HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHAPTER ELEVENBIOGRAPHY 1000–1350Michael GoodichThe chief biographical sources for the period ca. 1000–1350 maybe divided into three broad categories, all of which remained closelytied to the traditions of late antique rhetoric and biographical laudatio:1) saints’ lives, which conform to traditional models of Christianhagiography such as the Vitae patrum and Sulpicius Severus’s life ofMartin of Tours; 2) secular biographies, largely of contemporaryrulers such as Frederick Barbarossa and Edward II; and, 3) autobiographies,which are often confessional or apologetic in character.Nevertheless, biography cannot always be separated from other historiographicalgenres. As Gervase of Canterbury noted, even chroniclesand histories focus on the exemplary behavior of historicalfigures. 1 Furthermore, many royal biographies merely use the subject’sregnal dates as a convenient backdrop for the history of theperiod and, thus, may not be properly termed biographies, lackingas they do personal information. Sometimes borrowing liberally frompredecessors such as Suetonius, Sallust, Jordanes, Josephus, Einhardand Apollinaris Sidonius, these portraits of contemporary rulers oftendisplay a wooden and stereotypical quality. 2 While Peter the Venerableargued in favor of the accurate recording of contemporary historyin order to serve future generations, edification and the portrayal ofone’s subject as the personification of time-honored virtues remainedthe declared aims of the medieval biographer.Among the biographers may be numbered historians, theologians,natural scientists, and others for whom biography or hagiographywas only one literary genre. For example, although far better knownfor his great Chronica majora, a history of England in the thirteenth1Coleman (1992), 299.2Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. C. C. Mierow (NewYork, 1966), 9.