Is this the most important Historian of all time

By what metric is one the 'greatest historian'. Gibbon certainly left an indelible mark on western civilian's entire conception of the Roman Empire in the way that Dante did to hell. His books are worth reading for their prose alone. But he belongs to a forgone class of historiography somewhat in the vein of Herodotus whose limits in the material & tools available meant that he could only relate the events as they were understood at the time that obviously doesn't reflect the intense scrutiny & attention to detail at the smallest level that most modern scholarship strives for.

>>2347425
this is retarded, this is like saying Newton is not one of the "greatest" scientists, cause much of the Principia is outdated

>>2347429
Newton was a lifetime wizard do you seriously look up to him

>>2347429
How do you judge a historian? How pretty his writing was or how accurate his assessments are?

If flourishing language is what makes a great historian then Churchill must be at the top.

Is there a good summary of what was debunked about Gibbon's work?

I hear constantly that Decline and Fall is obsolete but I haven't heard why.

the only discrediting things from Gibbon are

his Christianity thesis and his treatment of the Byzantines

other than that he wasn't really inaccurate

>>2347392

He was the greatest of HIS time, but the greatest of all time is Thucydides.

>>2347438
keep playing with your dick, sleeper.

>>2347392
Leopold von Ranke is the father of modern historical research.

>>2347543

Read Bury's edition of Gibbon. It is the text with footnotes added discussing sources and where Gibbon's ideas have been challenged/superseded/shown to be erroneous. But even some of that is now long outdated.

In general terms, few would now agree with the teleology of Gibbon's narrative, the idea that civilisations naturally fall prey to 'decadence' or 'enervation' and therefore 'decline' and 'fall', and finally his idea that Christianity was one of the greatest contributors to the 'decline and fall' of the Roman Empire is now widely discredited.

Given the cyclical nature of historiography, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these ideas, repackaged, came back at some point.

>>2347543
For example, Gibbon uses the source of Ossian for some history of the province of Britannia. The problem is that Ossian was a massive forgery.

>>2347956

>>2347950 Here.

I think this is possibly a case where even Bury, c.1911, still wrote footnotes as if Ossian were real. So just a reminder to double check Bury's notes.

>discredited

God, I hate that fucking word.

People shit on Gibbon all the time, as if he also had access to the increased amount of information on Rome available to us today

God forbid Eusebius of Caesarea is held to this same standard. People would be screaming that he lived in a different time, and shouldn't be held accountable to our standards.