The Rhetoric of Numbers in Gibbon's History
By (author) F. P. Lock
Not available to order
Publication date:
28 September 2012Length of book:
236 pagesPublisher
University of Delaware PressISBN-13: 9781611494174
Gibbon aspired to combine the critical analysis of the eighteenth-century philosophe with the older traditions of the humanist and scholarly historian. His different uses of numbers, to inform and to persuade, illustrate his remarkable fusion of these approaches. This book, the first to be devoted to a historian’s use of numbers, shows how carefully Gibbon interrogated and deployed the numerical evidence in his sources to create a more accurate historical narrative; to demonstrate his own reliability and candor as a historian; and to convince readers of the validity of his interpretations of characters and events.