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Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) is generally acknowledged to be the best narrative history ever written in English, and it is arguably among the two or three greatest historical works in any language. A major contribution to eighteenth-century British literature both as a narrative and as a model of one kind of prose style, it is also an important document of the European Enlightenment, for two reasons: it permanently transferred the history of religious institutions to the context of social and civil history, and it provided proof that the recurrent polarities of historical writing, called in Gibbon's day "erudition" and "philosophy," could be reconciled, not only without prejudice to either but also with profit to both. Gibbon is in a sense a "one-book" author, though the six massive volumes of the Decline and Fall were published at three different times during a period of thirteen years and though his posthumously compiled memoirs have become a minor classic of that genre.
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