Author: David Womersley Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 9780198187332 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifications of an elusive aspect of authorship. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, Womersley makes possible a more intimate understanding of what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself. At the same time he deepens our knowledge of the conditions of English authorship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Author: David Womersley Publisher: ISBN: 9780191718861 Category : Byzantine Empire Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
This text is an examination of the conflict between Gibbon and his critics, especially the spokemen for religious orthodoxy. It illuminates both the historian's career and personality and the prevailing conditions for authorship in England
Author: Jan N. Bremmer Publisher: Barkhuis ISBN: 9077922709 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 98
Book Description
The rise of Christianity up to the victory of Constantine has often been studied and remains a puzzling phenomenon. In this valedictory lecture Jan N. Bremmer concentrates on the explanations adduced, focusing in particular on the works of three iconic figures from the last two hundred and fifty years: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of Edward Gibbon, the most famous ancient historian of all time, at the end of the eighteenth century; Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums of Adolf von Harnack, the greatest historian of early Christianity of all time, around 1900, and The Rise of Christianity of Rodney Stark, the most adventurous sociologist of religion of our times, at the end of the twentieth century.Bremmer locates their concerns and explanations within their own times, but also takes them seriously as scholars, discussing their analyses and approaches. In this way he shows both the continuities and the innovations in the evolving view which scholarship presents of early Christianity. Bremmer's exceptional knowledge of the huge range of scholarship and his humane and balanced judgment make this lecture the ideal introduction to the many problems raised by Christianity's displacement of paganism
Author: G.W. Bowersock Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190452080 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
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.
Author: F. P. Lock Publisher: University of Delaware ISBN: 1611494176 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Gibbon aspired to combine the critical analysis of the eighteenth-century philosophe with the older traditions of the humanist and scholarly historian. His different uses of numbers, to inform and to persuade, illustrate his remarkable fusion of these approaches. This book, the first to be devoted to a historian’s use of numbers, shows how carefully Gibbon interrogated and deployed the numerical evidence in his sources to create a more accurate historical narrative; to demonstrate his own reliability and candor as a historian; and to convince readers of the validity of his interpretations of characters and events.
Author: John Tolan Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691186111 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
Heretic and impostor or reformer and statesman? The contradictory Western visions of Muhammad In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Commentators have also portrayed Muhammad as a visionary reformer and an inspirational leader, statesman, and lawgiver. In Faces of Muhammad, John Tolan provides a comprehensive history of these changing, complex, and contradictory visions. Starting from the earliest calls to the faithful to join the Crusades against the “Saracens,” he traces the evolution of Western conceptions of Muhammad through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and up to the present day. Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. To Reformation polemicists, the spread of Islam attested to the corruption of the established Church, and prompted them to depict Muhammad as a champion of reform. In revolutionary England, writers on both sides of the conflict drew parallels between Muhammad and Oliver Cromwell, asking whether the prophet was a rebel against legitimate authority or the bringer of a new and just order. Voltaire first saw Muhammad as an archetypal religious fanatic but later claimed him as an enemy of superstition. To Napoleon, he was simply a role model: a brilliant general, orator, and leader. The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.
Author: Rosamond McKitterick Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521525053 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
This book examines Gibbon's interpretations of empire and the intellectual context in which he formulated them against a background of the eighteenth- and late twentieth-century knowledge of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Gibbon's ideas of empire, his understanding of monarchy and the balance of power, his sources and working methods, the structure of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his attitude towards the barbarians, the contrasting treatments of the eastern and western Empire, his appreciation of past civilizations and their material remains, his audience and their reactions - contemporary and Victorian - are considered in the light of the latest research on eighteenth-century intellectual history on the one hand and on late antiquity, Byzantium and the Middle Ages on the other. The book breaks new ground in taking the form of a dialogue between experts on the fields about which Gibbon himself wrote, and eighteenth-century intellectual historians.
Author: Nathaniel Wolloch Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1783277254 Category : Authors, English Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world.
Author: David Womersley
Author: David Womersley
Author: Jan N. Bremmer
Author: G.W. Bowersock
Author: Karen O'Brien
Author: F. P. Lock
Author: John Tolan
Author: Rosamond McKitterick
Author: Stefan Collini
Author: Nathaniel Wolloch