Biography
Authors: Covington Sarah 
Published: January 2024

The genre of biography enjoyed an efflorescence in the early modern period, fostered by the cultural, social, intellectual, and political changes of the time. Building on models from the classical past, the Renaissance biography also forged new directions that would deeply shape all later forms of life writing. From Petrarch onward, humanists forged a new biographical movement with their reading of the ancients, and above all Suetonius, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laertius, who imparted ethical messages by writing of the lives and deeds of antiquity’s heroes. Humanists not only paid homage to this classical past by devoting books to its “illustrious men,” but also elevated their own period and leaders by profiling the lives of their present-day artists, writers, philosophers, and statesmen. Indeed, Petrarch, the biographer of illustrious lives, himself became an illustrious life, becoming incorporated into a number of biographies in the centuries after. Much of this biographical drive could be attributed to the emergence of the kind of individualism famously if controversially described by Jacob Burckhardt and Ernst Cassirer, or to the understanding of the workings of fortuna and virtu in the unfolding of a life. The emergence of psychology and new kind of subjectivity, traced by Charles Taylor and others, also played a role, particularly in 17th-century life writings. One could add that self-fashioning, or in this case the often self-serving fashioning of another’s life, also played a part. Yet individual lives were also incorporated into group biographies that together added up to a larger collective picture. And biographies, as Eric Cochrane and others pointed out, converged with history, in biographically inflected patriotic narratives such as Filippo Villani’s De origine civitatis Florentie (1381–1396). Biographies could also assume a diversity of forms and styles, finding their way into bio-bibliographies (following the model of St. Jerome), genealogies, hagiographies, martyrologies, odes, sermons, dialogues, dictionaries, or prefaces. With the exception of figures such as Margaret Cavendish, few women were allowed the opportunity to publish formal biographies, though their letters were infused with vivid portrayals, and many of them bore the mantle of family biography. Notarial records, state papers, and wills were other sources in which the biographical slipped through, though they will not be treated here. As with autobiography, scholarly interest in biography has also flourished in recent decades, due in part to the rise of cultural history and an interest in narrative, representations, rhetorical strategies, and book history. The following bibliography is not comprehensive, though it covers some of the major texts and scholarship. And much is still to be written about early modern biography, especially with recent turns in the history of emotions, or material culture and the “biography of an object.” The relationship between early modern and modern biographies, or modernity in general, is also worthy of investigation. These possibilities reveal that biography is not simply about a life and the author of that life, but speaks to the changing interests and historical contexts of those who read and study the form in all its guises.