ABSTRACT
The words biography and biographer in English and their related forms in modern European languages, from the Greek roots bios, life, and graphein, to write, do not appear until the mid-seventeenth century. As early as the fourth century B.C.E. in the Western tradition, biography began to be distinguished from general history as a separate rhetorical form. Plutarch’s identification of a distinct formal and conceptual space for biography is a key event in the history of the genre. The Christian era applied biography to its educational mission of dramatizing the life and spreading the teachings of Jesus. Students of biography generally agree that the early Christian era was an unhappy digression from the line of development of modern biography stretching back to Plutarch. Eighteenth-century England produced the first substantial body of critical writings on biography to foster the burgeoning genre. Though not formal biography, the Memorabilia introduced several subsequently important characteristics of the genre.
