Barbarism and Religion. Volume 5

In a review of the 1855 edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, annotated by Guizot and Henry Hart Milman, Walter Bagehot retailed an anecdote from the 1780s: ‘Mr. Sheridan, who never read anything “on principle”, said that he found the crimes of Warren Hastings surpassed anything to be found in the “correct sentences of Tacitus” or “on the luminous page of Gibbon”. Some one seems to have been struck with the jet of learning, and questioned the great wit. “I said,” he replied, “voluminous”’. One can imagine that expansive pun appealing to some critics of Barbarism and Religion, the considerable historiographical enterprise on which J.G.A. Pocock has been engaged since the late 1990s: a contextual study of the origin, progress, and reception of Gibbon’s history. It would, however, be unjust to entertain the parallel, other than momentarily; complex and demanding though Pocock’s prose famously is, it is not without its many rewardingly luminous moments, and this is especially true of the fifth of the projected six volumes of his study

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• John Pocock’s Histories of Historiography

  Open Access•John Robertson•History of European Ideas•2025

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