{"id":96,"date":"2007-11-04T19:31:33","date_gmt":"2007-11-04T23:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2007\/11\/04\/the-luminous-historian-part-i\/"},"modified":"2007-11-05T14:44:55","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T18:44:55","slug":"the-luminous-historian-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2007\/11\/04\/the-luminous-historian-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"The Luminous Historian, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week I put up <a href=\"http:\/\/hcl.harvard.edu\/info\/exhibitions\/#gibbon\">my first exhibit<\/a> as Assistant Curator: &#8220;Edward Gibbon: The Luminous Historian&#8221;. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fas.harvard.edu\/~classics\/people\/jones.html\">Christopher Jones<\/a>, a professor in the Classics Department is teaching a course this semester on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Edward_Gibbon\">Gibbon<\/a>, the renowned author of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.his.com\/~z\/gibbon.html\">The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/a><\/em>. You&#8217;ll have to stop by Houghton to see the full exhibit, which will be up until December 22nd, but I thought I&#8217;d share a few highlights here.<\/p>\n<p>Gibbon was a passionate book collector (in fact he once compared his library to a seraglio) but it was more than just a hobby: his tremendous collection of original sources in Roman history made the <em>Decline and Fall<\/em> possible. Houghton owns several books from Gibbon&#8217;s library, but I chose to show his copy of Taylor&#8217;s <em>Elements of the Civil Law<\/em> because it bears not only his simple booklabel, but also his less common armorial bookplate.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/files\/2007\/11\/gibbon-booklabel.jpg\" alt=\"Edward Gibbon Booklabel\" height=\"128\" width=\"346\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/files\/2007\/11\/gibbon-bookplate.jpg\" alt=\"Edward Gibbon Bookplate\" height=\"623\" width=\"428\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the scale of Gibbon&#8217;s library is this bill from a master cabinet-maker named Bocion, who constructed the library in Gibbon&#8217;s house in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is just page one of three, and the total comes to over \u00a3700. As we&#8217;ll see in a later installment, that&#8217;s almost as much as Gibbon was paid for the first volume of the <em>Decline and Fall<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/files\/2007\/11\/gibbon-bocion-receipt.jpg\" alt=\"Edward Gibbon Bocion Receipt\" height=\"810\" width=\"475\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Stay tuned for more from this exhibit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week I put up my first exhibit as Assistant Curator: &#8220;Edward Gibbon: The Luminous Historian&#8221;. Christopher Jones, a professor in the Classics Department is teaching a course this semester on Gibbon, the renowned author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. You&#8217;ll have to stop by Houghton to see [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-overholt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}