This book began in January 1994 as a conference under the auspices of the Royal Historical Society as part of the bicentenary celebrations of the death of Edward Gibbon. We wish to express our warmest thanks, first of all, to all who participated in the discussions at that gathering of late antique, medieval and modern historians, and most particularly to the contributors to this volume. We are, moreover, especially grateful to Rees Davies, President of the Royal Historical Society, and the Fellows for making the conference possible, and to Joy McCarthy for all her cheerfully efficient organization. The work of preparing the typescript for publication benefited from the assistance of Sheila Willson in the History Faculty Office, University of Cambridge, and the staff of the Cambridge University Library. We are indebted to William Davies and the staff of Cambridge University Press for seeing the book through the press, and most particularly to Katy Cooper for her meticulous copy-editing. We should also like to thank Alice Prochaska and her colleagues in the British Library for mounting the Bicentenary Exhibition of Gibboniana in January 1994.

It afforded particular pleasure that the conference was held in Magdalen College, Oxford, Gibbon's own college (despite his opinion of it). We shall long treasure the beautiful image of Magdalen meadow transformed into a lake, with the snow deep upon the ground. We are indebted to the President and Fellows of Magdalen College for their hospitality, and to Janie Cottis the College Archivist and Gerald Harriss for providing an exhibition of Magdalen Gibboniana while we were there.