Tipologie biografiche dall’Alto Medioevo al primo Trecento

The argument of this essay ranges across an extensive and varied period of time, starting from an exploration of the main classical “sources” of the genres of biography and historiography, and taking in the hagiography of Christian martyrs in late antiquity, and in particular the works between the IV and VI centuries that marked the beginning of this composite genre in the West and that include the «Vita Antonii», Pontius’s Life of Cyprian, Paulinus’s of Ambrose, Possidius’s of Augustine, Sulpitius Severus’s of Martin, and Jerome’s of Hilarion, as well as his «Epitaphium sanctae Paulae» and the «Vitae Pauli monachi» and «Malchi»; until the fundamental contributions of two authors of the spiritual and literary stature of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.
Alongside the typology of the Saint, that of the «vir illustris» continued to hold its own in the High Middle Ages, and, to represent it, the multiform classical genre adopted for it was subjected to a complex Christian «renovatio». This was first undertaken by Jerome, and it saw further doctrinal shifts with Gennadius of Marseille, and more specifically political–ecclesiastical shifts with Isidore of Seville and Ildephonsus of Toledo, as the geographical confines of the genre shrank.
The later products of mediaeval encyclopaedism embraced a European cultural reality, whose distinctive expressions were the «Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum» by the pseudo Walter Burley, the «Speculum historiale» by Vincent de Beauvais, the «Policraticus» by John of Salisbury, and, as regards Italian historiography, the «Chronicon» by Benzo d’Alessandria, and, above all, both the «De viris illustribus» by Giovanni Colonna and by Guglielmo da Pastrengo.
From Jerome to the premises for Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s reform/revolution, the complex and varied phenomenology of the biographical genre became pervasive, making its presence seem natural in other literary genres too, particularly in letter–writing and historiography, which were already predisposed to welcome input of all kinds: from autobiographical narrative to biography, from celebratory oratory to the requirements of literary, socio–political, ethical–religious conventions.
The essay, then, does not claim to offer a theoretical model for a representative typology, but, more concretely, samples of the various textual typologies which can be included under the umbrella term of biography. This is partly because, at the dawn of Humanism, this genre was marked by the co–presence of various literary forms (dialogues, treatises, portraits, collections etc.) and various human models (the hero, the sage, the layman, the priest etc.), which was possible by virtue of the experience and the models provided by the previous multi–faceted Tradition, confirming the “relatively multi–form nature” of the biographical genre, whose structures were flexible, without relaxing their specific rhetorical identity.