1 It can be asked what became of Gibbon’s enterprise as he did so, and what the historians of historiography may learn from his experience in constructing his later volumes but since these are not to be explored in depth, only a tentative and introductory account can be given of this moment in the history of historiography. The two trilogies differ radically in character, and the purpose of this chapter is to explore what Bar barism and Religion may have achieved in situating the first of them in the history of historiography as it stood in Gibbon’s time and as we know it, and then to enquire what occurred in the same field as he turned from a western, or ‘Roman’ history of empire and religion to an eas tern, or ‘Byzantine’. The first three volumes (1776–81) or trilogy (as it may be called) of Gibbon’s T he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire arrives at the ‘extinction’ (as he calls it) of the Roman Empire in its western provinces a second trilogy (volumes iv through vi) covers a history centred on Constantinople to the capture of that city by the Ottoman Turks a thousand years later. After Barbarism and Religion: A Retrospect and a Prospect
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