I must confess to contradictory expectations when I opened this text, with its straightforward title and confusing subtitle. The central question set by the editors is an interesting one: “Why do people write and read lives, or, … more historically, what have been the purposes and uses of biography and other life writing?” (1). The essayists, well-respected scholars working within their fields of expertise (e.g., Steven Zwicker on John Dryden, Peter Lake on puritans, and Kevin Sharpe on the Stuarts), either analyze the shifting forms and contexts of early modern “life writing” or assess the sources for biography, satisfying the jacket cover's call for “a full return to history and an exact historicizing.” But the editors have chosen to organize the material into six sections of varying length and only comparative chronology, undermining any unified conclusion about the materials, methods, or purposes of life writing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their introduction provides minimal clarification of these categories. Having firmly excluded any overarching model, they apparently conclude that early modern life writing did not evolve in any way, through reformations and revolutions, until biography emerged fully formed from the muse of Enlightenment, an interpretation contradicted by many of the essays themselves.

In part 1, “Lives and Borders,” two essayists address the concept of biography as a “story of nationhood” (2). Stella Tillyard uses a range of modern and early modern sources to argue that the Anglo-American biography developed by the late eighteenth century as a response to the isolating experience of modernity, especially London life, rather than any form of nationalism. Lisa Jardine questions the sufficiency of “nationhood” for any seventeenth-century life by analyzing the multiple roles of Constantin Huygens, whose political diplomacy and artistic connections linked him to the House of Orange, the Stuart dynasty, and the leaders of the Royal Society.

Andrew Hadfield begins part 2, “Literature and Lives,” with a daring analysis of Edmund Spenser's literature to illuminate the poet's life; I was fascinated, but not persuaded. Thomas N. Corns performs a comparative analysis of the early “Lives” of John Milton, clarifies the writers’ partisan assumptions, and concludes that, as sources for biography, these versions offer “a partial Milton, in both senses of that term” (89). Go, ye, to Kew. Next, Harold Love, in a posthumously published essay, asks “how gossip differed and still differs from the other forms of orally circulated narrative” (93). He challenges prospective biographers to consider critically their use of such sources, especially since gossip, slander, and rumor often provide essential evidence but may also be an unacknowledged reason for the researcher's own interest (93). Finally, Steven Zwicker skillfully unpacks Dryden's biographies of ancient writers; his conclusions enrich our understanding of the poet-dramatist's life as a writer dependent upon patronage.

“Painting Lives,” part 3, offers, sadly, only two interpretations of art as a means for self-presentation within the nobility. Alastair Bellany documents the art collection of George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, concluding that the ideal of chivalric, courtly warrior personified in the collection eventually entrapped and burdened its creator. In one of only two essays on nonroyal women, Julia Marciari Alexander daringly sets two portraits of Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, both by Peter Lely, firmly within a Catholic religious iconography: one in the pose of a penitent Mary Magadalene and the other showing the notorious royal mistress and her bastard as Virgin Mother and Holy Child.

Part 4 continues the focus on materials of biography with three excellent essays on royal lives. First, Paulina Kewes shows persuasively that biblical analogies and iconography used by contemporary narrators of Elizabeth Tudor's life must be understood as a Protestant polemical redefinition of images originally associated with her Catholic elder sister. Leah Marcus proves that modern biographers of the last Tudor still have much to learn about critical moments in her life from the original material format of her letters, printed prayers, and translations. Finally, Kevin Sharpe vividly traces the life-long, often futile, effort of James II, “whose life and history have largely been written by his enemies,” to compose and “re-present” himself (240).

Three of the essays in part 5, “Spiritual Selves,” interpret life writing from the seventeenth century. Annabel Patterson meticulously analyzes the dual voices locked within Lucy Cary's manuscript Life of her mother, Catholic convert Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland. Peter Lake traces Samuel Clarke's series of collected Lives, printed at moments of political and religious crisis between 1651 and 1683, to understand definitions of the moderate puritan within a rapidly changing political context. Andrea Walkden finds a contemporary, but competing, version of the exemplary English churchman through interpretation of analogy and parable in Izaak Walton's lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson.

An additional essay in part 5 stood out because it challenges the prevailing conceptualization of self-fashioning with a reading of early modern identity. Frances Harris interprets the life of Sir Robert Moray through his roles as alchemist and Royal Society founder, stoic, and royalist, and as a man who faced criticism from associates and even scandal as a result of his close friendships with young women. She concludes, however, that Moray's “passionately expressed Christian beliefs” are most revealing of his core sense of identity. Any historical search for “self-fashioning” in early modern society, in her view, must include the recognition that men and women of that era looked within themselves for a “soul,” not a “self” (290).

Part 6 contains only one essay, Michael McKeon's richly detailed, densely written analysis of Enlightenment literature, the divergence of fiction from nonfiction genres, and the emergence of modernism and postmodernism within the eighteenth century.

Despite my frustration with editorial choices and my occasional disagreement with interpretations, I highly recommend these exceptional essays to all readers and writers of biography or history, especially graduate students who are still considering their thesis topics in early modern British history.