CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This thesis is about representations of male and female aging in early modern .

The aim of this study is to enrich our understanding of cultural discourses on aging by considering how this phenomenon was constructed in contemporary thought. The discourse analysis which characterises my study of the social construction of aging in the early modern period reflects the ‘cultural turn’ in history. Cultural definitions of age, which I too find useful, combine calendar years and functionality (when an individual is no longer able to care for him or herself) with other variables, and determines the understanding of age according to a society’s particular value-system.1 This definition has been most usefully applied to the study of old age, and reflects the development in historical research from a modernisation narrative that ‘traced’ the origins of the modern old-age pensioner to the eighteenth century, to the rather more fruitful idea that multiple truths of aging are produced within competing discourses that vary according to context.2 Hence, Paul Johnson, in a recent series of essays on the history of

1 Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, ‘Introduction’, in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane eds., Women and Ageing in

British Society Since 1500 (Harlow, 2001), p. 4; Erin Campbell, ‘Introduction’, in Erin Campbell ed., Growing Old in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, 2006), p. 3; Susannah R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 18-21; L.W. Simmons, The Role of the Aged in Primitive

Society (New Haven, 1945), p. 15.

2 Ottaway, The Decline of Life, pp. 9-13; Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Margaret

Pelling and Richard M. Smith eds., Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (London, 1991), pp. 2-5;

Steve King, ‘Reconstructing Lives and Social Structures in Britain: The Poor, and The Poor Law, and Welfare under Rural Industrialisation, 1650-1820’, Social History, Vol. 22.3 (1997), pp. 318-338; Peter M. Solar, ‘Poor

Relief and English Economic Development before the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol.

48.1 (1995), pp. 1-22; Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2002), pp.

147-158; Janet Roebuck, ‘When Does Old Age Begin?: The Evolution of the English Definition’, Journal of ocial old age from antiquity to post-modernity, explains how this alteration in emphasis has led to an increased appreciation of ‘the situatedness of historical texts within ambiguous and multiple constructions of meaning’. Indeed, as comparative anthropological research on the elderly in various cultures has revealed, there are few commonalities which unite such peoples across both space and time. This is a point which has been summarised by

Joel Rosenthal who argues ‘against any single “read” on old age as being correct, or all inclusive, or even preferred’.3

This approach has been successfully reflected in a number of edited collections on old age where early modern scholars have dismantled the often unhelpful assumption that the elderly were a homogenous group and also victims of the intangible forces of

‘historical progress’ and ‘modernisation’.4 As old age lacked the developmental milestones which marked childhood and early adulthood, scholars have rightly asserted the provisional nature of their conclusions on the beginnings of old age, given that these may also vary according to context.5 As Pat Thane acknowledges, ‘old age spans a long period of life, from the fifties or sixties to past one hundred, and it is questionable

History, Vol. 12.3 (1979), pp. 417, 419; Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America

(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 25-26.

3 Paul Johnson, ‘Historical readings of Old Age and Aging’, in Pat Thane and Paul Johnson ed