WPC 2 BL ZNLQ 10cpi#|xx6X@{ X@IBM ProprinterIBMPROPR.PRSx  @5`X@2 . 0XPF\NLQ 10cpiNLQ 17cpi Half-height?xxx x6X@{ X@&D1FFFx 5F6X@h ,@:\DOS allowedParameter value not allowedParameter format not correctInvalid peterInvalid parameter combination> R m |   IZc$d functionFile not2 3'3'Standard3'3'Standardprinter t॰   *+EF`(#@Gibbon +  Ѓ=Edward Gibbon (17371794) Patricia Craddock, University of Florida =Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was born on 8 May 1737 (N. S.), the first and only surviving child of parents deeply engrossed in a "love  ? tale at . . . Putney."EF Gibbon's phrase. See his Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: THomas Nelson and Sons, 1966), p. 19.  His birth came just too late to persuade a stern grandfather, one of the exdirectors of the notorious South Sea Company, again welltodo despite the punitive measures taken against the directors when the "bubble" burst, to forgive the young lovers for a marriage of which he had disapproved and to make a will more favorable to his only son, Gibbon's father. Though the SouthSea director had died in December 1736, the shadow of his disapproval and of his austere brand of Anglicanism (William Law, the prominent nonjuror, lived in his house) hung over Gibbon's childhood. He was often desperately ill as an infant and had only brief intervals of health as a boy. His mother, absorbed in her husband and numerous pregnancies, followed within days or months by the deaths of the infants, had little time for him. Her place was supplied by one of "the world's perfect aunts,"[ D. M. Low, Edward Gibbon 17371794 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), 24. [ her sister Catherine Porten, "the true mother of my mind as well as of my health," Gibbon called her gratefully (Memoirs, 36). She instilled in him a delight in reading, and especially in tales of life exotic in its distance either in time or place. Early favorites were the Arabian Nights and Pope's Homer. Though neither aunt nor nephew knew a foreign language, they did not content themselves with storybooks, and they were not passive readers. He "seriously disputed with [his] aunt on the vices and virtues of the Heroes of the Trojan War." She was "more prone to encourage than to check, a curiosity above the strength of a boy," the mental strength, that is, for the boy remained too weak and ill to join in the usual childhood sports (Memoirs, 37). "The Dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were my top and cricketball," Gibbon remembered (Memoirs, 43). His aunt, however, could not give him a gentleman's education. A brief interval at a preparatory school at KingstononThames taught him that he could be punished by his peers for the "sins of his Tory ancestors," and with "many tears and some blood, [he] purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax" (Memoirs, 33). This schooling was interrupted by his usual illnesses, and terminated by the death of his mother. His father's passionate grief was a stronger memory than that of his mother herself: he was not yet ten. He was not sent back to school, nor was he taken with his father to the country, to which the elder Gibbon retired; he was left with his aunt, in her father's house in Putney. It was a high spot in young Edward's education, for it "unlocked to the door of a tolerable library," and he "turned over many English pages of Poetry and romance, of history and travels" (Memoirs, 37). But school was still necessary, despite the boy's sophistical arguments against learning languages; and the aunt, moreover, after her father's bankruptcy, had her parents and herself to support. She combined her goals by undertaking to provide room, board, and care for scholars at Westminster School, starting with her own nephew. She made a significant success of this career, earning enough money not only to buy, instead of renting, the boardinghouse she maintained, but to retire with a comfortable income. From January 1748, when he was almost eleven, to January 1751, when he was almost fourteen, he attended Westminster in the intervals of his illnesses. At one point his life despaired of; at another he suffered a "strange nervous affection which alternately contracted [his] legs, and produced without any visible symptoms the most excruciating pain." (Memoirs 39). He moved from the fourth form to the third; he begin to manifest the talent for friendship that was, with scholarship, the great joy of his life; but he could not really endure the rigors of publicschool life, even with the advantage of his aunt's care. A few temporary tutors were tried, and his voracious reading continued. With puperty, his health problems vanished, and his father, desperate, sent the precocious fourteenyearold to Magdalen College, Oxford. Gibbon was ever afterwards indignant about the waste of time and intellectual energy he suffered in his fourteen months there, but