LeNain de Tillemont: Gibbon's "Sure-Footed Mule"
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...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
[1970]
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 1970, Volume: 39, Issue: 4, Pages: 483-502 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 0009-6407 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3162928 |