_A Vindication of some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ se publicó en febrero de 1779 en respuesta a los ataques que Gibbon había sufrido tras la publicación del primer volumen de su obra, que terminaba con los dos capítulos en cuestión. En sus _Memorias_ da cuenta circunstanciada de la naturaleza de esos ataques y de su irónica decisión de responder únicamente al cargo de no haber sido (...) escrupuloso en el manejo de las fuentes, pasando por alto los cargos de irreligiosidad. Lord Sheffield incluyó la _Vindicación_ en su edición póstuma de los _Miscellaneous Works_ de Gibbon (1796, 1814 2 ). La edición más reciente se encuentra como Apéndice 3 en _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, ed. de David Womersley, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, Londres, 1994, 3 vols., vol. 3, pp. 1108-1184. Véase _Religious Scepticism. Contemporary Responses to Gibbon_, ed. de D. Womersley, St. Augustine Press, South Bend, 1997. (shrink)

Combat deployments put health care providers in ethically compromising and morally challenging situations. A sample of recently deployed nurses and physicians provided narratives that were analyzed to better appreciate individual perceptions of moral dilemmas that arise in combat. Specific questions to be answered by this inquiry are: 1) How do combat deployed nurses and physicians make sense of morally injurious traumatic exposures? and 2) What are the possible psychosocial consequences of these and other deployment stressors? This narrative inquiry involves analysis (...) of ten deployed military nurses’ and physicians’ aversive or traumatic experiences. Burke’s dramatist pentad is used for structural narrative analysis of stories that confirm and illuminate the impact of war zone events such as betrayal, disproportionate violence, incidents involving civilians, and within-rank violence on military health care provider narrators. Results indicate cognitive dissonance and psychosocial sequelae related to moral and psychological stressors faced by military medical personnel. Discussion addresses where healing efforts should be focused. (shrink)

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

This article examines the influence of the philosophy of David Hume on Edward Gibbon’s critique of Christianity in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". The article shows the influence of Hume’s essay "Of Miracles" on Gibbon’s account of the history of Christianity in the "Decline and Fall" with a particular focus on the notorious chapter fifteen where Gibbon examines the "progress of Christianity" and applies the argumentation of "Of Miracles" to the apostolic accounts. Like Hume, Gibbon takes (...) a naturalistic approach to the study of religion. (shrink)

Edward Gibbon escribió en un inglés universal —un inglés lógico, pero no idiomático, como observó Jacob Bernays—, que estaba llamado a convertirse en el latín de nuestros días. Sin embargo, ni el latín ni el inglés han suplido nunca del todo la necesidad de una auténtica lengua franca como la que la traducción puede proporcionar y, en muchos aspectos, _La historia de la declinación y caída del Imperio romano_ es una obra de traducción, una vasta traslación de la que (...) probablemente seamos más conscientes ahora de lo que podía serlo el mundo de lectores de Gibbon a finales del siglo XVIII, entre la Declaración de Independencia de los Estados Unidos en 1776 —cuando se publicó el primer volumen— y la decisión del Consejo de Estado de Francia de doblar el número de representantes del Tercer Estado y convocar los Estados Generales en 1788, el año de publicación de los tres últimos volúmenes. En el capítulo LXX, tal vez con un sentido menos retrospectivo que prospectivo, Gibbon describiría los concilios de Pisa y Constanza como si “constituyeran los estados generales de Europa”. (shrink)

An analysis of Gibbon's five signs of civilizational decay.

