Ferdinand Lot

Ferdinand Victor Henri Lot (Le Plessis Piquet, 20 September 1866 – Fontenay-aux-Roses, 20 July 1952) was a French historian and medievalist. His masterpiece, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages (1927), presents an alternative and possibly more objective account of the fall of the Roman Empire than does Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which set the tone for Enlightenment scholarship blaming the fall of classical civilization on Christianity.

Lot was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, part of the Institut de France, and an honorary professor at the Sorbonne.

Select bibliography

• The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages. London: Kegan Paul, 1931. (La Fin du monde antique et le début du Moyen Age.)
• La France, des origines à la guerre de cent ans. (Paris: Gallimard, 1941).
• L'Art Militaire et les Armees au Moyen Age (Paris, 1946)
• La Gaule, Les fondements ethniques, sociaux et politiques de la nation française. (Paris: Fayard, 1947).