floruit

verb

1. (defective)lived, used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.

   “Marius Mercator must have shared the vigour of Alcimus, for he floruit in 218 according to Mr. Miller , while he at any rate existed in 418.”

   “J. Joyce (floruit 1850) In 1926 Svevo wrote a letter to James Joyce in Paris inquiring if he were related to the J. Joyce who in 1850 had had printed and published by Lloyd Austriaco in Trieste a book[...]”

   “Mīrā (Bai). Floruit 16th century. Rajasthan's most famous female saint and poetess of Kṛṣṇa bhakti.”

noun

1. The time period during which a person, group, culture, etc. is at its peak.

   “Though Aristotle claimed that a human being reaches his intellectual peak at age forty-nine (Rhetoric 1390b9), chronologists reckon a person's flowering—his floruit—at about age forty. The mists of time have made the precise reckoning of chronology quite difficult. Sometimes, when a birth is not known, a floruit can be estimated on the basis of what is known about an individual's career.”