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Book
ReviewMethodological
Rigour in the Imaginative Understanding of Past LivesWriting biography: historians and
their craft. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, editor, 2004. Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press; ISBN 0803210663 cloth, 166 pp., £34.50
SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130030503
MalcolmWagstaff
University of Southampton
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In September
2000, six distinguished historians, three men and three women, were invited
by the Department of History in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
to reflect on the writing of historical biography. They considered biography's
role in the writing of history, the selection of sub- jects for study, and
the approaches adopted, as well as the analysis of the available source materials.
This book is the result. After reflecting on the motives for writing biography
(breathing life into dry census data, for example) and the influence of the
author's per- sonality on the choice of subject, Shirley A. Leckie argues
that it is impor- tant to make the person alive for the reader. Thus, the
subject's intimate or domestic concerns should be revealed, together with
the way they confronted the existential issues faced by every one. Each person
must also be seen in the context of their times. But while the writer should
struggle to see the world with the eyes of the subject, a degree of detachment
and objectivity is required. R. Keith Schoppa stresses the importance of social
and cultural con- texts. His experience in writing the biography of the `second-tier'
Chinese leader of the 1910s and 1920s, Shen Dingyi, revealed that the standard
western approach focused on the individual was of limited use in under- standing
a Chinese subject. The importance of the group in Chinese soci- ety required
a different approach in which the individual was set in a web of social networks.
Retha M. Warnicke reached similar conclusions from her research into the lives
of two wives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves. Elite women of
the Tudor period became visible in the sources almost only when they participated
in rites of passage, especially marriage and childbirth, and within their
kinship and family networks. Warnicke, however, gives several warnings: against
assuming that the way things are done today was the way in which they were
done in the past (Christian rituals, for example); about the fictions contained
in some of the most frequently quoted sources (ambassadorial reports, for
example) and the persistence of long-established but distorted views of both
individ- uals and their socio-political context (Bishop Gilbert Burnet's invention
of the `Flanders' mare' to describe Henry's reaction to Anne of Cleves). Like
Lechie, John Milton Cooper reflects on how biographers choose their subjects.
As well as recounting his own experience, he urges authors to choose subjects
of historical significance, whose study would throw light upon the times in
which they lived and the events in which they participated. Sufficient source
material must also be available. Biographers converse with their subjects
through reading their words, listening to their voices or watching them on
film and talking to relatives, friends and associates. Cooper commends the
use of a comparative study of contemporaries, like his work on Roosevelt and
Wilson, as particularly revealing.
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As well
as studying individuals for the light that they might throw upon their own
times, they can also be researched to discover how their lives illuminate
their ideas, especially where significant shifts in their thinking are apparent.
Robert J. Richards explores this theme through the life of Friedrich Schelling,
a former room-mate of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and a founder of the natural
philosophy movement of the late eighteenth century, which was such an influence
on the scientist, Alexander von Humboldt, and the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Most research in historical biography tends to privilege texts as source material.
Although Cooper and Schoppa mention the value of oral evidence, it was left
to Nell Irvin Painter to urge the use of pictures. Seemingly natu- ral representations
of reality, visual images are actually carefully contrived and require careful
analysis. They are particularly valuable as sources of biographical information
in the study of what Painter calls `subaltern sub- jects', that is `individuals
who are oppressed on account of their group iden- tity' but who have the possibility
of exercising power over others. Painter includes white women, as well as
`members of stigmatised minorities'. She argues that the careful analysis
of images allows the biographer to portray the subject more thoroughly as
a person and to unpack cultural meaning, especially when compared with stereotypical
images. The existence of stereotypes is often overlooked. Painter exemplifies
the value of images through studies of the portraits of prominent African
Americans. Both Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, for example, used
their portraits to project images of the respectable American bourgeois in
stark contrast to the stereotypes of the typological `black' of their time,
whether the ex-slave or the `darky' of minstrelsy or `cook-mammy'. In sum,
there is great diversity in this book. But the authors share concerns for
methodological rigour, as well as an imaginative selection and use of sources.
Their reflections on the nature and approach of historical biography are interesting,
useful and stimulating.