Burnet's Heterobiography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Abstract

"Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester", published in London in 1680 soon after Rochester's death and written by the Scottish Latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet was an immensely popular biography, the earliest attempy to tell the libertine poet's life as a religious parable. The emphasis here is on Burnet's using and abusing of the biographical(-elegiac) frame that becomes the ambiguous meeting ground for biography, confession, theological disquisition/philosophical dialogue, letter-writing, and, above all, pulpit lecturing