'Barbarism and Religion' - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. In this first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, John Pocock follows Gibbon through his youthful exile in Switzerland and his criticisms of the Encyclopédie, and traces the growth of his historical interests down to the conception of the Decline and Fall itself.

Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society

‘Pocock manages to place Gibbon within these larger cosmopolitan movements without diminishing the historian’s extraordinary accomplishment.’

Tim Breen Source: New York Times Review of Books

‘Pocock the historian of political thought has not been altogether useless to Pocock the historian of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.’

Peter Burke Source: European Legacy

‘… the grandeur of Pocock’s conception amazes, but it is often the asides and apercus that linger longest in the mind.’

David Armitage Source: Lingua Franca

‘Thus we come back to the English Protestant Enlightenment and the point from which John Pocock set out on his magnificent tour de force.’

Nicholas Tyacke Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘He has penned two very important volumes.’

Jeremy Black

'There can be few scholars who can match the range and depth of Pocock's scholarship …'.

Source: History of Political Thought