to Oxford he owed the most fortunate error of his life: he "bewildered [him]self in[to] the errors of the Church of Rome" (Memoirs 58) and was exiled by his father to Protestant Switzerland. In Switzerland, in addition to losing not only his new faith but most of his old, he spent the most important five years of his youth. Under the friendly tutelage of a minister there, Daniel Pavillard, Gibbon learned French and Latin thoroughly, encountered many scholarly and philosophical books that influenced his subsequent career, found a social milieu in which he felt comfortable and welcome, became acquainted with one of his two most important lifelong friends, Georges Deyverdun, fell in love seriously enough to wish to marry (for the first and probably only time in his life)with Suzanne Curchod, later Madame Necker, also a lifelong friend, and began to write what would become his first published book, the Essai sur l'tude de la littrature. He also began his public scholarly career, in effect, by initiating Latin correspondences about textual questions with several scholars. At the age of twentyone, he was recalled to England, where, in exchange for his agreement to break the entail on the family estates, he received an independent allowance in the form of an annuity. The amount, 300, was enough for him to begin acquiring the scholarly library essential to his workhe always remembered "the joy with which [he] exchanged a banknote of twenty pounds for the [first] twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions" (Memoirs 97) when he received his first quarter's allowance. But it was hardly enough to live on in London as a gentleman of Gibbon's rank and fashion, and it certainly would not permit him to marry and carry on scholarship, much less fashion, at the same time. He approached his father, therefore, for the essential permission to marry his Swiss love. His father made it clear that if he did so, he would have no provision but his annuity; moreover, his father would be hurt and offended, hurried to the grave by his son's callousness. This emotional and financial blackmail worked: Gibbon "sighed as a lover, [but] obeyed as a son" (Memoirs 85n). His sufferings were more profound and prolonged than his later insoucient account suggests, but he was helpfully distracted by progress on his book, and piqued by reports from Lausanne that the lady was consoling herself. The book was the first of Gibbon's attempts to reconcile the virtues of the rudits, the philosophes, and the ancients. The seminal and standard study of Gibbon's pursuit and achievement of this reconciliation is that of Arnaldo Momigliano, "Gibbon's Contributions to Historical Method," in his Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 4055. See also Joseph M. Levine, "Edward Gibbon and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation 27 (Winter 1985): 4762.  He defended the antiquarian study of the ancients as necessary or at least valuable to the development of the "philosophic spirit," because only the contextual knowledge provided by these scholars, some of whom, he conceded, were mere drudges, but others of whom inquired and judged with a critical spirit, allowed the reader to acquire the eyes of a different age when he encountered the writings of the past, and such a perspective not only helps to free us from excessive confidence in the views and values of our own age, but gives us access to the experiences and even the information that we lack but that people in other times and places have had. This book was completed and published while Gibbon, with his father, was enjoying or suffering an unexpected foray into the active life: the South Battalion Hampshire Militia, which they had joined without anticipating any such event, was embodied in May of 1760. For more than two years, Gibbon combined the role of captain and acting executive officer of an independent military unit of 476 officers and men with that of budding scholar. In this period he taught himself to read Homer; more significantly, he resolved to be a historian, though he did not finally chose a subject. In his later view, the "Captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire" (Memoirs 117). In 1761 the Essai was published, to some applause in France but with very little notice in England. Its success abroad, however, led the young scholar to depart for Paris on a belated grand tour, after the militia was disbanded, with high hopes of being recognized as both a gentleman and a man of letters. In Paris he studied "the world," but he also read Mabillon and Montfaucon, though he mastered only their results, not their methods. Despite his religious liberation, he was taken aback by the "intolerant zeal of the philosophers and Encyclopaedists" in Paris (Memoirs 127). By his own account, "the most pleasing connection which [he] formed in Paris [was] the acquisition of a female friend