The Post‐Renaissance Reception of Plutarch in England

Abstract

This chapter focuses almost exclusively on the Lives. While there are certainly indications that Pope was familiar with Holland's translation of the Moralia, and individual essays were popular, in general it was as a biographer that Plutarch made most impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a view whose influence persists today. In terms of influence over the writing of biography, it is clear that Plutarch easily and early outstripped Suetonius as a model. Dryden's preface demonstrates that Plutarch's moral biography made him superior in the eyes of Christian readers. Possibly the most important contribution of Plutarch to biographical method is his defense of the use of anecdote and detail in the creation of a character. One important Plutarchan idea that almost never caught on, however, is parallelism: Mortimer's The British Plutarch makes no attempt to find parallels or comparisons, but simply compiles Lives in chronological order.

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