Editing Historiography (section)

====Edward Gibbon====
[[File:Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton cleaned.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Edward Gibbon]]'s ''[[The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]]''

(1776) was a masterpiece of late 18th-century history writing.]]

The apex of Enlightenment history was reached with [[Edward Gibbon]]'s monumental six-volume work, ''[[The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]]'', published on 17 February 1776. Because of its relative objectivity and heavy use of [[primary source]]s, its methodology became a model for later historians. This has led to Gibbon being called the first "modern historian".<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yH9rdaF1CckC|title=Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf|author=Deborah Parsons|year=2007|publisher=Routledge|page=94|isbn=978-0203965894}}</ref> The book sold impressively, earning its author a total of about £9000. Biographer [[Leslie Stephen]] wrote that thereafter, "His fame was as rapid as it has been lasting."

Gibbon's work has been praised for its style, its piquant epigrams and its effective irony. [[Winston Churchill]] memorably noted, "I set out upon&nbsp;... Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' [and] was immediately dominated both by the story and the style.&nbsp;... I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all."<ref>Winston Churchill, ''My Early Life: A Roving Commission'' (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 111.</ref> Gibbon was pivotal in the secularizing and 'desanctifying' of history, remarking, for example, on the "want of truth and common sense" of biographies composed by [[Saint Jerome]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.historytoday.com/tom-holland/edward-gibbon-and-he-rose-again|title=Edward Gibbon: And He Rose Again|access-date=2012-12-17|archive-date=2015-09-12|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150912101729/http://www.historytoday.com/tom-holland/edward-gibbon-and-he-rose-again|url-status=live}}</ref> Unusually for an 18th-century historian, Gibbon was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible (though most of these were drawn from well-known printed editions). He said, "I have always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend."<ref>Womersley, ''Decline and Fall'', vol. 2, Preface to Gibbon vol. 4, p. 520.</ref> In this insistence upon the importance of primary sources, Gibbon broke new ground in the methodical study of history:

<blockquote>In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the 'History' is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive.&nbsp;... Whatever its shortcomings the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period.<ref>Stephen, ''DNB'', p. 1134.</ref></blockquote>