by whom [he] was sure of being received every evening with the smile of confidence and joy. . . . Madame Bontems" (Memoirs 127). Nineteen years older than Gibbon in years, she astonished him by being an author without parading her celebrity or ability, seriously religious without losing her charity toward heretics and sinners, or her good humor. When he returned to Paris in 1765, on his way back to England, she may have extended still more generous favors to him.g See Michel Baridon, Edward Gibbon et le Mythe de Rome (Paris: Champion, 1977), 128. g In April, 1763, however, he left for Lausanne, where he spent the summer and winter preparing himself for his trip to Italy by compiling a study of its geography and history as represented in the ancient authors. In this period, and during his Italian journey itself, Gibbon kept reading notes and wrote essays on many literary and scholarly subjects, some of which showed his great interest in Roman history, but many of which dealt also with medieval subjects. His first intention, indeed, was to choose for his first major historical study, one of two favorite subjects, both significantly medieval: "the history of Swiss liberty," and Florence under the Medicis. He also formed the second of the two great friendships of his life, with a fellow Englishman, John Holroyd, who became Gibbon's adviser in all matters of "business." In Italy itself, Gibbon finally found his subject. Entering the Rome of the Popes in 1764, he was "overcome by a dream of antiquity," Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 225. (Gibbon's travel diary of his Italian tour.)  and at least in his own famous account, echoed at the end of the Decline and Fall itself, "It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefoot fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind" (Memoirs 136). Confined at first to the fortunes of the city, his subject from the beginning encompassed medieval Rome as well as imperial Rome; but it was only after two anonymous publications Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of Virgil's Aeneid (1770) and (with Georges Deyverdun) Mmoires littraires de la Grande Bretagne pour l'an 1767 (1768). A second volume of this review of English publications for speakers of French appeared in the following year, but Gibbon probably contributed very little to it. See Patricia B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon, Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), 25768.  and abortive attempts at several other projects, including the Swiss history, and the financial and emotional freedom made possible by his father's death, that he actually began writing the Decline and Fall. The first volume appeared, with great success, in 1776. During the years of its composition, Gibbpn became a Member of Parliament (1774)a silent supporter of Lord North's government, at first in a seat given him by his cousin, and later in one provided by the party; a Lord of Trade (1779a nearsinecure appointment with nominal oversight of colonial trade), and an occasional pamphleteer, in defence first of his own work (the Vindication of . . . Chapters XV and XVI, January 1779), and then of the Government's (Mmoire justicatif, October 1779). Volumes II and III were written during these scenes of public activity, and published in 1781. When North's government fell, Gibbon lost his seat and chose to retire to Lausanne (1783), where his income would go much further, especially since he could share a house recently inherited by his longtime friend Deyverdun. There he completed the last three volumes, turning to England for a lengthy visit to publish them in 178788. He turned his hand to many projects after completing the history, but finished none to his own satisfaction, not even his memoirs, which after his death were compiled by Holroyd, now Lord Sheffield, into a single whole, from the six drafts Gibbon had written, and published as the centerpiece of Gibbon's posthumous Miscellaneous Works (2 vols., 1796; 5 vols., 1814) . Included in that collection also was another incomplete project of some interest to medieval historians, the Antiquitities of the House of Brunswick, incorporating much of the medieval Italian material Gibbon had accumulated while preparing the Decline and Fall, but foundering like the Swiss history when he began to require materials in German. After the publication of the last three volumes, Gibbon returned once more to Lausanne, where he lived most of the remainder of his life very happily. His final return to England (May 1787) was made in an effort to comfort the Sheffields when Lady Sheffield died. While there, following surgery for an enormous swelling in his groin, which he had neglected for years, he died at the age of 56, on January 16, 1794. Despite his ill health, he had just made an enthusiastic beginning on another kind of scholarly contribution, an edition of the medieval English historians, for which he wrote a preface cum prospectus, and on which he would have collaborated with a young scholar named John Pinkerton, who would have done the actual editing, Gibbon providing introductions and commentaries. Thus he had hoped to contribute still more to medieval scholarship than he was able to do.  