4 - Chivalric Biography and Medieval Life-Writing

Summary

Biography, as has often been pointed out, has moved progressively over the centuries from the outward to the inward, from the persona to the personality. Central to this progression is the analysis of motivation, a question which medieval life-writing rarely addressed explicitly. Yet this failure on the part of medieval biographers was only partly due to a lack of models to emulate. Classical biography, as represented by its best exponents such as Plutarch and Suetonius, at times portrayed its subjects as capable of independent agency. Characters had moral choices to make, and it was through the choices they made that their fates were determined. Equally to the point, they had real characters. It is worth remembering, for example, Plutarch’s comment, early in his life of Alexander the Great, about the difference between history and biography:

It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

In fact, Plutarch did not always draw as clear a distinction between history and biography as this implies, but there is no doubt that he was deeply interested in human nature, and was always keen to bring out ‘the moral pattern in his hero’s career, the movement from virtue to vice or the contrary’. His subjects, in other words, were dynamic. They developed with the plot, with the progression of their lives and fortunes. Yet Plutarch’s Parallel Lives were little known in medieval Europe until their translation from Greek in fourteenth-century Italy.