Metabiography is concerned with the relation of biographical representations

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 to the temporal, geographical, institutional, intellectual or ideological locations of biographers. It is an hermeneutics of biography that sees the biographee as a collective construct of different memory cultures

Cultural memory

For other approaches see Memory and Culture As a term, cultural memory was first introduced by the German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis", who drew further upon Maurice Halbwachs’s theory on collective memory...

 and so recognizes the essential instability of historical lives. In the words of Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin is a historian and sociologist of science. He is currently the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University...

, metabiography stresses “that shifting biographical traditions make one person have many lives,” none of these necessarily more real than any other, because all are “configured and reconfigured according to the sensibilities and needs of the changing cultural settings.” In this sense, metabiography expresses a belief in the observer-dependence of historical knowledge.

Metabiography vs. traditional biography

As part of the preparations for their own writings, biographers have traditionally examined previous biographical studies. For these authors, dealing with predecessors has served such purposes as establishing the factual inadequacy of earlier efforts, staking one’s own claim against prior “myths” and “mistakes,” or has been intended simply as laying the groundwork for a new and more “definitive” study. Metabiography, however, goes beyond writing about the strengths or weaknesses of preceding biographical studies in interpreting a life. It is less concerned with the authenticity of biographical representations than with their relational nature.
It has been argued that in the history of science, metabiography has a long tradition of over fifty years, stretching from Henry Guerlac

Henry Guerlac

Henry Edward Guerlac was an American historian of science. He taught at Cornell University where he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of History and a member of the Department of History....

’s study of “Lavoisier and his biographers” to A. Rupert Hall’s edition of eighteenth-century Newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

 biographies and beyond. However, to these scholars, the study of former biographers had a propaedeutic

Propaedeutics

Propaedeutics or propedeutics is a historical term for an introductory course into a discipline: art, science, etc. Etymology: pro- + Greek: paideutikós, "pertaining to teaching"....

 function vis-à-vis the biographical works of their own time. They did not follow a relational approach and thus do not meet the crucial criterion for metabiographical studies.

Examples of metabiography in general history

In the field of biographies of artists and writers, the metabiographical approach was followed e.g. by David Dennis for Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

 (1770–1827), and Lucasta Miller

Lucasta Miller

Lucasta Frances Elizabeth Miller is an English writer and literary journalist.-Education:Miller was educated at Westminster School and Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, receiving a congratulatory first in English in 1988. She was awarded a PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2007.-Career:Miller...

 who used it to good effect in the case Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...

 (1818–48).
Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize...

’s study on the Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...

, however, is not metabiography, although the Franklin literature would provide ideal material for such a study.

Examples of metabiography in the field of scientific biography

Examples of scientific metabiography are Jan Sapp

Jan Sapp

Jan Sapp is an historian of biology at York University, Canada. His writings focus especially on evolutionary biology beyond the traditional neo-Darwinian framework, and emphasize the fundamental importance of symbiosis and horizontal gene transfer in heredity and evolution...

’s “The nine lives of Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...

,” Patricia Fara’s Newton: the Making of Genius and Nicolaas Rupke

Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke

Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke is a Dutch historian of science, who began his academic career as a marine geologist.He studied biology and geology at the university of Groningen and geology and the history of science at Princeton and Oxford...

’s Alexander von Humboldt: a Metabiography. James Moore and Ralph Colp have applied the metabiographical approach to Charles Darwin. A metabiographical slant is also discernible in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (2000).