Writing Biography at the Edge of History

Fleming discusses why historians often channel their biographical impulses into prosopography or multiple biography. Prosopography has proven fruitful, since analyzing gross and generalized patterns across dozens of contemporary lives is almost always more feasible than reconstituting a single life in detail. Still, because of the ways in which early medieval texts were both written and preserved, even the brief prosopographical sketches are limited. Furthermore, the individuals who emerge from such studies are often, in the end, not much more than the sum of their charter attestations. As a result, historians are left with a historical period bristling with names, dates, and events, but devoid, by and large, of living, breathing human beings; and one of the unfortunate consequences of this is that even those who are working in the field sometimes have a hard time remembering that the men, women, and children they study were actually people, rather than faceless automatons pushed across time and space by anonymous, impersonal historical forces.