Gibbon advirtió que es raro que el anticuario y el filósofo se fundan felizmente, pero Jacob Bernays (1824-1881) encarnó ejemplarmente esa figura, a la que añadió la fidelidad al judaísmo. Discípulo de F. Ritschl —el maestro de Nietzsche y Rohde— y amigo de T. Mommsen, llegó a tener un dominio completo de la filología y sus repercusiones en la actualidad. Su interés por Gibbon se manifestó en numerosas conferencias y en las notas de trabajo que traducimos a continuación, de las (...) que Arnaldo Momigliano escribió que no habían perdido su valor cien años después; más de medio siglo ha pasado desde esa apreciación inalterable. El texto, que reproducimos literalmente sin intervención editorial, se encuentra en _Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Jacob Bernays_, ed. de H. Usener, Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, Berlín, 1885, vol. 2, pp. 206-254. Entre corchetes figuran las aclaraciones del editor alemán (su gran discípulo Usener). Agradecemos al profesor Venancio Andreu Baldó la revisión de la traducción. (shrink)

A Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) le habría parecido una ironía que el dato más relevante de su genealogía personal no se encontrara en el pasado sino en el futuro y que lord Acton (1834-1902) formara parte, aunque de la manera más remota imaginable, de su legado. Al margen de todas las instituciones de su época, salvo la constituida por el mundo de lectores en el naciente mercado editorial, _La historia de la declinación y caída del imperio romano_ (1776-1788) es una (...) obra acabada que lord Acton no lograría emular con su proyecto de una _Historia moderna_. (shrink)

Lausana no fue seguramente “el epicentro geográfico del universo histórico de Gibbon”, como los editores reconocen con franqueza en la Introducción a esta última entrada de la bibliografía gibboniana, pero _Edward Gibbon et Lausanne_ tiene todo el derecho a ocupar un lugar eminente en el panorama de los lectores de _La historia de la declinación y caída del Imperio romano_. Se trata de un libro materialmente sólido, de muy hermosa factura, que tienta por igual al anticuario y al filósofo, que (...) conserva la preferencia por la transmisión escrita, combinada sabiamente con la cultura visual, y cuyos autores no ocultan su admiración por el asunto que tienen entre manos —_Le Pays de Vaud à la rencontre des Lumières européennes _es una variación significativa del encuentro de la ciudad con la filosofía, de las _mores _con la reflexión— al ejercer la crítica ni al ponderar sus conocimientos en campos de investigación muy distintos. (shrink)

Solo con el mayor de los escrúpulos podría señalarse una extraña omisión en el planteamiento del problema central de la relación de la filosofía con la historia, una omisión que se reflejaría en ‘History as a System’ (Historia como sistema) del filósofo español José Ortega y Gasset, un texto que se había publicado antes en alemán con el título ‘Die Lage der Wissenschaft und die historische Vernunft’ (El lugar de la ciencia y la razón histórica’) y que, al publicarse por (...) primera vez en la versión original, en 1941, formaría un libro junto con otro capítulo —evidentemente inacabado— dedicado al Imperio romano. En la relación de la historia como sistema con el Imperio romano, de dos “totalizaciones” —el término de Ortega en _España invertebrada_ para referirse a la agencia romana en la historia— o dos aspiraciones a la totalidad de la vida civilizada, la omisión de Edward Gibbon resulta aún más extraña. (shrink)

Edward Gibbon es generalmente considerado el mejor historiador en lengua inglesa. Durante su vida fue también una figura literaria con reputación en toda Europa. Desde su muerte, la _Declinación y caída _ha mantenido su estatus como una de las pocas obras de historia —quizás incluso la única— de la que puede esperarse que una persona bien informada la haya al menos examinado. Resulta, pues, sorprendente que nunca se haya proyectado una edición completa y uniforme de los escritos y la (...) correspondencia de Gibbon, y mucho más que se hubiera completado. Una edición exhaustiva y académica de los escritos y la correspondencia de Gibbon plantea retos particulares y requeriría un número insólitamente grande de volúmenes. Sin embargo, también proporcionaría una abundante cantidad de nuevos hallazgos y estimularía y apoyaría nuevas investigaciones, no solo sobre el propio Gibbon, sino sobre el siglo XVIII británico y la Ilustración europea en general. (shrink)

