Gossip has a deep, lasting value in our lives The truth is that, in the Elizabethan period, incidental, seemingly trivial details about lives - of the sort that fascinate us today - were not recorded. Biographies only meant something if they could tell a useful story, instructing readers to follow the path of virtue and shun the highway of vice. The lives of the great European reformers - Luther, Calvin, Zwingli et al - were often copied from each other because they were designed to make readers realise how a great spiritual leader should behave and inspire others. The scraps and fragments of lives were often taken from funeral sermons, orations designed, then as now, to sum up the purpose of a life at its end and provide a message for those left behind. The major change in biography occurred in the 17th century, and it was linked to art. In the early 1600s, what we might term "citizen portraiture" came into vogue. Not only did middle-ranking civic figures - mayors, aldermen, philanthropists - have their pictures painted, but so did the upper echelons of the trades, including writers. Ben Jonson was painted by the talented Dutch artist Abraham van Blyenberch, a work probably commissioned by the Duke of Buckingham in 1617. This may have helped start a trend, just as the publication of the folio of Jonson's Works in the previous year did. While Elizabethan writers remain faceless, we have detailed and accurate portraits of many of their Jacobean counterparts, including John Fletcher, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and William Shakespeare (although no likeness remains of Thomas Middleton or John Webster). More significantly still, later 17th-century writers started to record details of their subjects - one reason why we know so much more about the life of John Milton than of William Shakespeare. The most important figure in this revolution was John Aubrey (1626-97), who dedicated his life to recording the details of the nation's most celebrated and significant writers, intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers. Aubrey has not really received his due, hindered by the lack of a proper edition of his Brief Lives - one is now forthcoming - and the assumption that because he deals in gossip he must be trivial. But he was hugely influential. No one else that we know of at this time took such a close interest in the idiosyncrasies of the individual personality. He thought of himself as the "hint keeper," and he was the father of modern biography. His writing was a triumph of dedication, ingenuity and humanity. It often demands careful reading between the lines, and nearly always yields wonderful details. Aubrey assiduously rooted out the testimony of contemporaries. For example, he learns from "Mr Samuel Woodford (the Poet who paraphras'd the Psalms) " that Spenser "lived sometime in these parts, in this delicate sweet ayre," near Alton in Hampshire. And, based on the report of a Mr Beeston, he provides the only description we have of Spenser, commenting that "he was a little man, wore shorte haire, little band and cuffes." The account suggests that Spenser was a modest man of the "middling sort," rather like Jonson in the Blyenberch portrait. If Aubrey had been given his due we would have been more sceptical of the familiar image of Spenser, which is as a courtier with a ruff, as he is shown in the two portraits supposed to be of him. Of course, these days, as biography has become a hugely popular form of writing and, perhaps, the dominant way of interpreting the world, it may be that we have become too obsessed with inconsequential detail as a means of unlocking deeper personal secrets. But we need to remember how this most modern of forms began, and how, when it comes to biography, the profound depends on the ephemeral. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and the author of 'Edmund Spenser: A Life" (Oxford University Press)