Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on references, quotations and translations
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I ENGLAND AND SWITZERLAND, 1737–1763
- PART II THE ENCOUNTER WITH PARIS AND THE DEFENCE OF ERUDITION, 1761–1763
- PART III LAUSANNE AND ROME: THE JOURNEY TOWARDS A SUBJECT, 1763–1764
- Epilogue: Gibbon and the rhythm that was different
- List of references
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on references, quotations and translations
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I ENGLAND AND SWITZERLAND, 1737–1763
- PART II THE ENCOUNTER WITH PARIS AND THE DEFENCE OF ERUDITION, 1761–1763
- PART III LAUSANNE AND ROME: THE JOURNEY TOWARDS A SUBJECT, 1763–1764
- Epilogue: Gibbon and the rhythm that was different
- List of references
- Index
Summary
This volume, and its successor, are the first of a number of studies which I hope to publish with Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at their centre. At times (though not in this volume) my focus will be on the text of that great work, and at others on texts to which it makes allusion that supply contexts in which passages of the Decline and Fall may usefully be read. This widening of focus is intended to lead to a portrayal of the writing of history and other intellectual activities in the setting of the eighteenth century, in which larger context both Gibbon's history and his life as a historian may be situated, so that we understand the Decline and Fall as an artefact of its age and culture. At the end of the twentieth century, there are still specialists in some of the many fields which Gibbon studied who can examine and even evaluate his performances in them, treating him as a contemporary and equal who may be paid the compliment of criticism; but the work I ampresenting here has the different objective stated in the preceding sentence. Barbarism and Religion is not a contribution to the historiography of the Roman empire, but to that of European culture in the eighteenth century.
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- Barbarism and Religion , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999