Essay on the study of literature

Essay on the study of literature
by Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon’s Essay on the Study of Literature is one of the most characteristic documents of the European Enlightenment. Written in French by a young English gentleman exiled in Switzerland for religious reasons, it tries to defend, against the growing influence of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, the task of scholars, a neologism at the time that indicated a traditional profession that It had its roots in the study of antiquity. “The ancients,” wrote Gibbon, “knew its advantages and applied them successfully.” Instead of claiming to know the ancients better than the ancients had known themselves, Gibbon would defend in his Essay the knowledge of antiquity and would begin to glimpse the fundamental difference between the “philosophical spirit” and—with the term Voltaire—the “century.” The Essay on the Study of Literature can now be read as the essay on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Gibbon would undertake upon his return to England and the English language. Reading the brief and delicate Essay prepares the reader for the infinite reading of the Decline and Fall.

The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 (the year of the Declaration of Independence of the United States) and 1788 (a year before the French Revolution) gave Edward Gibbon (Putney, 1737-London, 1794 ) fame as a writer and man of letters, although the regular member of London clubs would have preferred to be remembered as a gentleman rather than as a historian. That personal reserve is also part of the charm of his work. At the beginning of his literary career is the Essay on the Study of Literature, published in 1761 and written in French, under the influence of Montesquieu, at the decisive moment of the transformation of the Enlightenment into a revolutionary ideology.