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Monday, May 14, 2012

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The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity (see Hagiography). One significant secular example of biography from this period is the life of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard.
Meanwhile in the medieval Islamic civilization (c. AD 750 to 1258), biographies began to be produced on a large scale with the advent of paper, beginning with the Prophetic biography tradition. This led to the introduction of a new literary genre: the biographical dictionary. The first biographical dictionaries were written in the Muslim world from the 9th century onwards. They contain more social data for a large segment of the population than that found in any other pre-industrial society. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions, with one of the earliest examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi, and then began documenting the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world.[2]
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "bestseller". Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the 15th century and the gradual increase in literacy. Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was essentially the first dictionary of biography in Europe, followed by Thomas Fuller's The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life. Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, A General History of the Pyrates (1724) is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates.[3]

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