Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes

Benjamin Disraeli once observed that one should prefer biography to history, for biography is "life without theory." Of course, Disraeli's remark says more about his view of the kind of history being written in his own day than it does about his notion of biography. To be sure, biography is not a neutral enterprise and often can reveal as much about the context of the biographer as it does about its subject or perhaps even more. Such is the focus of Irena Backus in her study, Life Writing in Reformation Europe. Exploring a number of important biographies or Lives of reformers written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Backus hopes to shed light not only on the methods and genre of these Lives but also on how they function as part of the reception and propagation of the European Reformations. Their accuracy or approximation to modern standards is not her primary concern. Rather, she argues that studying this kind of literature provides windows into the theological, polemical, and civic climate of this period.

While Lives are not a fundamentally new genre, those in the Reformation do have unique characteristics that distinguish them from the classical models found in Plutarch and Suetonius as well as Christian examples in the Vitae of church fathers and legends of the saints. This is especially true of Lives that depict reformers as heretics—a category of biography without precedent. Yet even sympathetic biographies found it necessary to distance themselves from medieval hagiography or pagan encomia. There was certainly an apologetic or polemical dimension to these Lives, but this is not, Backus argues, the primary purpose. Lives favorable to the reformers had a pedagogical function, intended to edify the faithful. This might be directed to Protestant doctrine or piety, or, as in the case with the Swiss Lives, a more nationalistic picture of the Reformation.

Following a chronological structure, the first chapter is devoted to sixteenth-century biographies of Martin Luther. Already Backus is able to demonstrate how these lives are moving beyond the traditional genres. Detail of the reformer's person is unimportant in these Lives, for Luther is not to be approached as a medieval saint, either for veneration or emulation. Rather, Luther is situated in the course of salvation history as a prophetic figure, an instrument of God. As such, his life and his doctrine are identified and thus justified. Likewise, hostile lives of Luther depict the man as an instrument of the devil that then de facto condemns Protestant doctrine.

Zurich and Swiss Lives inculcate a broader, more nationalistic corporate narrative of the Reformation. Major figures like Zwingli and Bullinger are not only depicted as heads of Reformed Christendom but also as exemplars of Protestant piety for all to imitate. This extends to Lives of other Swiss Protestants who embody ideals of citizenship, scholarship, and servants of a Christian state.

However, it is the Lives of the Genevan Reformation that receive the most attention by Backus and perhaps exhibit the most interesting complex of context, doctrine, and the fashioning of Reformed identity. Beza's various attempts to compose a Vita of Calvin are closely examined, observing how the successor of Calvin struggled to find a form of biography that followed biblical models rather than classical and yet steered away from medieval hagiography. It is finally the Catholic biography of Jean-Papire Masson that moves the Calvinistic biography into a more "objective" direction that would ultimately influence the "Calvinography" of later centuries. Yet despite this shift, the old images derived from Beza's saint and Bolsec's sinner continue to have a lasting influence on the picture of Calvin even to the present.

In the end, Backus provides the reader with a very thorough and stimulating entry into the Lives literature of the Reformation, which in turn provides further insight into larger questions of Wirkungsgeschichte in Reformation Europe.