SOURCE: Jemielity, Thomas. “Gibbon Among the Aeolists: Islamic Credulity and Pagan Fanaticism in The Decline and Fall.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 165-83.

In the following essay, Jemielity argues that although many critics have commented on the satire directed at Christianity in the Decline and Fall, in fact the historian attacked forms of superstition and religious zeal in other religions, ranging from paganism to Islam.

James Boswell is only one of the earliest to allege that insidious and dishonest motives prompt Edward Gibbon's analysis of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although the Life of Johnson, admittedly, does not appear until 1791, that 20 March 1776 conversation which impugns Gibbon's integrity is in the biography but a reshaping for public view of doubts Boswell had expressed at Oxford about Gibbon's recently published history that winter. In the Life Boswell refers to the Decline and Fall as a work...