ABSTRACT
It was originally Leopold von Ranke who, in his Geschichte der Päpste, which began to appear in 1834, arrived at the notion of a general movement of Catholic reform and resistance to Protestantism.1 Essentially conceived as a series of reflex defensive actions, Ranke’s Gegenreformationen brought into a grand synthesis such phenomena as the foundation of the Jesuits, the Council of Trent and the activities of the later sixteenth-century popes, events that had previously been treated only in an isolated fashion. With Ranke, the concept of the Counter-Reformation was introduced into the language of periodization, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, it had been established as an historical development of European significance. Other scholars came to argue that rather than being merely a direct consequence of Protestantism, the Catholic Reformation (as some preferred to call it) had deep historical roots. In place of the simple model of action and reaction, the question was now raised of the double character of the Counter-Reformation, with Protestantism on one side and reformed Catholicism on the other. In this process, the idea of an independent and ultimately successful Catholic Reformation gained increasing acceptance. For Ludwig Pastor, as for Ranke, the importance of Trent was central, and that position has been further consolidated, above all by Hubert Jedin’s conviction, argued throughout his Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, that a whole period of the history of the Church was fashioned by the Council.2
