La biografia nella storiografia e nella storiografia dell’educazione. Linee evolutive di un rapporto complesso

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the role and development of biography in the Italian history of pedagogy after Italian unification, when education historiography began to gain its own autonomy. The first step is to identify the main features of educators biographies; the second step is to describe their evolution in the last forty years. In order to gain a deeper knowledge of this evolution, a large part of this study is devoted to describe the relationship between biography and historiography and to analyze the different attitudes towards the «individual» and individual actions as much as the standard models of biography in the course of time.