Before Edward Gibbon began his history of the Christian empire, he ended the first volume of the “Decline and Fall” with two chapters on the rise of Christianity before Constantine. These were believed to deny or ignore its character as revelation. It was also pointed out that this purpose was irrelevant to the history he had set out to write. The church historians he read focussed on the interactions between the Christian gospel and Hellenic philosophy. Gibbon, however, chose to (...) emphasize the Christian rejection of cultic polytheism, and gave a Humean account of the early Christians as enthusiasts. Five years elapsed between the first and second volumes of his history. By the latter date his reputation as an unbeliever was established, and has since received more attention than the history he wrote. (shrink)

For several decades G. W. Bowersock has been one of our leading historians of the classical world. This volume collects seventeen of his essays, each illustrating how the classical past has captured the imagination of some of the greatest figures in modern historiography and literature. The essays here range across three centuries, the eighteenth to the twentieth, and are divided chronologically. The great Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon is in large part the unifying force of this collection as he appears (...) prominently in the first four essays, beginning with Bowersock's engaging introduction to the methods and genius behind The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's profound influence is revealed in subsequent essays on Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century scholar famous for his history of the Italian Renaissance but whose work on late antiquity is only now being fully appreciated; the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose annotations on Gibbon's Decline and Fall tell us much about his own historical poems; and finally W. H. Auden, whose poem and little known essay "The Fall of Rome" were, in quirky ways, tributes to Gibbon. The collection reprints Auden's poem and essay in full. The result is a rich survey of the early modern and modern uses of the classical past by one of its most important contemporary commentators. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said of (...) Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century. (shrink)

In these learned essays, Joseph M. Levine shows how the idea and method of modern history first began to develop during the Renaissance, when a clear distinction between history and fiction was first proposed. The new claims for history were met by a new skepticism in a debate that still echoes today. Levine's first three essays discuss Thomas More's preoccupation with the distinction between history and fiction Erasmus's biblical criticism and the contribution of Renaissance philology to critical method and the (...) way in which Renaissance rhetoric, as in Thomas Elyot's Book of the Governor, continued to inhibit the autonomy of history. He then shows how these issues persisted into the eighteenth century, even as critical method developed. He concludes with a close description of the great controversy that culminated in Edward Gibbon's day over the authenticity of a biblical text that had been used for centuries to defend the Trinity but which turned out to be a forgery. Levine shows how by then all sides were ready to concede the autonomy of history. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- INTRODUCTION -- VOLTAIRE -- HUME -- ROBERTSON -- GIBBON -- INDEX.

En varios pasajes de sus _Memorias_, Gibbon explicaría las razones de la publicación de estas _Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid_, surgidas, como anotó escrupulosamente en sus _Memorias_, de la decimotercera lectura de la _Eneida_ y de la recuperación del inglés como lengua de escritura. “El sexto libro de la _Eneida_ —escribe en la Memoria C— es la composición más grata y perfecta de la poesía latina.” “A principios del año 1770 —sigue diciendo— mis (...) _Observaciones críticas sobre el sexto libro de la Eneida_ fueron enviadas a la imprenta sin mi nombre. En ese breve ensayo, mi primera publicación en inglés, dirigí mis golpes contra la persona y las hipótesis del obispo Warburton. (shrink)

Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without (...) begging any crucial questions against theists.) A genealogy is an explanation which somehow subverts the claims believed, usually by putting down the beliefs to unreliable causal mechanisms. Some genealogies are natural histories, such as Aquinas’s explanation of the prevalence of Islam and Gibbon’s explanation of the prevalence of Christianity. But not all genealogies are natural histories and not all natural histories are genealogies: witness the Primitive Christians’ explanation of the prevalence of Paganism which relies crucially on supernatural agencies and Hume’s explanation of our moral beliefs which defines moral truth in terms of the idealized outputs of our natural belief-forming mechanisms. However both believers and non-believers postulate a natural propensity of to devotion on the part of human beings a ‘sensus divinitatis’ which often results in false positives and is therefore unreliable. Thus the evolutionary explanation of this propensity does not add much to the skeptical case against religion. I conclude by arguing, as against Plantinga that since on his own showing our sensus divinitatis often malfunctions under optimum conditions, its unreliability constitutes a defeater for the claim that Christian beliefs are properly basic. (shrink)

