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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman
Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living
in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of
remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one,
Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in
post-Renaissance Europe - what he calls litterature. The first
publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets
Gibbon's work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction
examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to
this text: the young writer's perception of European intellectual
life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the
Encyclopedie and the French academies, the fate of erudition, and
the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive
commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation
of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections
on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text. As
current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will
find in this edition of Gibbon's Essai a new approach to the
intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.
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