Edward Gibbon and empire

Gibbon´ s ideas of empire, his understanding of monarchy and the balance of power, his sources and working methods, the structure of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, his attitude towards the barbarians, the contrasting treatments of the easrtern and western empires, his appreciation of past civilizations and their material remains, his audience and their reactions -contemporay and Victorian- to his text are considered in the light of the latest research oon eighteenth-century intellectual history on the one hand and on late antiquity, Byzantium and the Middle Ages on the other.