Electronic Resource
New York
:
Cambridge University Press
Church history
39 (1970), S. 483-502
ISSN:
0009-6407
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
History
,
Theology and Religious Studies
Notes:
Gibbon was scrupulous and generous in discharging his intellecttual and scholarly debts. The footnotes in the Decline and Fall (which comprise about a fourth of the work) are a candid and reliable index of the materials used in its composition. The reader of Gibbon is most forcefully struck by those mordant remarks which annihilate the work—and occasionally the character—of some obscure pedant. But the majority of Gibbon's notes are elegant apostrophes to the scholarship that supports the Decline and Fall. Of all the secondary authorities cited by Gibbon—there are nearly 3,000 such references— none is so frequently cited (about 250 times) and praised as Sebastien LeNain de Tillemont. He is “that learned Jansenist,” “the indefatigable Tillemont,” “the accurate M. de Tillemont”; and in one of those felicitous metaphors of which Gibbon was a master, Tillemont is “the patient and sure-footed mule of the Alps” who “may be trusted in the most slippery paths.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3162928
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