In the winter of 1532, five years before he drank himself to death, Johann Carion traveled from Berlin to Wittenberg to see his Chronicle through the press. Astronomer, tutor, and diplomatic agent for the Brandenburg court, hailed by Luther as a magus, Carion had prophesized a flood in 1524 that was taken as a metaphor for the Peasants’ War (his prediction of a great European upheaval in 1789 took longer to confirm). In reality, his contribution to the Chronicle went little beyond sending a hodgepodge of material to Philip Melanchthon, an old friend from Tübingen, who took the opportunity to reorganize and massively expand it into a Protestant vision of universal history. Yet it was Carion's name that stuck to a work that, as Mark Lotito argues in this magisterial study, was instrumental in transforming the constitution of Europe and giving rise to history as a modern discipline. Not until Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary—the latter responsible only for the letter A—would authorial credit again be so unjustly distributed.

Carion's Chronicle was so influential that basic questions of bibliography have awaited the Census of Editions that forms the backbone of this book, comprising over two hundred entries from 1532 to 1966, indexed, mapped, and stemmatized. This alone will make Lotito's work the foundation of any future work on the Chronicle. Yet over six chapters Lotito also unpacks the complex story of Melanchthon's intervention in Western historiography, starting with the models he inherited from classical sources. Eusebius, Jerome, and Orosius combined the pagan tradition of the Four Monarchies with the book of Daniel to create a patriotic model of history which saw Rome as the last of four great empires to arise. The association of ecclesiastical history with Rome's political continuity gave way after the fall of the Western empire to Augustine's alternative of Six Ages, which assured the survival of the church independent of Rome's political fortunes. Medieval historians followed Augustine's example, developing a “curial interpretation of history” (55) that remained dominant on the eve of the Reformation.

Sensing an opportunity, Melanchthon reshaped Carion's materials into an argument for solidarity in the Electoral College, “the hero of their Chronicle” (156), against the pope, the French, and the Turks all at once. The 1532 Chronicle muted the dissent already fermenting under the surface of the Reformation to advance a vision of cooperation among German temporal and spiritual powers, grounded in the Four Monarchies. Yet it was Melanchthon's tragedy that his natural moderation could not survive the revolution he led. Later chapters detail the rapid adaptation of the Chronicle as it spread across Europe in the following decades. Outside Wittenberg, Carion's name became “a rubric for an array of texts” (209) which were polarized by recent events. Under pressure from Protestant radicals, Melanchthon revisited the Chronicle toward the end of his life, reshaping it with Caspar Peucer into a strident anti-papal text, “the defining statement of Wittenberg historiography” (267). Events at last overtook Melanchthon's vision of a Europe at peace under a stable imperial constitution, though his legacy as an historical thinker, the final chapter shows, persisted into the twentieth century. Even today there is resonance in Lotito's description of how the Chronicle shifted “from efforts at compromise to self-legitimating critiques of incompatible theological positions” (205).

As a study of reception, Lotito's account of Carion's Chronicle is exemplary. Melanchthon remains chronically overlooked, and this book showcases the riches on offer in his correspondence. Less convincing is the attempt to ascribe political positions to historiographic schemes. Melanchthon adapted the Four Monarchies to an anti-papal position, but Nauclerus and Martin of Troppau both argued for papal supremacy on the same basis, while both versions of the Chronicle apply the Four Monarchies to what Lotito shows were very different ends. Historiographic schemes could be made factional, but no faction mapped predictably onto one scheme or another. It is when Lotito moves away from schematic analysis to focus on the nuance of the Chronicle and its diasporic refashioning, on Wittenberg's enduring place in the long arc of European history, and on Melanchthon's pursuit of a politics subtler than his times could bear, that this book emerges as a landmark in Reformation intellectual history.