biographia

Biographia is a term used in English to denote life-writing or a biographical collection. Derived from Greek bios meaning life and graphein meaning to write, it historically appears as a title element or descriptor for works that recount the lives of notable individuals. The form can range from concise biographical sketches to comprehensive dictionaries of lives.

One prominent 18th-century use is Biographia Britannica, an extensive biographical dictionary that compiled lives of eminent persons in Britain and Ireland and contributed to Enlightenment approaches to knowledge and reference works. The phrase also appears in other historical titles that sought to organize human lives into systematic accounts.

In literary criticism, the root appears in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), a key Romantic-era work on poetry, imagination, and the nature of literary composition. Although not titled simply Biographia, it exemplifies the use of life-writing as a lens for critical theory. In modern usage, biography is the standard term, and Biographia is mainly encountered in historical bibliographic contexts.