Mark Lotito has written an excellent book. Big in more than a physical sense, this book covers in great detail a wide range of historical actors across large swathes of time, all with a view to understanding changes in historical thought. The central focus here is Carion's chronicle, a work originally composed by Johann Carion of Bietigheim (a court astronomer to the Elector of Brandenburg in Berlin). In 1532 Carion brought his raw manuscript to the University of Wittenberg and handed it over to Philip Melanchthon, who took the ‘hodgepodge rather carelessly heaped together’ (his words, p. 123) and crafted it into nothing short of a revolutionary work of historical scholarship. In chapter iii Lotito offers a biographical sketch of Carion, but the real story he tells here, with all the drama and flair of the Reformation itself, is about Melanchthon and Wittenberg.

Writing in the 1530s, Protestant reformers in the Holy Roman Empire (and elsewhere) faced a significant challenge when looking back through the ages: all of the histories had been written from and for a Roman Catholic perspective. Dissenters from the Church were heretics, nothing more, and deserved their punishment. Relations between the papacy and secular rulers placed the former above the latter, and in Reformation Germany that meant looking back upon a long line of Holy Roman Emperors as subservient to Rome. Melanchthon, a good Lutheran of his day, would have none of it. Working from early printed works by other humanists, with the Chronicle he ‘sketched a historical argument for excluding the papacy from political affairs and for limiting the Emperor through the Imperial constitution’ (p. 29); that he ‘ultimately succeeded in overturning the pro-papal narrative that had dominated historical thought for centuries’ (p. 83) merits the fine dissection of the work offered by Lotito. Melanchthon is found here not simply to be a great scholar of the Christian Fathers, but also asserting a patristic view of the Holy Roman Empire's destiny as the fourth great monarchy prophesied in Daniel. Yet, in Carion's chronicle we do not find a recitation or rescuing of Reformation forebears like Jan Hus (who received little sympathy from Melanchthon); rather, the focus here is squarely placed on reassessing papal-imperial relations and in a particular Saxon political context that situates the Chronicle within what becomes the Wittenberg view of the past. After the editio princeps printed in German in spring 1532 and a speedily revised edition later that autumn, the work was re-printed several times across Europe and in Latin as well as in a range of vernaculars by 1554 (Plattdeutsch, Czech, Italian, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, Danish). During the 1550s Melanchthon returned to the work for revisions and to combat the range of alterations and corruptions in these unauthorised versions, but after his death in 1560, the revisions for the period after Charlemagne (or as he preferred, Karl der Große) ended up being finished by his son-in-law, Caspar Peucer. In consequence, the tacit implications and quiet but significant assertions in the earlier Chronicle, the ‘earlier perspective of unity through compromise[,] was utterly lost’ in favour of Peucer's ‘unbridled attack on papal tyranny and the superstitions of the ‘Roman religion’’’ (pp. 198, 196). Standing in the shadows of Melanchthon, Luther and the rest of the first-generation Lutherans who had secured their faith both spiritually and politically in the Holy Roman Empire, Peucer understood the Reformation as the key defining event in history, and he incorporated forerunners of the Reformation in the final complete revision in 1572, by which time martyrologists in Germany and across the Protestant world had done the archival spadework for him. The Melanchthon-Peucer version of Carion's chronicle was subsequently issued many times and in many languages, but as Lotito points out, ‘Carion's chronicle’ was not so much a single text as it was a rubric for the multiple editions and adaptations that derived from the original of 1532, and it offered a vision of the past previously unknown; one could push the phrase further to say that, as emblematic of the Reformation as a whole, it held a central message emanating from Wittenberg but was adapted to different cultural and political contexts for centuries to come. Indeed, although the work eventually gave way during the seventeenth century to other works of historical scholarship in German universities (for example, Sleidan on the four monarchies), the reception and legacy of the Chronicle continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth. Leopold von Ranke was educated in the Protestant historical tradition initiated by Melanchthon, so it may not be surprising to learn of his copy of the Chronicle printed at Wittenberg in 1578. One may see a degree of affinity between Ranke and Lotito, not on account of the latter's own personal 1580 edition, but due to their shared experience in the German historical tradition, Lutheran immigration in the nineteenth century, and the intellectual culture and educational forms of ‘a world that has largely vanished from Europe [but] has in some ways been preserved in North America’ (p. 335 n. 4).

This well-written book is easy to read despite its heft, has many colourful illustrations and helpful maps, and offers the breadth and depth one expects from the St Andrews series; a critical reader looking for faults may want to see more discussion of the Melanchthon-Peucer Chronicle vis-à-vis the martyrologies, more recent scholarship on intra-Lutheran controversies of the 1570s, or a bigger index. Because much of Lotito's task was to track editions and changes across time and space, the book can sometimes feel a little like a work in bibliography (for example, Appendix E, a census of editions running to ninety-six pages), but the author is to be applauded for involving such fine details and personalities in the narrative without losing focus on his argument that Melanchthon not just reformed historical thought, but also established a tradition of Protestant historiography still with us today.