The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople. Challenging the entrenched view that medieval life writing, though abundant, was static and lacking innovation, it argues that medieval biographers were also theorizers of lives and experimented with modes of narrating them. Medieval life stories unfold not only in chronological birth-to-death narratives but also through dialogues, letters, debates, and visions. In medieval life writing, we encounter the ancestors of many of our own diverse biographical forms-tabloid lives, literary lives, brief lives, revisionist lives; lives of political and cultural heroes, memoirs, fictional lives, and even ‘virtual’ lives.