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Full Description
Despite calls since the 1970s for more research into the history of old age, there is still a relative dearth of historical studies on the elderly, especially in the pre-industrial past. This volume remedies much of that deficiency with essays exploring the lives of old men and old women, and the images of old age and aging, in early modern Europe and America. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate there was a strong association of advanced age with authority in the lived experience of older men and women. This book recognizes poverty and physical limitations were a very real threat, but challenges the tendency of existing literature on historical gerontology to associate old age with dependence and disability. Instead, what emerges from this volume is the success of older people in the past in imbuing their old age with dignity, despite the often vicious nature of old age in both popular and elite literature.
Essays are brought together on old age in early modern England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and America, enabling comparisons that cross geographical boundaries. Historians of old age, the family, demography, social history and cultural history will value this volume, as will sociologists and anthropologists interested in gerontology.
Contents
Foreword by W. A. Achenbaum Introduction: Authority, Autonomy, and Responsibility among the Aged in the Pre-Industrial Past by Susannah R. Ottaway Crafting a Good Old Age Aging and Memory in a Bureaucratizing World: A French Historical Experience by David G. Troyansky Poverty, Patriarchy, and Old Age: The Households of Revolutionary War Veterans, 1820-1830 by Jack Resch Social Lives of Elderly Women in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse by Sherri Klassen Women and Aging in Transatlantic Perspective by Anne Kugler Interacting with Institutions to Thrive or Survive in Old Age Old People and the Flow of Resources between Generations in Papal Rome, 16th to 19th Centuries by Angela Groppi Experience of Old Age in the Narratives of the Rural Poor in Early Modern Germany by Louise Gray "Labor and Sorrow": The Living Conditions of the Elderly Residents of Bocking, Essex, 1793-1807 by Jane Pearson Image and Reality: Social Experience Versus Cultural Representations of Old Age Old Age in Early Modern Castilian Villages by David Vassberg Stereotypes and Statistics: Old Women and Accusations of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe by Alison Rowlands Naturalizing Myths of Aging: A Cautionary Tale by Kirk Combe and Kenneth Schmader Representations of Old Age and Aging Aging Heroes, Buffoons, and Statesmen in Shakespeare's Plays by Janice Rossen Images of Old Age in Early Modern Cheap Print: Women, Witches, and the Poisonous Female Body by L. A. Botelho "The Ag'd Dame to Venery Inclin'd": Images of Sexual Older Women in 18th-Century Britain by Katharine Kittredge Appendix Bibliography Index
