GIBBON, EDWARD. — English historian, b. at Putney-on-Thames on 8 May 1737, d. in London on 16 Jan. 1794. He entered Oxford in 1752 to complete his studies, converted to Catholicism, but was sent by his father to Lausanne (1753) and soon returned to Protestantism. In 1758 he was in London, where he continued his studies.
In 1763 he set out on an educational journey, stopping in Paris, where he became friends with D’Alembert and Diderot, then in Lausanne, and later went to Rome, where he seems to have conceived the plan for his great work, the *History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*. Returning to England (1765), he devoted himself to it, as well as to minor literary studies. Elected to Parliament in 1774, he published the first volume of the *History* in 1776, which was met with great acclaim but also strong opposition for its depreciation of Christianity. In 1779, on behalf of the ministry, he wrote a *Mémoire justificatif* in anti-French polemic, in return for which he briefly secured a position at the Board of Trade. In 1781 he published volumes II and III of his *History*. In 1783 he was again in Lausanne, from where he returned to England in 1788 for the publication of the final three volumes of the work.
His *History* is divided into two parts: the first (1806–64 A.D.) is rich in documentation and conducted with rigorous scholarship, while the second (641–1453) is a summary in which he entirely depreciates the history of the Byzantine Empire. Overall, the work is animated by a rationalistic spirit and aims to strip facts of every extra-human element (it was placed on the Index in 1783).