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A stunning reference on thirty of the greatest comets that have been witnessed and documented since the Middle Ages. Supported by a wealth of images, the broad historical context and modern scientific interpretation are explored for each Great Comet, providing an invaluable resource for all astronomy enthusiasts.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. The Constantinian Empire: 1. Constantinople: a new city and a new history; 2. Constantine to Julian: the disintegration of a dynasty; Part II. The Church in the Empire: 3. Constantine's second revolution; 4. Theology and the problems of authority; 5. Nicaea and its aftermath; 6. The reign of Constantius and the Arian triumph; 7. The structure of chapter 21; Part III. The Interlude of Julian: 8. Gibbon and Julian: the history of an anomaly; 9. Julian apostate: the failure of an alternative; 10. Julian as persecutor: from toleration to the failure of repression; 11. The sojourn at Antioch and the Persian disaster; Part IV. Barbarism: The First Catastrophe: 12. Valentinian I and Valens: the turn to the west; 13. The geography and history of the western Decline and Fall; Part V. The Triumph of Orthodoxy and the Last Emperor: 14. The reign of Theodosius: triumphs preceding disaster; 15. Ambrose of Milan: the church and the empire; 16. Theodosius narrated and re-narrated: the death and rebirth of polytheism; Part VI. The Barbarisation of the West; 17. The Gothic phase: the sack of Rome and the loss of the transalpine west; 18. Vandals and Huns: the twin empires and the loss of Africa; 19. Attila and Aetius: the Hun invasions of the west; 20. The end of the western succession; Part VII. After the Fall: Towards a History Not Written: 21. Ends and beginnings: the conclusion of Gibbon's third volume; 22. The barbarian kingdoms and their laws: the beginnings of a mediaeval history; 23. The general observations; 24. Gibbon's first trilogy and its successor volumes; Conclusion of the present series; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
J. G. A. Pocock was educated at the Universities of Canterbury and Cambridge. He is now Harry C. Black Professor of History Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. His many seminal works on intellectual history include The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957, second edition 1987), Politics, Language and Time (1971), The Machiavellian Moment (1975, second edition 2003), Virtue, Commerce and History (1985), Political Thought and History (2009), and five previous volumes in the Barbarism and Religion sequence, initiated in 1999. He has also edited The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1987), as well as the collaborative study The Varieties of British Political Thought (1995). A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Pocock is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of New Zealand Merit in 2002.
Summary
This is the sixth and final volume in an acclaimed sequence of works situating Edward Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas.