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle, that darted a ray of light into the indigested chaos, (...) was an early and rational application of the order of time and place. The maps of Cellarius and Wells imprinted in my mind the picture of ancient geography: from Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher [ sic ] and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events. . . This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris, Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”. In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis. But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions. (shrink)

Barbarism and Religion - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the idea of 'The Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. Professor Pocock (...) argues that the English Enlightenment of which Gibbon was part was an ecclesiastical as well as a secular phenomenon, one of several Protestant Enlightenments distinct from that of the Parisian philosophes, and part of the reconstitution of Europe after the wars against Louis XIV. The whole sequence is concerned less with the specific historiography of the Roman Empire than with the cultural history of Europe in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

A provocative critique of Western attitudes about the Orient, this history examines the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East from the 1700s to the present.

An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience --the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks (...) out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is. (shrink)

Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an evocation of his own response to nature and an eloquent statement of the conservation ethic. Wilson argues that our natural affinity for life―biophilia―is the very essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.

The discovery that loans for the payment of slave abolition compensation had not been repaid by British taxpayers until 2015 took many by surprise. But it is the financial contribution of British A...

One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics, society, and religion–from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the wisdom (...) and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment, she argues, that created a moral and social philosophy–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more so than in Europe. This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on the readings and uses of Virgil in British imperial contexts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British interest in Virgil heightened during the middle of the eighteenth century, when Britain was establishing its Second Empire. In the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, Virgil was often deployed by writers in different imperial situations. Writers such as Edward Gibbon turned to Virgil not because of a desire to promote monarchical imperialism but with the aim of (...) evaluating the mechanism of the empire, to explore its limits and contradictions, and to question its durability. In Victoria’s reign, when the empire in India seemed to several Britons to be long lasting, many prominent figures highlighted the providential and prophetic interpretations of Virgil, and speculated about an empire that was divinely ordained and infinite. Among these prominent personages were Tennyson, Auden, Bryce, and so on. These themes of British Empire within the context of Virgil’s writings are examined from the time of Gibbon to the Victorians, in order to describe the interweaving relationships and patterns that link Virgil and the history of the empire. (shrink)

