When Gibbon published the first volume of The decline and fall in 1776, the initial response of enthusiasm at the advent of a major historical talent was overtaken by clerical outrage at the substance – and, more, the tone – of the two final chapters, in which Gibbon had considered successively the history of Christianity before the conversion of Constantine, and the persecutions that the Christians had suffered under the pre-Constantinian emperors. In the case of the latter, Gibbon's cool diminution of the number of Christian martyrs, in the case of the former his studied and exclusive focus on the secondary causes for the growth of the Christian religion, were swiftly decoded by the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’ as infallible tokens of irreligion. Although Gibbon took issue with at least some of his critics in that notorious triumph of scholarly polemic, A vindication, the lofty and acerbic tone of his pamphlet did nothing to dispel the stubborn suspicions of his clerical adversaries (although the deep wounds that it inflicted seem to have dissuaded them from any further open attacks on the man whom they now styled the ‘infidel historian’). However, what the clergy of the late eighteenth-century Church of England deplored the scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by and large relished. The very chapters which so scandalised Gibbon's contemporaries became the centrepieces in a critical tradition which valued The decline and fall above all for what was construed as its anti-clerical aggression. Some of Gibbon's earliest and more philosophical readers (notably David Hume and Hugh Blair) were uncomfortable with this. They foresaw that the two final chapters of the first volume of The decline and fall were liable to mislead Gibbon's readers, and were also very possibly a false move on the part of the historian. ‘What the Deuce had he to do with Attacking Religion?’, Blair asked Hume shortly after Gibbon's volume had been published. It is a very good question, and one which John Pocock explores in matchless depth and with consummate historical finesse in the fifth volume of Barbarism and religion. Pocock was the first modern scholar to raise the intriguing possibility that chapters xv and xvi of The decline and fall – the chapters which to the clergy revealed the cloven hoof of irreligion beneath the gown of the historian, which were revered by later critics as the summit of English irony, but which both Gibbon's detractors and his defenders were agreed in recognising as, for better or worse, the hallmark of his achievement – were in fact misjudgements on the part of their author. Volume v of Barbarism and religion explores that thesis by contextualising Gibbon's exposition in the historiographical contexts of late antiquity and early modernity. The result is a superbly nuanced study which immensely advances our understanding of the silences, simplicities and omissions in these most influential chapters of The decline and fall.