When Gibbon began thinking about writing medieval history, he "periodized" the "memorable series of revolutions, which, in the course of about thirteen centuries, gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of [Roman] greatness," as follows: "The first . . . from the age of Trajan and the Antonines . . . to the subversion of the Western Empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia . . . completed about the beginning of the sixth century." "The second . . . may be supposed to commence with the reign of Justinian who by his laws, as well as by his victories, restored a transient splendour to the Eastern Empire. It will comprehend the invasion of Italy by the Lombards, the conquest of the Asiatic and African provinces by the Arabs, who embraced the religion of Mahomet; the revolt of the Roman people against the feeble princes of Constantinople; and the elevation of Charlemagne, who, in the year 800, established the second or German Empire of the West." The "last and longest [extends] . . . from the revival of the Western Empire till the taking of Constantinople by the Turks and the extinction of a degenerate race of princes, who continued to assume the titles of Caesar and Augustus, after their dominions were contracted to the limits of a single city. . . . The writer . . . w[ill] find himself obliged to enter into the general history of the Crusades, as far as they contributed to the ruin of the Greek empire; and he w[ill] scarcely be able to restrain his curiosity from making some enquiry into the state of the city of Rome during the darkness and confusion of the middle ages" Preface to Volume 1, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury. 6 vols. (London: Methuen, 19091914; New York: AMS reprint, 1974), xxxixxl. Originally published 17761788.  Gibbon revised this scheme in large ways and small as, over the course of twelve more years, he completed his history. At the beginning of the last two volumes, after his "age of Justinian" was complete with accounts of Roman law and of the religious controversies and conflicts over the Doctrine of the Incarnation, in which Justinian involved himself, Gibbon proposed a revised structure for the remainder of his task, preferring, he said, to "group . . . my picture by nations;. . . the seeming neglect of Chronological order is surely compensated by the superior merits of interest and perspicuity" (Memoirs, 179). In youth he had objected to Voltaire's topical arrangement in "Sicle de Louis XIV," although he admired that work, because different matters "are all connected in human affairs, and as they are often the cause of each other, why seperate [sic] them in History"?o Gibbon's Journal to January 28th, 1763, ed. D. M. Low (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 129. o On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about the method of Robert Henry's then recent (and now forgotten?) history of Great Britain, which was topical, but narrative within the topics. The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton. 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan and London: Cassell, 1956), 3: 223, with the note of J. E. Norton.  This was Gibbon's practice in the remainder of his medieval history, which proceeds narratively and even chronologically, but which is conceived as a number of parallel narratives, with a few atemporal analyses interspersed. As a result, the same year and even the same events may be discussed in several different chapters, even as the history gradually moves forward to 1453, and the temporal framework is often violated in both directions. Thus Gibbon conceives of the "middle" ages as medial at different times and at different rates in different places and with respect to different things. His new plan called for a chapter devoted to the "revolutions of the [Greek] throne" from Heraclius to the "Latin conquest," a "tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery" included because it is "passively [Gibbon's emphasis] connected with the most splendid and important revolutions which have changed the history of the world." "Such a chronological review will serve to illustrate the various argument of the subsequent chapters; and each circumstance of the eventful story of the barbarians will adapt itself in a proper place to the Byzantine annals." He then promises analytical chapters on the internal state of the empire and "the dangerous heresy of the Paulicians, which shook the East and enlightened the West." But first, he says, we must look at "the world in the