A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a work by Edward Gibbon, published in 1779. It serves as a defense of specific arguments made in his larger historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.1

Gibbon's monumental history, published between 1776 and 1788, chronicles the Roman Empire from the 2nd century CE to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. He viewed the empire as being in a continuous state of decline, attributing Rome's material decay to moral decadence. The fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his work, which A Vindication defends, specifically address the rise of Christianity and its role in this decline. Gibbon's perspective was that religions should be understood as phenomena of human experience, and he treated the supernatural with irony.21