Boldt approaches his topic via an account of two converging extended family circles: the far-flung Prussian von Rankes and the equally wide-ranging Anglo-Irish Graves relatives and friends. They met with the most influential European intelligentsia in the regular assemblies of Clarissa von Ranke's salon and elsewhere. Ranke's distinct historical research work seems to have thrived in such sociability and lionisation. Boldt supports his findings with often over-long excerpts from original correspondence. Only the second part of the book is devoted to the examination of Ireland, especially in the seventeenth century, extrapolated from Ranke's much acclaimed English and papal histories. The assessment of key events is briefly compared with those treated by Macaulay, Froude and Lecky. Boldt's book is the German version of his PhD thesis submitted at the National Irish University at Maynooth. The style is discursive. Mistranslations (inter alia ‘Dean’ as ‘Diakon’) and idiomatic infelicities could have been tidied up by more careful proof-reading but the publication has certainly fulfilled its purpose of stimulating further research. Boldt's 681-page edition of Clarissa von Ranke's letters, published by the Edwin Mellen Press, also in 2012, will prove a helpful supplement.