the students of history. Through the Protestant city librarian, J. F. Boehmer, a very able man in historical research work, Janssen was drawn into this circle. Janssen then flung himself with the greatest of zeal upon the deeper study of the written and printed sources dealing with the last centuries of the Middle Ages, contained there appeared, as the result of this study, "Frankfurt's Reichscorrespondenz nebst verwandten Aktenstuecken, 1376-1519." Although the efficient co-operation of a catholic historian in the effort to shed more light upon the last centuries of the Middle Ages was highly gratifying even to Protestants, yet the publication of his history of the German people, the first volume of which appeared in 1877, proved a blow aimed at the very heart of Protestantism. In this work Janssen had placed his extensive knowledge of the religious conditions of the end of the Middle Ages into the service or subservience of the proof that the church, art, and science enjoyed a period of flourishing growth in the era just preceding the Reformation, only to be trampled to death under the roughshod feet of Luther and his followers. The volumes following, with their characterization of Luther and the Reformation, follow the same methods and thoughts employed in the first volume.
This work — its methods and main conclusions defended by the author in his "An meine Kritiker," Freiburg, 1882, and "Ein zweites Wort an meine Kritiker,"Freiburg, 1883 — achieved a very surprising and almost unparalleled success; the first volume, for instance, in three years was printed in the sixth edition, 1883 in the eighth; the second volume was printed in the seventh in 1882. Today the first four volumes, which have been continued and
