Lives as lived and lives as written are never one and the same. To turn the first into the second one must introduce "fiction" into the "fact" of the actual existence. This generalization holds especially true for the wide variety of life-writing forms employed during the Renaissance. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe explores the ways in which authors and their subjects constructed images for themselves, and some of the ways in which those images worked.

The kinds of life-writing explored extend from familiar modes of biography (hagiography, for example) to less usual but still literary representations, such as the parody prosopography of The Lives of Obscure Men. Some essays stay within fairly traditional forms but study their employment in the hands of women. Others cross boundaries, illuminating, for example, the martyrology of John Foxe as comedy, or revealing unknown forms of life-writing in Lutheran funeral sermons.