This major intervention from one of the world's leading historians, challenges the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and posits instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. The first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion were warmly and widely reviewed, and won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. In the third volume in the sequence, John Pocock presents a historical introduction to the first fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work, recounting the end of the classical civilization Gibbon and his readers knew so much better than the worlds that followed. "This book is essential reading for students of the British Enlightenments, their rhetorical arts, their relations to antiquity and to French historical writing, and their complex religious and civic politics. The authority and comprehensiveness of Pocock's understanding of this episode of classical and Enlightenment historiography and the reach of his prose, intuitive and resonant, are evident throughout this study." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Like Gibbon, [J.G.A. Pocock] is a truly enlightened historian, one who takes ideas seriously and who has no patience for those of our own age who would 'deny the reality of authors and the readability of texts.'" New York Times Book Review "For the specialist, it is indispensable." New England Classical Journal The third in a sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Edward Gibbon in a series of contexts in the history of Europe. J. G. A. Pocock is one of the world's leading historians of ideas, and is Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. Used Book in Good Condition