what effect. As the title suggests, it is in the broad sense a political history, not a religious or intellectual history. Ranke is not concerned with the broad sweeps of opinion that brought Protestantism into being, but with how the critical leaders of the opposition to Protestantism  the Popes, an

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estknown, at least to English readers, of the Annales school of French historians. Among his works that have been published in English, and are widely available and frequently read, are The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II and The Structures of Everyday Life. The title of the latter aptly summarizes Braudel's approach to history, which may be characterized as history approached from below. From below not in an ideological or class sense  though Braudel gives much more attention to the lives of the humble than do more traditional historians  but in the sense that he looks at the factors of "everyday life" that shaped the limits and capabilities of an age or region, and founds his approach to history upon them. On History is a collection of essays written by Braudel in the two decades following the publication of The Mediterranean. The essays are divided into three broad catagories: "Time in History," "History and the Other Human Sciences," and "History and the Present Age." (Eight of the twelve selections are in the second section.) The first selection is an extract from the Preface of the Mediterranean, and in it Braudel explains the unusual plan of that book, and in a sense the plan of his whole approach
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Approximate Word count = 2477
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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