Our "author of the month" is Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). Gibbon composed his magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (often simply referred to as the Decline and Fall) over a time period of almost 20 years.
When the first volume was published in the eventful year of 1776, it went through three editions in a short span of time. In addition to being an undeniably great and influential work, the book represents a milestone in the craft of historical writing. Peter P.Witonski, in Gibbon for Moderns, an annotated and abridged version of the Decline and Fall, remarks that Gibbon combined the "renewed historical perspective" of the Renaissance -- i.e., that contemporary authors were capable of writing histories superior to the first-hand accounts of classical authors -- with the scientific mindset developed in the 17th century.
Gibbon was unusual among British intellectuals of his time in that he was educated abroad (in Lausanne). Gibbon tells us that he conceived of The Decline and Fall "among the ruins of the Capitol" in Rome. The work is a product of Gibbon's formidable linguistic skills and his prodigious study of history. In his book The Ruins of the Roman Empire, James J. O'Donnell writes, "No page of Gibbon is not worth reading; few of his footnotes are not worth considering carefully."
It his difficult to imagine a contempory historian undertaking a work quite as massive in scope as Gibbon's. In our selection this month, we read two chapters from The Decline and Fall, which discuss the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Every subsequent age has seen a mirror of itself in the story of cycles of growth and decay of ancient Rome. Gibbon's account, written during an age of Empire and so-called Enlightenment, stands as perhaps the best.
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