Reviews of Books

The first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion comprise an expansive, erudite, and often engrossing study of the historical and historiographical contexts that inform Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788). At the outset of this grand work, J.G.A. Pocock remarks of his manner of proceeding: "It has been put to me that I am attempting an ecology rather than an etiology of the Decline and Fall; a study of the world in which it existed, not confined to its genesis in that world. An enquiry of that order begins in the volume which I here deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public" (1:10). By the end of the second volume we have not yet arrived at 1776 or the Decline and Fall, although Pocock's general introduction suggests that we sometime may: "Other volumes may follow under the series title of Barbarism and Religion, but their reading should not be subordinated to their place in the series. Each, that is to say, will be designed, as this is, to be read as a single study, rounded out to the point where its contribution to Gibbon studies is defined and delimited; the reader is desired only to remember that others will come" (1:10).

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Each of these two volumes is indeed "defined and delimited," or intelligible without its companion; given their shared themes, however, the volumes gain cumulative force when read together, as I hope by the following synopsis to suggest. Volume 1, in Pocock's words, "traces The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, following the trajectory of his earlier life through a series of contexts to which the term Enlightenment can in various ways be applied, until we reach his return from Rome to England in the early months of 1765. By that time--though his full encounter with the Scottish Enlightenment had still to occur--he was well on the way towards the formation of a concept of historiography as he intended to practise it" (1:9). In Pocock's account, Gibbon's early career consists of fleeing from the troubling ecclesiological politics of the English Enlightenment into the comforts of Catholicism; abandoning Catholicism and becoming a skeptical historicist in Lausanne through his encounter with "the Arminian Enlightenment" of exiled Huguenot writers; discovering l'érudition (philology or antiquarianism) through Huguenots such as Pierre Bayle and French academicians such as Nicolas Freret (1688–1749); defending in print the érudits and histoire civile against the philosophes, while conning the lesson of d'Alembert's histoire philosophique; and pledging Whig allegiance to what Pocock dubs "a Utrecht Enlightenment," or the belief, tenable through 1776 or perhaps 1789, that the commercial confederation of sovereign states that emerged with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht would foster politeness and peace throughout western Europe. 1

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