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Johann Sleidan and the Origins of History as a Profession

Johann Sleidan was not only "the father of Reformation history," he was one of the greatest of all modem historians.' A man of action, he was also trained in the best traditions of classical scholarship and was a pioneer in the use of European archives. A passionate Lutheran, he was at the same time an extraordinarily accurate, fairand international-minded observer of the upheavals of his time, the Thucydides as well as the Eusebius of early Protestantism. The period spanned by his life (1506-56) and book (1517-56) was one of the most revolutionary in European history. He was born into a world in the course of being illuminated by the humanist discovery of the classical and Christian past, his childhood coincided with the emergence of the national state and modern power politics, and his adult career with the Protestant Reformation, the first social and ideological revolution of modern times. Corresponding to these three transformations were three new perspectives on the European past: The first created by the humanist "sense of history" associated with scholars like Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and Lorenzo Valla; the second shaped by the new politics observed and interpreted by such actor-critics as Niccolo Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Philippe de Commines, and Claude de Seyssel (whose work Sleidan translated into Latin); and the third a kind of fundamentalist church history derived from Martin Luther and Phillip Melanchthon's radical reevaluation of the Christian tradition.2 Such was Sleidan's mixed heritage, and such the ingredients of his own contributions to modern historiography.