Descripción
Six volumes, 4to (280 mm x 220 mm), pp.[iii] viii, [iv], 586, [2], lxxxviii, [1 (errata)]; [iii xii], 640, [1 (errata)]; [iii xi], 640, [1 (errata)]; [ii], viii, [viii], 620; [iii xii], 684; [iii xiii], 646, [52]; with a frontispiece portrait and three folding maps; without the half-titles, vol.II without the Table of Contents of vol.I (as often); some occasional light spotting or browning as usual, some marginal staining in gathering Q of vol.II, but a very good copy in contemporary diced russia, rebacked in modern brown morocco, spines gilt and with contrasting red and blue calf lettering-pieces; slightly rubbed, corners and edges bumped and with consequent small losses.First editions of all six volumes of Gibbon's 'masterpiece of historical penetration and literary style' (PMM). The first volume here is of the second variant (of two), with the errata corrected as far as p.183 and X4 and a4 so signed. The first edition of volume I (1000 copies, published in February 1776) was exhausted 'in a few days' and reprints followed in June and the following year. By the end of his life 'my book was on every table, and almost on every toilette' (Autobiographies, 311). 'For 22 years Gibbon was a prodigy of steady and arduous application. His investigations extended over almost the whole range of intellectual activity for nearly 1500 years … But it is not merely the learning of his work, learned as it is, that gives it character as a history. It is also that ingenious skill by which the vast erudition, the boundless range, the infinite variety, and the gorgeous magnificence of the details are all wrought together in a symmetrical whole. It is still entitled to be esteemed as the greatest historical work ever written" (Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, 1882). 'When Gibbon in his concluding pages remarks "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion", he may be conceding that what set out as a history of the end of the Roman empire has become a great deal more than that. The Gothic, Lombard, Frankish and Saxon barbarians replaced the western empire with systems in whose barbarism may be found the seeds of European liberty … [Under] the head of religion, we face as Gibbon did the knowledge that the replacement of empire by church as the governing principle of European civilisation is a far greater matter than the secondary question of how far Christianity was a cause of the Decline and Fall. It was already a historiographic commonplace that the end of empire led to the rise of the papacy; Gibbon explored it in depth, but recognised that this theme, however great, was limited to the Latin west and that the challenge of councils, bishops and patriarchs to imperial authority … led to the world-altering displacement of Greek and Syrian culture by Arabic and Islamic' (Pocock, Barbarism and religion I, pp.2 3). For Gibbon's revisions to the first volume after its original publication in 1776 and the composition of the subsequent volumes (the second and third of which did not appear until 1781) in relation to his critics and the reception of his work, see Womersley, Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City' pp.11 172. Norton 20, 23, 29; PMM 222; Rothschild 942. Language: English. N° de ref. del artículo G2228
Contactar al vendedor
Denunciar este artículo
