Autobiographies of the Middle Ages
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11004641 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul Lehmann (0000-0001-7999-9125), Paul William Lehmann (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1953 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Pages | 41 |
| Publication date | 1953-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0080-4401 • E-ISSN: 1474-0648 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3678708 |
| OpenAlex | W2322051028 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
HE twentieth century, particularly since the two world wars, has been overwhelmed with a spate of memoirs which are in part autobiographical but even more markedly apologetic and self-laudatory. The inner development of the author, who is describing his own life, or at least retrospectively certain parts of it, is subordinated to his account of the events in which he has been involved and which to some extent have come about through his agency. Such memoirs, of which a good example is Bismarck's Gedanken und Erinnerungen, though not free from tendentious matter, do of course possess a value of their own as autobiographies. The Middle Ages produced various types of memoirs and less frequently autobiographies, which naturally enough were much less refined and are composed with a curious mingling of reticence and naivete. The growth in the self-awareness of the personality, which should fuse with the external development of the individual and the events in which he has played a part to form the central core of the ideal autobiography, was a slow progress even in the Ancient World. I do not need to repeat here what Georg Misch' has written on the subject of ancient autobiographies, since comparatively few of them exerted any direct effect upon the Middle Ages. At first, indeed, many of them were completely unknown in the West, though people were at least familiar with typical specimens of various forms of autobiographical writing: the writings of sovereigns in which they describe their activities, and in particular their accomplishments, the documents in which they justify their policies, the rhetorical and dialectical compositions of lesser personages, soliloquies on human events, and so on
Ancient history · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · French Literature and Criticism · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History
| Citations per year | 0.11 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1991 - 2017 (27) |
| Highly cited | No |