David Womersley has been a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford since 1984. He has published widely on English Literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Previous publications include, Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994), Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays (1997), Augustan Critical Writing (1997), The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1988).