prosopography

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. The discipline is considered to be one of the auxiliary sciences of history.

==History== British historian Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) brought the term to general attention in an explanatory article in 1971, although it had been used as early as 1897 with the publication of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani by German scholars. The word is drawn from the figure of prosopopeia in classical rhetoric, introduced by Quintilian, in which an absent or imagined person is —in words, as if present.