This compilation of essays on biography from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century is the first work dedicated exclusively to collective biography in early modern Europe. As a whole, the essays support the claim made by James Weiss in his book on humanist biography that Renaissance biography demonstrates little interest in individuality, conforming instead to the rhetorical influences of humanist historiography. What these essays contribute to the discussion is that these influences were ever changing and were specific to the author or translator’s cultural, academic, or spiritual milieu.
The volume is divided into seven sections, each including an essay followed by excerpts of the primary sources, all in Latin, and all with facing translations. Some of these selections represent the first modern publications or the first English translations of the biographies. Though the essays are organized chronologically, thematic crossover is evident throughout, such as references to the rich biographical traditions established by Plutarch, Seutonius, and Diogenes Laertius, and to the frequency with which biographies of these ancients were received, translated, and adapted by the humanist biographers of Europe.
Patrick Baker’s introduction is a must-read, providing an impressive exposition of the development of biography in Europe. In it he observes that collective biography is a “ragtag” offshoot of the genre, frequently made up of bare-boned biographies with ranging didactic purposes (12). As such, the corpus lacks unity, but nevertheless hinges on the story of individuals whose biographies are able to portray at least something of their community, culture, family, or religion.
The first essay, by Manuela Kahle, discusses Giannozzo Manetti’s divergent adaptations of Diogenes Laertius’s biography of Socrates. His early version, published in De illustribus longaevis, is one of almost 200 bio-bibliographies, and gives a simplistic historical outline of Socrates, whereas the later adaptation found in Vita Socratis et Senecae emphasizes the persona of Socrates, who is portrayed, through anecdotes and thematic sequencing, to be the paradigm of a Renaissance humanist philosopher. Adaptive translations are also explored in the second essay, wherein Marianne Pade focuses on Plutarch’s Lives, specifically the biography of Lucius Aemilius Paullus by Abbot John Whethamstede. She begins her essay with a brief description of how Plutarch’s Lives and translations of his work flourished in the Renaissance, then observes how these translations reflected the political or civic realities of the translator or dedicatee. In the case of Whethamstede’s translation of Paulus, the Plutarchan model of biography is transformed into a Seutonian model, one that is linked to the hagiographical tradition of the medieval Latin west.
The third contribution, by the volume’s editor Patrick Baker, tackles the communicative potential of an entire volume of collective biography. In his essay he discusses the hegemonic result of multiple lives coexisting in one volume, one that often reveals sweeping philosophical, social, and cultural realities, as in the case of Bartolomeo Facio’s De virus illustribus, a collection of biographies that, observed in concert, give a historical account of humanism.
The fourth and fifth essays in the volume investigate how biographical styles reveal the pedagogical or patriotic intentions of the author. Johannes Helmrath concludes that biographer Johannes Trithemius used an apologetic approach in his bio-bibliographies to encourage monastic reform through spiritual education and to grant Germany a position equal to Italy in humanist learning, while Asaph Ben-Tov analyzes Philipp Melanchthon’s two biographies of Aristotle, asserting that the first is a demonstration of the philosopher’s superior philosophical methods, the second a defense for the philosopher’s textual corpus as a whole.
The study of philosophical biography continues in the sixth and seventh essays of the volume that investigate how biographers of philosophers in the seventeenth century embraced or rejected Laertius’s style in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. The first essay, by Michael Weichenhan, details how Pierre Gassendi’s biography of Epicurus, written to renew interest in the philosopher, also embraced Laertius’s premodern style of philosophical biography. Leo Catana’s essay, in contrast, posits that Christoph August Heumann’s critique of Porphyrys’s Life of Plotinus discredited the entire tradition of biographical history of philosophy and, subsequently, the creator of this method, Diogenes Laertius. In so doing, Heumann would change the face of philosophical history for two millennia, a history that would be entirely disinterested in philosophers’ life stories.