ninth and tenth centuries. The following nations will pass before our eyes, and each will occupy the space to which it may be entitled by greatness or merit, or the degree of connexion with the Roman world and the present age." He enumerates first the Franks, treated in chapter 49, and the "Arabs or Saracens" (chapters 5052). "A single chapter [55] will include III. the Bulgarians, IV. Hungarians, and V Russians." The remaining "nations" are listed as the Normans, the Latins, i.e., "the subjects of the pope, the nations of the West, who enlisted under the banner of the cross, [and] a fleet and army of French and Venetians who assaulted the capital and [were] seated near threescore years on the throne of Constantine," and the Greeks, considered by Gibbon as a foreign nation "during this period of captivity and exile," remarking that "Misfortune had rekindled a spark of national virtue; and the Imperial series may be continued, with some dignity, from their restoration to the Turkish conquest." Finally there are the Moguls and Tartars"By the arms of Zingis and his descendants the globe was shaken from China to Poland and Greece; the Sultans were overthrown; the caliphs fell; and the Caesars trembled on their throne. The victories of Timour suspended, above fifty years, the final ruin of the Byzantine empire"and the Turks. Two other topics are mentioned in this plan: "The [religious] schism of the Greeks will be connected with their last calamities, and the restoration of learning in the Western world. I shall return from the captivity of the new, to the ruins of ancient Rome; and the venerable name, the interesting theme, will shed a ray of glory on the conclusion of my labours."< Decline and Fall (chapter 48) 5: 18385. < But in the text itself, before even the conclusion of the "first part" of his original plan with the last of the Western emperors, he marks strongly a sense that a new age has begun in the first part of the fifth century. He singles out from the "insipid legends of ecclesiastical history," the story of the Seven Sleepers who fell asleep in the reign of Decius and awoke in that of Theodosius the younger: XWe imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs, and, even in our larger experiences of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. ButX. . . if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator, who still reatined a lively and recent impression of the old; his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance. The scene could not be more advantageously placed than in the two centuries which elapsed between the reigns of Decius and of Theodosius the younger. During this period, the seat of government had been transported from Rome to a new city, [Constantinople] . . . and the abuse of military spirit had been suppressed by an artificial system of tame and ceremonious servitude. The throne of the persecuting Decius was filled by a succession of Christian and orthodox princes, who had extirpated the fabulous gods of antiquity; and the public devotion of the age was impatient to exalt the saints and martyrs of the Catholic church on the altars of Diana and Hercules. The union of the Roman empire was dissolved; its genius was humbled in the dust; and armies of unknown Barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairet provinces of Europe and Africa.9 Decline and Fall (chapter 33) 3: 439. 9 Most of Gibbon's history of the fifth century, indeed, appears before his "first period" ends in chapter 36 of volume 3. It is in volume III, for example, that he treats what Santo Mazzarino calls the "Stilicho problem." Mazzarino credits Gibbon, "the greatest of the Enlightenment historians," with achieving a positive view of Stilicho, in opposition to the Augustinian position. But Enlightenment historiography, Mazzarino believed, could appreciate only the character, not the age, of Stilicho, because its attention was centered on the transition from an age of faith to an age of reason, and it therefore could not appreciate the more important conflict between a supranational idea such as that of the Roman empire, and the emergence of nations, "the empire's successors and [yet] its continuation.". Santo Mazzarino, Stilicho. . I think, rather, that Gibbon clearly distinguishes himself from enlightenment historiography of the "school of Voltaire," by, among many other means, recognizing and being concerned with precisely this problem, as Giorgio Falco pointed out: the loss of the distinctive set of qualities that characterized Roman civilizationand the compensations for that loss. From the beginning of the history, Gibbon had known that his subject was as much the rise of a new world order as the dissolution of an old: "The [imperial] Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies, when the fierce giants of the north broke in and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and, after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste and science."8 Decline and Fall (chapter 2), 1: 64. 