The Rhetoric of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1998 by James M. Weiss

These fourteen essays with introduction derive from a symposium at the 1991 Sixteenth Century Conference. They explore genres and methods used in biography, autobiography, and many forms of life-writing ranging from dramas to memoirs from about 1500 to 1670. The editors' superb introduction and a good third of the essays offer some substantive and scholarly introductions to major issues and problematics of Renaissance life-writing, a field that has suffered neglect despite much research on early modern historical writing. Thus, it would be desirable for a volume of this size to present an overview of representative moments in early modern life-writing, but the editors state a desire to be eclectic. This does not disguise the mediocre quality of several essays that lack a sense of Renaissance background or of recent historiography. Nor does eclecticism excuse the randomness of including some subjects of very limited significance while ignoring influential early modern authors, texts, innovations in life-writing, and patterns of intertextuality. Perhaps any collection will appear random, but the editors' fine account of the many types of life-writing (13-17) only underscores the lacunae here.

Informed readers will justifiably miss references to crucial moments in early modern life-writing, such as the debate over biography between Valla, Facio, and Panormita; the achievements of widely influential life-writers like Petrarch, Boccaccio, Decembrio, Manetti, Cuspinian, Trithemius, Walton, Aubrey, and others; the absolutely central importance of collective biography (apart from Protestant martyrologies treated here by D.R. Woolf and Catharine Randall); and the blossoming of royal vitae (other than unusual "lives" of Catherine de Medici elegantly analyzed by Sheila Ffolliott. Such topics define the field of early modern biography. Also, despite generally impressive scholarship, this volume never mentions the important Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance containing Jozef IJsewijn's foundational essay "Die humanistische Biographie" (ed. August Buck [Wiesbaden, 1983]; one should also consult Biographie zwischen Renaissance und Barock, ed. Walter Berschin [Heidelberg, 1993]), probably unavailable as this volume was prepared).

The strengths of this volume deserve emphasis, however. The editors' introduction carefully analyzes our torturous hermeneutical environment, where emphasis on strategies of readership and textual construction yields such diverse methods and conclusions as those assembled here. This hermeneutical situation may explain why methodological sophistication and self-consciousness inhibit clarity in some essays , as for example Diana Robin's on female epistolography, Catharine Randall's on French Protestant martyrology, and William Engel's on Montaigne's "textual body."

Five essays in particular are very strong. F.W. Conrad's "archaeology" of the development of the Thomas More mythology is a model of literary and historical analysis. With deep knowledge of classical and medieval models, T.C. Price Zimmermann explicates the techniques of the widely influential Paolo Giovio. D.R. Woolf writes exactly the long-needed article illustrating John Foxe's conflation of genres and hitherto incompatible models in the popular Book of Martyrs, a technique that became a hallmark of biographical creativity for the entire period.

Scholars have long recognized that early modern life-writing used rhetorical protocols that enabled life-writers to reflect their agendas and even their personae in lives of others. (Some authors, however - notably Timothy Wengert - naively treat this as a fresh discovery and a Renaissance aberration.) Adriana McCrea sensitively discloses the reflection of the author Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney. Co-authors Elizabeth Goldsmith and Abby Zanger adroitly demonstrate bias and rhetorical strategy even in apparently informal vehicles for life-writing like correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and personal memoirs.

The superb introduction and the five just-mentioned essays offer a fine short course on how to read an early modern life. They carry the weight of an otherwise uneven volume.

JAMES M. WEISS Boston College