Who is gibbon

That too is evident in his decision to write chapters 15 and But it was once the Church had established itself that Gibbon faced his major challenge. Read with one eye chapter 21, in which Gibbon recounted the great controversy over the Trinity, or chapter 48, in which he did the same for the Incarnation, may appear master-classes in keeping a skeptical, disbelieving distance.

Gibbon took up the challenge of understanding Islam, and its even more rapid rise, in Volume 5, chapters 50— To do so, he had to overcome unaccustomed obstacles, not least that he did not know Arabic: he was therefore reliant on Christian scholarship in Latin and modern European languages, much of it hostile to its subject. But here too Gibbon recognised the need to understand the content of the new religion, the extent to which it was a response to both Judaism from whose Patriarch, Abraham, the Arabs too were descended, through his first-born, Ismael , and an increasingly sectarian Christianity.

History as Gibbon wrote it in the Decline and Fall was thus far from a simple exercise in the subversion of religion. Gibbon was not, of course, every Enlightenment historian. He stands out even from his greatest contemporaries, Voltaire, David Hume, and William Robertson, in his curiosity as well as in his scholarship and his style.

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. He is the author of The Enlightenment. Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Gibbon returned to England in , where he continued his studies, but his only publications were two volumes of a French literary journal, edited with his friend G.

He began a history of the Swiss republics in French , which he abandoned. David Hume, who read this work, urged him to write history, but in English. By this time Gibbon may already have begun preliminary work for the Decline and Fall, but he was preoccupied with domestic matters; his father died in November In , having straightened out some of the tangles in his father's finances, Gibbon settled in London with his sources comfortably around him in an extensive library.

He joined the famous Literary Club and became a member of Parliament in , and in February he published the first volume of his Decline and Fall. The fifteenth and sixteenth chapters seemed so devastating an account of the early Christian Church that attackers hurried into print.

Gibbon ignored them until a rash young man named Davis added plagiarism and the falsification of evidence to the charges against Gibbon. Gibbon's superb Vindication can be read with delight by those who know nothing about either the history or Davis's attack; in passing, Gibbon answered his other critics. After a brief visit to France Gibbon continued to work on his history, which was enjoying a large sale.

In he was appointed a lord of trade, and he was a conscientious member of that Board and of Parliament, but his real work was writing; volumes 2 and 3 were published in Gibbon had lost his seat in Parliament in but was elected to another in A new ministry abolished the Board of Trade in , and Gibbon left Parliament forever in In September Gibbon returned to Lausanne to share a house with his old friend Deyverdun and to write the concluding volumes of his history.

Much of volume 4 had been written before he left England, but its completion and volumes 5 and 6 occupied Gibbon until June He then returned to England to see the volumes through the press; they were issued on his fifty-first birthday. While in England, Gibbon had the pleasure of hearing R. Sheridan refer, in a famous Parliamentary speech, to Gibbon's "luminous pages," and he enjoyed public applause and the company of his English friends.

Nevertheless, Lausanne was now his home and in he returned to Switzerland. Various literary projects, especially six attempts to write his own memoirs, occupied Gibbon upon his return. His happiness was seriously marred by Deyverdun's death July 4, , which left him, in his words, "alone in Paradise. A long-standing illness of Gibbon's own was temporarily relieved by surgery in November but Gibbon died on Jan.

After Gibbon's death Lord Sheffield compiled and published his friend's memoirs and other miscellaneous works and The best edition of Gibbon's autobiography was edited by Georges A. Bonnard The standard biography is David M. Low, Edward Gibbon, An excellent short critical biography is George Malcolm Young, Gibbon Gibbon is praised in Harold L.