Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one, Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in post-Renaissance Europe – what he calls littérature.

The first publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets Gibbon’s work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to this text: the young writer’s perception of European intellectual life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the Encyclopédie and the French académies, the fate of erudition, and the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text.
As current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will find in this edition of Gibbon’s Essai a new approach to the intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.