Review article: early medieval rulers and their modern biographers Sarah Hamilton Alfred the Great. War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England. The Medieval World series. By Richard Abels. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998. xviii + 373 pp. £15.99. ISBN 0 582 04047 7. Otto III. By Gerd Althoff. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997. x + 243 pp. 58 DM. ISBN 3 89678 021 2. Charlemagne. By Roger Collins. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Limited, 1998. xvi + 234 pp. £16.99. ISBN 0 333 65055 7. The post-Second World War turn away from biography to structural history in the academic world, led by the Annales school, has come full circle and biography is once again respectable, bearing the sanction of Jacques Le Goff no less, who has argued that biography is a form or microhistory; by focusing on one individual, one can study the struc- tural changes highlighted by Annales. 1 At almost the same time as Le Goff was rediscovering the biographical approach to historical writing, Janet L. Nelson in her life of Charles the Bald demonstrated the value of royal biography for the study of early medieval politics: `its concern with 1 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996). With, or without, the sanction of Le Goff, English- language historiography has seen a resurgence of interest in medieval biographies in the past decade, including: Michael Clanchy's use of one of the earliest medieval autobiographies to contextualize the life of his subject in the world of his times: M.T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997); Longman's Medieval World series has been responsible for several studies including: J.L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (Harlow, 1992); M.K. Lawson, Cnut: the Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (Harlow, 1993); J. Moorhead, Justinian (Harlow, 1994); J.E. Sayers, Innocent III: Leader of Europe 1198±1216 (Harlow, 1994); R.V. Turner, King John (London, 1994); J. Bradbury, Philip Augustus: King of France 1180±1223 (Harlow, 1998); Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of Saint Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth- Century France (Harlow, 1998). Other recent biographical studies include: P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997); H.E.J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073±1085 (Oxford, 1998). The modern historian, Derek Beales, on the other hand, has highlighted the distance between biographical and structural approaches to history in the modern period in T.L.W. Blanning and D. Cannadine (eds.), History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), p 268: `Phillip II had not been taught the right kind of geography.' Early Medieval Europe 2000 9 (2) 247±260 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA