Although biography is one of today's most flourishing literary genres, its early history has attracted much less attention than that of other forms, a neglect that is especially apparent in the case of the formative period of English biography, the seventeenth century. This new work by Allan Pritchard fills the scholarly void by providing a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of this period's biographical writings.

After charting the growth of seventeenth-century biographical writing, Pritchard explores the ways in which traditional forms of religious biography and lives of princes and...