Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was born in 1737 in Putney, near London, a sickly child and the only one of seven siblings to survive infancy. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford, at fifteen, but was sent away after converting to Catholicism. His father sent him to Lausanne in Switzerland, where under the guidance of a Protestant pastor he returned to Protestantism and studied widely in French and Latin. He served as an officer in the Hampshire militia during the Seven Years' War. In 1764, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, he conceived the idea of writing the history of the city's decline. The first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776 and was an immediate success; the sixth and last volume came out in 1788. The work covers more than thirteen centuries, from the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Gibbon was also a member of Parliament. He settled in Lausanne in 1783 and died in London in 1794.

Edward Gibbon is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised Protestant; he converted to Catholicism as a young man and later returned to Protestantism. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)