Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on References
Abbreviations
I: The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1788
1: Revision and Religion
2: Forging a Polemical Style: Gibbon's Vindication and Literary Warfare, 1694-1779
3: 'Too deeply into the mud of the Arian controversy': Gibbon and the early Church Fathers
4: 'Enthusiasm and Imposture': Gibbon and Mahomet
II: After The Decline and Fall
5: Gibbon's Unfinished History
6: The 'Memoirs': Autobiography in Time of Revolution
7: 'As common as any the most vulgar thing to sense': Three Versions of the Death of a Father
8: 'Fourteen months, the most barren and unprofitable of my whole life': Five Versions of Residence in Oxford
III: Miscellaneous Works
9: The Making of Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works
10: Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

a delightful book ... Womersley's scholarship is both impressive and endearing. Journal of Religious History Womersley has produced a signally effective study of the various processes which create an authorial reputation, assiduously demonstrating how careful documentary reconstruction can restore the rich textuality of a writer's life ... This is a major contribution not only to Gibbon scholarship but also to methodology. Review of English Studies Erudite and absorbing new book ... David Womersley has written an important book; it greatly increases our sense of the ways in which Gibbon's self-fashioning went on within the pages of his major works ... Womersley has taken us where none have ventured before, in showing Gibbon as a Bowdler-like censor of his own ongoing productions. Pat Rogers, Times Literary Supplement