Prosopographies

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Systematic studies that gather the life details of a group of people sharing a trait ; the collected records or body of such group biographies
2. Organized accounts tracing the careers and backgrounds of many individuals in a category ; the cumulative body of these biographical surveys
3. Comparative biographical analyses of a set of people linked by a common role ; the scholarly corpus formed by these group portraits

Etymology: "Prosopographies" is the plural of "prosopography", a term that sounds ancient but was built from Greek parts in modern times. The Greek "prosopon" meant "face" or, by extension, "person", and "-graphia" meant "writing" or "description". Together they gave Latin "prosopographia", meaning a description of a person's appearance or of an individual's life, and that Latin word is the direct ancestor of the English term. The English form comes from international scientific vocabulary, the scholarly coinage style that assembles classical combining forms as needed. Its use is firmly modern: the word belongs to the vocabulary of historians who study the collective biographies of groups, such as the officeholders of a particular era. The Greeks and Romans themselves did not use "prosopography" as a technical discipline, so the word reflects a later scholarly purpose built on their vocabulary.