ABSTRACT
The genre of scientific biography stands in want of two kinds of inquiries which, in principle, go all the way back to the Aristotelian poetical tradition. One concerns the formal properties of the genre – that is, features such as composition and style, the use of literal versus figurative language and so on – the other its historical embedment: its historicity, its cultural poetics. The two kinds of inquiries are, of course, closely related since the formal characteristics of scientific life writing have varied over time and between different social and cultural settings.