8 Gibbon's subject is neither the pigmy world nor the mended one, but the ten centuries in between. Falco's La Polemica sul Medio Evo (1933) contains one of the most extended considerations of Gibbon as medieval historian with which I am familiar. Two chapters150 pagesare devoted to Gibbon, who is credited with offering, "perhaps for the first time" (despite his acknowledged debt of gratitude to both Voltaire and Robertson, on whom he improves respectively in complementary ways, according to Falco), "a full narrative of the middle ages, distinguished from universal history, irradiated by an idea." Giorgio Falco, La polemica sul medio evo (Turin: Biblioteca dellaSocieta storica subalpina, no. 143, 1933; reprint, ed. Fulvio Tessitori, Naples: guida editori, 1974), 191.  For Falco, Gibbon's main faults in the final volumes of the history are (1) lack of organic unity and (2) a static method. He concedes, however, that it is not altogether regrettable that Gibbon failed to sacrifice "his art and his encyclopedic learning" for the cause of organicity. Gibbon's work has become a great model of medieval history, and it behooves us to see how Gibbon configures the Middle Ages and to learn what we can from his inability to systematize all his material organically. For Gibbon, Falco argues, the ancient problem of the decline of the empire was reborn as a vague design of the decline of Romaninity, together with a sense of the progressive enlargement of "Europe" intimately connected with that decline. Hence his "impenitent wandering" from East to West, North to South.k Falco, "La crisi del medio evo illuministico nella 'Decline and Fall' di E. Gibbon," 191255. k Falco singles out several topics in Gibbon's medieval history for special treatment, starting, of course, with religion. He cites Gibbon's fantasy of Peter and Paul, returned to life and Rome, wondering what god might be worshiped with such mysterious rites in such splendid temples. "In this fantasy is summed up his judgment on the medieval Church. We can know no other Christianity than that which is seen in the unique and manifold process of history." We do not see in it moral or intellectual positions that can be admired by the philosopher; yet we may speculate that most people cannot get along with austerely rational metaphysics, and we can acknowledge that as a social institution, religion, even in the form of the Catholic Church, has done some good. Falco's second topic is that of competitive value systems, represented in the Orientals and the Orientalized empire, and in the barbarians. Gibbon's norm is the laws of nature, and first, those of personal freedom. Despite the advantages of order and comfort offered by the empire, it is condemned. For barbarians, "the problem is simply inverted." Their "freedom" depends on "misery, material and moral." In the falling empire and in the high middle ages, Gibbon's recurrent theme is the opportunity for a better, i.e. freer, society that arise and are lost. In the treatment of reviving constitutional states of the low middle ages and modern times Gibbon indicates, even beyond his sympathies, the temperateness of his democratic propensities and his conservative temper, faithful to the theory of balance of powers. He makes clear his idea of the worst government: an ecclesiastical state, which can neither secure order and comfort, nor allow civil and religious liberty. These aspects of the Decline and Fall, however, are not unusual in the century, says Falco. The originality and fecundity of the History will appear to those who consider the historian's art and method. What it gives us is great pictures of the "fundamental moments" of the middle ages: Constantine, Christianity and the Empire: Charlemagne, Muhammed and the Arabs, the Crusades, the Renaissance." Falco devotes an entire chapter to an appreciation, with appropriate qualifications, of these "moments."G Falco, "I grandi quadri dlla storia gibboniana," 257319. G He concludes, "we could trace [in Gibbon] the thread of an organic medieval history, but it would be artificial. This is not Gibbon's argument. He intended to write the history of the decline and fall of all Romaninity as a political organism. He had a lively sense of the ancient world, of the unified empire that dissolved, and he studied acutely and minutely its crises; "a thousand sporadic points show a clear consciousness of the modern states: but . . . despite all the riches of information and penetration he provides, he lacks precisely an appreciation of the 'Middle Ages' as an object of study for its own sake." Many other writers and editors have paid special attention to these and other aspects of the final four volumes of Gibbon's history, without necessarily agreeing with this assessment. A common characteristic is that everyone who looks closely at the last volumes of the history realizes that Gibbon does not portray the "decline and fall" as merely a negative process. One valuable study, that of G. Giarrizzo, goes so far as to claim that the title of the Decline and Fall is merely occasional: its true theme is rather a product of Gibbon's lifelong interest in medieval history, "an unconscious exaltation of modern Europe, after a near tragic gestation period." Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1954), 446.  Despite this view, Giarrizzo leaves much of Gibbon's medieval history undiscussed, and discusses the work, of course, from his own agenda, as a contribution to intellectual history of the eighteenth century, not from the agenda of Gibbon's history, some understanding of the fate of the onceRoman world. This is understandable. Even if we limit ourselves "only" to Gibbon's medieval history, his range, chronological, spatial, and topical, is enormous. Perhaps we may see his conceptual achievement as paradoxical: on the one hand, to see the continuity between the ancient world and modern Europe, precisely to see the ancient world, the middle ages, and the modern age as parts of a single whole; on the other, to respect the profound discontinuities among the various stories that might be perceived in his materials, depending on where the observer stands. Certainly Gibbon's readers have tended to see, whether with approval or disapproval, whichever of these perceptions interested them; and some readers who were aware of both have objected to Gibbon's "inconsistency." Recent readers have begun, on the other hand, to admire the honesty and richness of this complex response. Increasingly, as Gibbon worked through his history, he treated his subject as a set of distinct and parallel stories, profoundly interconnected both by influence and by analogous and contrasting motifs, such stories as those of church and state, East and West, Rome and "Barbarians" both Northern and Persian, etc. Byzantium is the center of a narrowing circle preserving the Roman name and fewer and fewer features of the "Roman spirit"; beyond Byzantium, on the other hand, the excitement of human diversity even includes embodiments of some features of Roman culture and spirit, and improvements on others. One recurrent inquiry in all these stories is about the interplay among major competitors for the power to define human groups: religion, politics, and economic life. Gibbon's interest in the first of these competitors is famous; recent work, particularly a series of essays by J. G. A. Pocock, is illuminating his development of perspectives on the others derived from Machiavelli, Adam Smith, John Ferguson, and others. Another is the possible role of heroic individuals, in any sense of the word "heroic." Gibbon sees certain large historical results as affected by the existence and nature of particular individuals, but more often he sees individuals as heroic and/or ridiculous in the futility of their resistence to the "times." He is concerned from the beginning of the history about the fate of the individual, whether or not heroic, who is capable of thinking for himselfor even herself. At the height of the empire, he saw this opportunity as threatened by cultural hegemony; in the disintegrating empire, he sees twin perils, orientalization and decivilization. He sees the "orientalized" Eastern empire as attempting to deny change and the nomadic tribes as unable to preserve it. Thus both threatening types essentially withdraw themselves from history. Almost as soon as the Decline and Fall was published, specialist historians were able to improve upon Gibbon's account of any one of his subjects, to challenge or enlarge any one of his perspectives. But he succeeded in creating an awareness of, an interest in, even those aspects of his subject with which he was least sympathetic, whether it was the history of religious controversy, or the endurance of Byzantium, or barbaric heroics. Carlyle, unconsciously echoing Suzanne Necker, recommended that Jane Welsh read the Decline and Fall because "there is no other tolerable history of those times and nations . . . . it is a kind of bridge that connects the antique with the modern age. And how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of those barbarous centuries!"  Thomas Carlyle, Early Letters, ed. C. E. Norton (London and New York: Macmillan, 1886), 2: 180. Suzanne Curchod Necker, letter of 21 April 1781, in The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, ed. John, Lord Sheffield. 5 vols. (London: John Murray, 1814), 2: 246.  Gibbon, perhaps because of the title of his great work, is seldom thought of as a historian of the medieval world. But as an inquirer into the signifance that world had, in its own right and as a link to its past and future, he remains not only stimulating, but, in English at least, indispensable.