A new feminist biography of the incomparably influential English historian Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Even 250 years after it was first published, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire— Edward Gibbon’s six-volume chronicle of the late Roman and Byzantine periods—remains the best known work of history written in the English language. Gibbon’s flights of lyricism, his ironic observations, and his unflagging devotion to reason over piety (not to speak of his scabrous footnotes) inform a captivating examination of the late ancient world and an epochal model of historiography.

In The Conversions of Edward Gibbon, the last book by the celebrated feminist historian Martha Saxton, we meet the man and his methods. Saxton’s illuminating biography follows Gibbon from his unhappy childhood to his time at Oxford; then to Lausanne, where he reinvented himself; and through his life in the militia and his career in Parliament. Though the eminent historian represented much of what Saxton repudiated throughout her career, and though she writes unsparingly of his foibles and cruelties, her interest comes from a place of deep curiosity and from the desire to do him true justice. To that end, she plumbs a mystery that other scholars have slighted: Why did Gibbon—unlike the many other Enlightenment thinkers who regarded their female contemporaries as allies in building an equitable civil society—remain so implacably hostile to the women in his life and work?

Saxton offers a lively, engrossing portrait of a great and complex figure, a man who reinvented both himself and his genre, the historian with whom all subsequent historians have had to contend.