Biography, as has often been pointed out, has moved progressively over the centuries from the outward to the inward, from the persona to the personality. Central to this progression is the analysis of motivation, a question which medieval life-writing rarely addressed explicitly. Yet this failure on the part of medieval biographers was only partly due to a lack of models to emulate. Classical biography, as represented by its best exponents such as Plutarch and Suetonius, at times portrayed its subjects as capable of independent agency. Characters had moral choices to make, and it was through the choices they made that their fates were determined. Equally to the point, they had real characters. It is worth remembering, for example, Plutarch’s comment, early in his life of Alexander the Great, about the difference between history and biography:

In fact, Plutarch did not always draw as clear a distinction between history and biography as this implies, but there is no doubt that he was deeply interested in human nature, and was always keen to bring out ‘the moral pattern in his hero’s career, the movement from virtue to vice or the contrary’. His subjects, in other words, were dynamic. They developed with the plot, with the progression of their lives and fortunes. Yet Plutarch’s Parallel Lives were little known in medieval Europe until their translation from Greek in fourteenth-century Italy.