Edward Gibbon FRS (/ËÉĄÉȘbÉn/; 8 May 1737Â â 16 January 1794) was a British essayist, historian and politician. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organized religion.
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đ Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline. By extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topicâsuch as the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of Chinaâand different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyaltiesâsuch as to their nation stateâremains a debated question.
In Europe, the academic discipline of historiography was established in the 5th century BC with the Histories, by Herodotus, who thus established Greek historiography. In the 2nd century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder produced the Origines, which is the first Roman historiography. In Asia, the father and son intellectuals Sima Tan and Sima Qian established Chinese historiography with the book Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), in the time of the Han Empire in Ancient China. During the Middle Ages, medieval historiography included the works of chronicles in medieval Europe, the Ethiopian Empire in the Horn of Africa, Islamic histories by Muslim historians, and the Korean and Japanese historical writings based on the existing Chinese model. During the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, historiography in the Western world was shaped and developed by figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline. In the 19th century, historical studies became professionalized at universities and research centers along with a belief that history was like a science. In the 20th century, historians incorporated social science dimensions like politics, economy, and culture in their historiography.
In this Dossier
- â Core Definition: Edward Gibbon
- đ Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography
- Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire
- Edward Gibbon in the context of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography of the Christianization of the Roman Empire
- Edward Gibbon in the context of Battle of Lugdunum
- Edward Gibbon in the context of Göttingen school of history
Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire
The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the empire collapsed, he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account of the event, and started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The traditional date for the end of the Western Roman Empire is 476 when the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed. Many theories of causality have been explored. In 1984, Alexander Demandt enumerated 210 different theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have since emerged. Gibbon himself explored ideas of internal decline (civil wars, the disintegration of political, economic, military, and other social institutions) and of attacks from outside the empire.
Many historians have postulated reasons for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Their conclusions usually belong in two broad schools: (1) external factors, such as military threats and barbarian invasions or (2) internal factors, such as a decline in "civic virtue" and military and economic capability. Most historians believe that the fall was due to a combination of both internal and external factors, but come down more heavily on one or the other as the most important cause of the fall. Modern scholarship has introduced additional factors such as climate change, epidemic diseases, and environmental degradation as important reasons for the decline. Some historians have postulated that the Roman Empire did not fall at all, but that the "decline" was instead a gradual, albeit often violent, transformation into the societies of the Middle Ages.
Edward Gibbon in the context of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sometimes shortened to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is a six-volume work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. The six volumes cover, from 98 to 1590, the peak of the Roman Empire, the history of early Christianity and its emergence as the Roman state religion, the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the rise of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and the fall of Byzantium, as well as discussions on the ruins of Ancient Rome.
Volume I was first published in February 1776 by William Strahan and Thomas Cadell. It was reissued in a succession of six revised editions between 1776 and 1789. Volumes II and III appeared in 1781, and the final three volumes (IVâVI) were issued together in 1788. All six volumes of the first edition were published in quarto; later octavo reprints followed from 1783 onward.
Edward Gibbon in the context of Historiography of the Christianization of the Roman Empire
The growth of early Christianity from its obscure origin c. ADÂ 40, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches.
Until the last decades of the 20th century, the primary theory was provided by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. Gibbon theorized that paganism declined from the second century BC and was finally eliminated by the top-down imposition of Christianity by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and his successors in the fourth century AD.
Edward Gibbon in the context of Battle of Lugdunum
The Battle of Lugdunum, also called the Battle of Lyon, was fought on 19 February 197 at Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France), between the armies of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and of the Roman usurper Clodius Albinus. Severus' victory finally established him as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire following the Year of the Five Emperors and immediate aftermath.
This battle is said to be the largest, most hard-fought, and bloodiest of all clashes between Roman forces. According to English historian Edward Gibbon, the Roman historian Cassius Dio placed the total number of Roman soldiers engaged for both sides combined at 150,000. Historian Michael Kulikowski states that Severus led the much larger force with the combined legions of Dacia and the Danubian provinces. Historian A. J. Graham supports Gibbon's number of 150,000 soldiers in total, rather than the sometimes cited number of 300,000 in total and therefore 150,000 on each side, which he states to be a commonly accepted mistranslation of Cassius Dio's original language. Graham also analyses the possible forces available to Albinus and states that the numbers on each side could have been roughly equal.
Edward Gibbon in the context of Göttingen school of history
The Göttingen school of history was a group of German historians associated with a particular style of historiography located at the University of Göttingen in the late 18th century.
The University of Göttingen was the original center of the "Geschichtswissenschaft" or history as an academic discipline, and became a major centre for globally-orientated anthropology. The school itself was one of the newest universities in Europe, having been founded in 1734 by Gerlach Adolph von MĂŒnchhausen, and the first to include the obligation to conduct and publish research alongside lecturing. The historians of this school sought to write a universal history by combining the critical methods of Jean Mabillon with that of the philosophical historians such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.