History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireI argue that there are duties that can be called ‘Moral duties due to history’ or, in short, ‘Duties to History’. My claim is not the familiar thought that we need to learn from history on how to live better in the present and going forward, but that history itself creates moral duties. In addition to (...) those obligations we currently recognise in response to the present and the future, there also exist special obligations in response to the past. If convincing, this means that our lives ought to be guided, in part, not only by our obligations to the living but by our DTH. This is a surprising result, with significant and sometimes perplexing implications. My focus is on the obligations of individuals in the light of history rather than on collective duties.I argue that there are duties that can be called ‘Moral duties due to history’ or, in short, ‘Duties to History’. My claim is not the familiar thought that we need to learn from history on how to live better in the present and going forward, but that history itself creates moral duties. In addition to those obligations we currently recognise in response to the present and the future, there also exist special obligations in response to the past; such as obligations to good people in the past, but going beyond them. If convincing, this means that our lives ought to be guided, in part, not only by our obligations to the living but by our DTH. This is a surprising result, with significant and sometimes perplexing implications. My focus is on the obligations of individuals in the light of history rather than on collective duties. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: PART ONE: TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF HISTORY -- SECTION I: THE SOCIOLOGICAL -- FOUNDATIONS OF HISTORY -- I. The Sources of Culture Change -- 2. Sociology as a Science -- 3. Sociology and the Theory of Progress -- 4. Civilization and Morals -- 5. Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilization -- 6. Art and Society -- 7. Vitality or Standardization in Culture -- 8. Cultural Polarity and Religious Schism -- 9. Prevision in Religion -- (...) Io. T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture -- SECTION II: THE MOVEMENT OF WORLD HISTORY -- I. Religion and the Life of Civilization -- 2. The Warrior Peoples and the Decline -- of the Archaic Civilization -- 3. The Origins of Classical Civilization -- 4. The Patriarchal Family in History -- 5. Stages in Mankind's Religious Experience -- SECTION III: URBANISM AND THE ORGANIC -- NATURE OF CULTURE -- I. The Evolution of the Modern City -- 2. Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind -- 3. The World Crisis and the English Tradition -- 4. Bolshevism and the Bourgeoisie -- PART TWO: CONCEPTIONS OF WORLD HISTORY -- SECTION IV: CHRISTIANITY AND THE -- MEANING OF HISTORY -- I. The Christian View of History -- 2. History and the Christian Revelation -- 3. Christianity and Contradiction in History -- 4. The Kingdom of God and History -- SECTION II: THE VISION OF THE HISTORIAN -- I. The Problem of Metahistory -- 2. St. Augustine and the City of God -- 3. Edward Gibbon and the Fall of Rome -- 4. Karl Marx and the Dialectic of History -- 5. H. G. Wells and the Outline of History -- 6. Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations -- 7. Arnold Toynbee and the Study of History -- 8. Europe in Eclipse -- Afterword by John J. Mulloy: Continuity and Development -- in Christopher Dawson's Thought -- Sources -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century BritainMark Salber PhillipsQuando mia figlia era molto piccola si divertiva a entrare nel mio studio e a chiedermi con finta gravità: “Signore papà che cosa hai concluso?” La sua domanda mi è tornata in mente molte volte più tardi, e mi ritorna nella mente anche oggi. Concludere non è facile, in qualsiasi lingua. E io per natura (...) preferisco proporre problemi.—A. Momigliano, “Epilogo senza conclusione”The question is: can we save for ourselves and for our successors this immemorial tradition, this long-standing delight, of talking to past historians as if they were our senior colleagues?—A. Momigliano, “Polybius Between the English and the Turks”More than any other historian of this century, Arnaldo Momigliano shaped our understanding of the evolution of Western historiography from the ancient to the modern world. Fundamental to this continuity, as Momigliano saw it, was the revival in the Renaissance of the classical division of history into two distinct genres. The first (often called, without further qualification, “history”) is the narrative of public events organized in linear [End Page 297] and causal fashion; the second, antiquities, is a more diverse body of writing that neglects political narrative for philosophical, literary, topographical, and other concerns. After the Reformation antiquarianism took on new tasks in response to the religious controversies of the age, but it remained distinct from the narrative tradition. Only in the eighteenth century did a convergence begin that has finally been completed in the historical methods of our own time. 1This identification of the eighteenth century as the time when historical narrative and antiquarian research converged gives Momigliano’s views their particular interest to students of this period. His terms, however, are always far wider than any single century. In fact his argument constitutes a genealogy of modern historical method, since the merging of the two traditions—first witnessed in the erudite historiography of Edward Gibbon—was a precondition of modern practice. On these foundations, a modern historical discipline has grown up in which systematic research has become indivisible from the task of representing the past in narrative, with the consequence that the ancient separation of history and antiquities has at last been transcended.This essay is intended as a sketch of an alternative approach to the study of historical thought and writing in eighteenth-century Britain. In my view an essential point of departure is the interest of eighteenth-century writers in the structures and experiences of private life, their desire to explore the inward lives of individuals and the everyday life of societies. This revaluation of private life challenged the classical conception of history in fundamental ways, resulting in a fruitful tension between the social and sentimental interests of the age and its inherited view of history. At stake, in the very [End Page 298] broadest terms, was the need to find forms of historical narrative that met the needs of a commercial society and recognized the values and activities of a non-aristocratic audience.In the eighteenth century antiquarian erudition was far from the only genre bordering on the territory of political narrative. Conjectural history, religious history, history of manners, history of sciences and of literature, biography, memoir, and novel all defined themselves in relation to a traditional conception of history and claimed the attention of readers for their own rival narrative spaces. More particularly, these related genres ranged themselves against history’s strict identification with public life, with all the assumptions about audience, gender, and intellectual authority that accompanied the public domain. Without ever displacing the national narrative in the hierarchy of literatures, these other genres offered a variety of alternative histories whose common ground was their resistance to the assumed priority of politics. 2For a generation Momigliano’s dialectic of history and antiquarianism has served as an organizing principle for a good deal of teaching and writing on early modern historiography. 3 It is time, I believe, for a revaluation of this conceptual scheme. The wider consideration of genres I am urging would greatly enlarge the framework of discussion and give us a sharper sense of the interests of eighteenth-century historians and their... (shrink)

