English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey (review)

The authorial acknowledgments in this book thank the Canada Council for a research grant. This should raise a flag right away, since the Canada Council has not been in the business of supporting the humanities for thirty years, and the author asserts that some portion of the research for this book was done in the mid-1970s. A career-long gestation for a project can be a very good thing: it allows considered thought and reflection, time to change one's mind, and the opportunity for mature judgments. Unfortunately, it also runs the risk of making the final product seem out of step with current scholarship and bibliographically out of date.

These fears are realized in two different ways as one reads Allan Pritchard's study of English biographical writing in the seventeenth century. First, the overall approach to the subject is triumphantly old-fashioned, sorting its specimens into various groupings and then critically evaluating them by standards that would have made an Edwardian don proud. It does not so much revise, much less replace, Donald Stauffer's classic study (which included medieval and Renaissance antecedents) as provide it with an extended homage. Secondly, the book is limited by its minimalist notes and supporting bibliography, and by its author's sketchy understanding of the historical and historiographical contexts within which English life-writing — the word biography was not yet in common use — developed. It is incredible that a book published in 2005 can blithely ignore a huge amount of scholarship on biography and history since the 1970s or that it can cite Helen White's 1963 book on Tudor martyrologies as if there had not been a cottage industry of work on John Foxe for the past decade. If the author has failed to keep up with the bibliographies close to his own subject, his understanding of the wider historical background is even more suspect. Can one seriously write in the early twenty-first century about early Stuart Anglicans and Puritans (even a "puritan party"!) as if they were still the mutually-opposed entities of pre-1980s early modern scholarship? There is also occasional carelessness with respect to the core subject: the name of a an oft-mentioned pious female, Elizabeth Juxon (the focus of a funeral sermon by Stephen Denison in 1619), is rendered "Juxton" throughout (16, 61).

Despite these manifest shortcomings, it would be a mistake to dismiss this book outright. The author has worked through a very wide array of biographical materials and thought a good deal about them. The account begins with early Stuart religious lives such as Daniel Featley's of Bishop Jewel, continues with Restoration lives of writers, scientists, and antiquaries (the last two taken as two sides of the same methodologically forward-looking Baconian coin), before ending with the major collective biographical authors of the last part of the century, John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, and Roger North. Pritchard is on safer ground in the second half of his book, with the likes of Aubrey and North, than in the first half, where the datedness of his understanding of the early Stuart religious landscape proves a much greater liability. If the progression described here is unrelentingly positivist, praising some life-writers for skepticism and careful research, criticizing others for credulity or stylistic flaws, and measuring all by seemingly arbitrary post-Boswellian standards, one nevertheless finds a clear and jargon-free style, sympathetic readings, and a reasonable balance between descriptive summary and critical appraisal. Pritchard's point about the coincidence between antiquarian interests and life-writing in the persons of Wood and Aubrey (and to a lesser extent Thomas Fuller) is a good one, and actually defensible without the book's teleological frame. It is worth remarking also that the general pattern in the later life writers such as Aubrey of adding vivid physical detail and memorable, if trivial, anecdote stands in contrast to the resurgent classicism of narrative history-writing...