SOURCE: Waith, Eugene M. “Heywood's Women Worthies.” In Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan, pp. 222-38. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Waith discusses Heywood's transformation of the aristocratic “exemplary lives” genre into biographies intended to inspire the general reading public.

A subtitle for this paper might be: “From the Exemplary Life to the Pop Biography and the Journalistic Profile,” for Thomas Heywood's book not only shows the pressure of several intellectual and social forces on a major component of the heroic tradition—the exemplary life—but also anticipates some of the ways in which this component was later to be transformed and popularized. The work I shall describe is not a neglected literary masterpiece but a valuable piece of evidence in the history of the tradition that this...