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Prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. Research subjects are analysed by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis.Stone 1971. The discipline is considered to be one of the auxiliary sciences of history.
Stone noted two uses of prosopography as an historian's tool, in uncovering deeper interests and connections beneath the superficial rhetoric of politics, to examine the structure of the political machine and in analysing the changing roles in society of status groups—holders of offices, members of associations—and assessing social mobility through family origins and social connections of recruits to those offices or memberships. "Invented as a tool of political history", Stone observed, "it is now being increasingly employed by the social historians".Stone 1971, p. 47.
The nature of prosopographical research has evolved. In his 1971 essay, Lawrence Stone discussed an "older" form of prosopography which was principally concerned with well-known social elites, many of whom were already historical figures. Their genealogies were well researched and social webs and kinship linking could be traced, allowing a prosopography of a "power elite" to emerge. Prominent examples which Stone drew upon were the work of Charles A. Beard and Sir Lewis Namier.Stone 1971, pp. 47–52.
Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) offered an explanation of the form and content of the U.S. Constitution by looking at the class background and economic interests of the Founding Fathers. Namier produced an equally influential study of the 18th-century House of Commons of Great Britain, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, and inspired a circle of historians whom Stone light-heartedly termed "Namier Inc".Stone 1971, p. 51. Stone contrasted this older prosopography with what in 1971 was the newer form of quantitative prosopography, which was concerned with much wider populations, particularly "ordinary people".Stone 1971, pp. 58–59. An early example of this kind of work is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's pioneering microhistory Montaillou (1975), which developed a picture of patterns of kinship and heresy as well as daily and seasonal routine in a small Occitania village, the last pocket of Cathars, from 1294 to 1324.
Stone anticipated that this new form of prosopography would become dominant as part of a growing wave of social science history.Stone 1971, pp. 69–73. Prosopography and other associated forms of social science and quantitative history went into a period of decline during the 1980s. In the 1990s, perhaps because of developments in computing and particularly in database software, prosopography was revived. The "new prosopography" has since become clearly established as an important approach in historical research.
In the words of prosopographer Katharine Keats-Rohan, "prosopography is about what the analysis of the sum of data about many individuals can tell us about the different types of connection between them, and hence about how they operated within and upon the institutions—social, political, legal, economic, intellectual—of their time".Keats-Rohan 2000, p. 2.
In this sense prosopography is clearly related to, but distinct from, both biography and genealogy. While biography and prosopography overlap, and prosopography is interested in the details of individuals' lives, a prosopography is more than the plural of biography. A prosopography is not just any collection of biographies. The lives of the research subjects must have enough in common for relationships and connections to be uncovered. Genealogy, as practiced by family historians, has as its goal the reconstruction of familial relationships, and as such, well-conducted genealogical research may form the basis of a prosopography.
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