Book Description

The Oxford History of Life-Writing consolidates recent academic research and debate to provide a multi-volume history of life-writing. Each volume provides a selective survey of the range of life-writing in a given period with particular focus on the most important or influential authors and works within the genre. 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. VOLUME 2: Early modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing.