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29Introduction response to this critique has also implied the redefinition of the object of biog- raphy: the historical person is no longer understood as an individual, morally expressed, stable self closed in itself and divorced from the social–cultural environment shaping, and shaped by, her or him. The concept of historical personality is an open one, enabling an insight into the social constitution of identity at any point: it presupposes an individual with different manifesta- tions over time, reacting to the requirements and opportunities presented by diverse spaces of action—s/he is the subject of her or his own life story and the constructor of her or his own biography. The existence of a person is not con- ceived as “given” but as emerging continuously—but by no means in a linear fashion—in reactive processes, day-to-day transactions between the subject and the complex influences of the surrounding world.91 These transformations have given occasion to a wide array of incisive “life studies” in historical scholarship. Some of these—in avowed opposition to “modal” biographies, chiefly interested in the common and measurable traits in individual lives that may shed light on the relationship between individual and group habitus—were dedicated to “liminal” case studies highlighting the margins of the social and cultural horizons within which all other cases are imaginable.92 Others have used the prism of individual lives for re-inserting peculiar manners of procedure into the context of the cultural practices and forms of behavior characteristic of their age, and making each more intelligi- ble.93 Conversely, such contextualization has been employed—remarkably, long before the recent surge—to fill gaps in the information gleaned from the available sources, like in the case of the life of the young Denis Diderot (1713– 84), reconstructed by his biographer from examples taken from parallel career “illusion” faulted by Bourdieu was recognized long ago: eighteenth-century novelists were fully aware of the difficulties posed by the fragmentation of personal life paths, and the resulting difficulties for narrative representation. 91 Hans Erich Bödeker, “Biographie: Annäherungen an die gegenwärtigen Forschungs- und Diskussionsstand,” in Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 9–64, here 19–22, 27–28. Cf. Peter An- dré Alt, “Mode ohne Methode? Überlegungen zu einer Theorie der literaturwissen- schaftlichen Biographik,” in Grundlagen der Biographik: Theorie und Praxis des biogra- phischen Schreibens, ed. Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 23–40. For lives as “processes” rather than “units” specifically in the history of science, see Mary Jo Nye, “Sci- entific Biography: History of Science by Other Means?,” Isis 97 (2006): 322–29; Marianne Klemun, “‘Living fossil’—‘Fossilized life’? Reflections on Biography in the History of Sci- ence,” Earth Sciences History 32, no. 1 (2013): 121–31. 92 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]). 93 Daniel Roche, ed., Journal de ma vie: Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au 18e siècle (Paris: Montalba, 1982); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).