Editing Edward Gibbon (section)

===Oxford, Lausanne, and a religious journey: 1752–1758===
[[File:Magdalen College, Oxford (7958644740).jpg|thumb|[[Magdalen College, Oxford]]]]
Following a stay at [[Bath, Somerset|Bath]] in 1752 to improve his health at the age of 15, Gibbon was sent by his father to [[Magdalen College, Oxford]], where he was enrolled as a [[gentleman-commoner]]. He was ill-suited, however, to the college atmosphere, and later rued his 14 months there as the "most idle and unprofitable" of his life. Because he says so in his autobiography, it used to be thought that a penchant from his aunt for "theological controversy" bloomed under the influence of the deist or rationalist theologian [[Conyers Middleton]] (1683–1750), the author of ''Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers'' (1749). In that tract, Middleton denied the validity of such powers; Gibbon promptly objected, or so the argument used to run. The product of that disagreement, with some assistance from the work of Catholic Bishop [[Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet]] (1627–1704), and that of the Elizabethan Jesuit [[Robert Persons|Robert Parsons]] (1546–1610), yielded the most memorable event of his time at Oxford: his conversion to Roman Catholicism on 8 June 1753.  He was further "corrupted" by the 'free thinking' deism of the playwright and poet [[David Mallet (writer)|David Mallet]];<ref>Pocock, ''Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon''. for Middleton, see pp. 45–47; for Bossuet, p. 47; for the Mallets, p. 23; Robert Parsons [or Persons], ''A Christian directory: The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution'', (London, 1582). In his 1796 edition of Gibbon's ''Memoirs'', Lord Sheffield claims that Gibbon directly connected his Catholic conversion to his reading of Parsons.&nbsp; Womersley, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', p. 9.</ref> and finally Gibbon's father, already "in despair," had had enough. David Womersley has shown, however, that Gibbon's claim to having been converted by a reading of Middleton is very unlikely, and was introduced only into the final draft of the "Memoirs" in 1792–93.<ref>Womersley, ''Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and His Reputation, 1776–1815'' (Oxford University Press, 2002), as cited by G. M. Bowersock in ''The New York Review of Books'', 25 November 2010, p.&nbsp;56.</ref>

Within weeks of his conversion, he was removed from Oxford and sent to live under the care and tutelage of Daniel Pavillard, Reformed pastor of [[Lausanne]], [[Switzerland]]. There, he made one of his life's two great friendships, that of [[Jacques Georges Deyverdun]] (the French-language translator of [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe's]] ''[[The Sorrows of Young Werther]]''), and that of [[John Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield|John Baker Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield)]]. Just a year and a half later, after his father threatened to disinherit him, on Christmas Day, 1754, he reconverted to Protestantism. "The various articles of the Romish creed," he wrote, "disappeared like a dream".<ref>John Murray (ed.). ''[https://archive.org/stream/autobiographies00gibbgoog?ref=ol#page/n12 The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon]''.  (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 137.</ref>