Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Bibliographic Data

ID23501335
AuthorsDavid Womersley
Year2013
Publication date2013-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueTransformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9780511895951
ISBN9780511895951
Open LibraryOL34492248M
LanguageEN
Citations received11

David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work's transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon's achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.