Jean Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis was the first substantial biography of the Prophet Muhammad translated by a European author directly from an authentic Muslim source. Familiar to Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, Gagnier’s work significantly shaped European understandings of the origins of Islam well into the nineteenth century. Yet Gagnier’s scholarship has not been examined in any depth since it was closely read by his contemporaries. This article provides an analysis of Gagnier’s strategies and competencies as a (...) translator and reconstructs his attempt to exploit the Arabic manuscripts then available to an Oxford scholar. It argues that the case of Gagnier is a cautionary reminder that philological approaches to the study of the Muslim past did not necessarily occasion sympathy for Islam. Old prejudices continued to influence Gagnier’s decisions as a translator and were passed on in new forms to later readers. Moreover, aspects of the Muslim historiographical tradition discovered by Gagnier did not necessarily incline his readers to a more positive view of Islam. The increased accessibility of Islamic historical texts could just as easily serve the Christian polemicist as the Enlightened historian. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider a posthumanist critique of international law in relation to the material world. Our perspective on posthumanism and international law is framed by a monument of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the so-called ‘founding father’ of the colony of South Australia. Centering the monument in our dialogue, we discuss two types of materialism: New materialism and historical materialism. We argue that an engagement with new and old materialism opens possibilities for a critical engagement with posthumanism. Central to (...) this critical engagement are themes of materiality, settler colonialism, agency, and exploitation – themes that are key for understanding the operation of international law. By identifying where the materialist theories differ, and also where they converge, we ultimately seek to identify the utility of a posthumanist critique for destabilising international law’s imperialist, capitalist, racialized and patriarchal structures. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to look at an early 17th-century analysis of a prince’s management of an ‘agglomerate polity’ in order to obtain a view of its chief focuses, concerns, and terms of analysis. Four main types of issues appear (apart from Grotius’ general analysis of Philip’s person and policies, which are also discussed): 1. Acceptation and legitimacy of a prince who was perceived to ignore local customs, rights and interests of his various territories; 2. The king’s representatives (...) and intermediaries, their (mis)management of their task, or the King’s (mis)management of them; 3. The conflicting demands of international politics; 4. Controlling armies and the connected issue of financial resources. The ‘Tacitean’ mode of writing history was regarded as the most ‘true’ and ‘revealing’ historiography in Grotius’ time. However Tacitean perceptiveness and analysis were not about what historians today regard as deeper historical processes and causation (like those associated with the ‘philosophic’ histories from the Enlightenment onwards, e.g. in Edward Gibbon), but about understanding personal motives and (hidden) immediate causes and intentions behind particular events and decisions. This historic differences in historical explanation should be taken into account when judging the value of Grotius’ history of his own time. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

This article examines an eighteenth-century historical work, Antoine-Yves Goguet's De L'origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences, et de leurs progrès chez les anciens peuples. Goguet studied ancient cultures, but maintained that they were inferior to modern European civilization. His methodology, wide erudition, and detailed footnotes were praised at the time, including by the customarily critical Edward Gibbon. Goguet's work was translated into several languages and was influential into the beginning of the nineteenth century, although he was later (...) all but forgotten. The article discusses his work in the context of eighteenth-century scholarship. (shrink)