Historians, Critics and Historicists

WRITING in the first portion of his Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), the young Edward Gibbon lamented that the categories of the érudit and the philosophe no longer cohered as they had only decades before. The scholar was excluded from philosophical discourse by virtue of his dustily monomaniacal antiquarianism, while the philosopher had little or no interest in the scholarly traditions that, to him, manifested the deadening weight of history and convention. Gassendi, Leibniz and Newton may have done much to foster the Enlightened age in which Gibbon lived, but they had also devoted themselves to erudition in a way that would have been unthinkable to many of those in the Parisian salons to which Gibbon sought admission. Gibbon's point was that it was necessary to combine these two intellectual modes, and so it was that he announced his intention to write with an eye for erudite detail while incorporating the discursive flair of the new ‘philosophical’ history. As Momigliano was perhaps the first fully to credit, Gibbon's success in this undertaking was among his greatest achievements.1 But for the student of early modern (by which I mean something like ‘relating to the long seventeenth century’) intellectual history, Gibbon's text sounds a profoundly cautionary note: if Gibbon, coming of age only a hundred years after the death of Gassendi, had consciously to expend so much energy in conditioning himself to inhabit the world of learning familiar to ‘general scholars’ of the seventeenth century, it follows that twenty-first-century students of early modern intellectual history must, at the very least, not shrink before the prospect of hard work

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