The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifica

Heretic and impostor or reformer and statesman? The contradictory Western visions of Muhammad In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an i

There has never been much doubt about the faith of the “infidel historian” Edward Gibbon. But for all of Gibbon’s skepticism regarding Christianity’s ce

Gibbon aspired to combine the critical analysis of the eighteenth-century philosophe with the older traditions of the humanist and scholarly historian. His diff

It is too often assumed that religious heterodoxy before the Enlightenment led inexorably to intellectual secularisation. Challenging that assumption, this book