BIOGRAPHY: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
Organized by Michael Meckler, Ohio State University

[Panel as described in the Call for Papers]
Biography has received renewed interest in recent years, from academia to the best-sellers list, on television and in motion pictures. This genre, which sprouted in Hellenistic times from a blending of history and philosophy, produced effusive blooms in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Biography may be found in many literary forms in medieval Latin. Familiar is the prose narrative prominent in the classical period from the works of Cornelius Nepos and Suetonius. Life-writing also appears in elegiac and epic poetry, and in epitaphs and epigrams. Biography and literary criticism are melded together in the accessus-tradition of introductions to commentaries. Many late-antique and medieval biographies concern holy men and women, and the demands of hagiography had their effects on the forms of biographical writing. Secular subjects also had their lives commemorated, often following different criteria from those used to commemorate saints. This panel will examine the variety of life-writing in medieval Latin. Submissions are encouraged from all aspects of this rich tradition. Thematic or theoretical approaches that embrace more than one variety of medieval biography are especially welcome.

Kristina Sessa, University of California at Berkeley
Allusion and the Negotiation of Authority in Roman Episcopal Biography

Joan Gómez Pallarès, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Autobiography as Meta-Literature: Epigraphy and Literature from Ancient to Medieval Times

Eva Odelman, National Archives of Sweden
"The Apostle of the North": Rimbert's Vita Anskarii

Matt Kuefler, San Diego State University
The "Double Life" of Gerald of Aurillac

Respondent: C. E. V. Nixon, Macquarie University