Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts
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Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts Editor-in-Chief Francis G. Gentry Emeritus Professor of German, Penn State University Editorial Board Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University Cynthia Brown, University of California, Santa Barbara Marina Brownlee, Princeton University Keith Busby, University of Wisconsin-Madison Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University Alastair Minnis, Yale University Brian Murdoch, Stirling University Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection VOLUME 11 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mrat Portrait of Montaigne. French School, circa 1590. (From Philippe Desan. Portraits à l’essai. Iconographie de Montaigne. Etudes montaignistes 50. Paris: Champion, 2007, p. 70.) Private Collection. Courtesy Philippe Desan. Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne By Cynthia Skenazi LEIDEn • BOSTON 2013 This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0925-7683 ISBN 978-90-04-25466-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25572-2 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Cynthia Skenazi. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper. In memory of my parents CONTENTS Acknowledgments .......................................................................................... ix Abbreviations ................................................................................................... xi Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 1 A Sound Mind in a Healthy Body ....................................................... 15 Galen ...................................................................................................... 17 Petrarch ................................................................................................. 22 Ficino and Zerbi .................................................................................. 28 Cornaro .................................................................................................. 36 Erasmus ................................................................................................. 42 Montaigne ............................................................................................. 47 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 58 2 The Circulation of Power and Knowledge ....................................... 61 Petrarch ................................................................................................. 64 Castiglione ............................................................................................ 79 Montaigne ............................................................................................. 86 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 95 3 Love in Old Age ........................................................................................ 98 Petrarch ................................................................................................. 100 Ronsard .................................................................................................. 105 Montaigne ............................................................................................. 111 Pasquier ................................................................................................. 119 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 136 4 Then and Now ............................................................................................. 138 The Care of the Aging Self ............................................................... 139 Erasmus’s Colloquium “The Old Men’s Chat” ............................. 142 A Way of Life and a Mode of Discourse: The Case of Montaigne ................................................................ 150 In Vino Veritas ...................................................................................... 165 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 167 Index ................................................................................................................... 177 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to Floyd Gray and François Rigolot for their perceptive comments at various stages of this work. My thanks go also to Brian Copenhaver, Philippe Desan, George Hoffmann, Mary McKinley, Carole Paul, Dora Polachek, François Rouget, Robert Williams, Colette Winn, and Cathy Yandell. The organizers and audiences of the many conferences that gave me the opportunity to present and discuss some elements of the following chapters helped me to reshape many aspects of this book. I should like to thank the staff of the library of the University of California, Santa Barbara—especially Jane Faulkner—for their assistance throughout the course of the project. I owe a special debt to Roxanne Lapidus and to Marianne Noble for editorial assistance. My thanks also go to Marcella Mulder of Brill. Earlier versions of parts of some chapters have appeared in the fol- lowing publications: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance LXVIII, 2 (2006), pp. 289–305, and LXX, 3 (2008), pp. 579–93; Vieillir à la Renaissance, ed. Colette Winn and Cathy Yandell (Paris: Champion, 2009), pp. 339–57; “ ‘The Ages of Life’: Living and Aging in Conflict?”, ed. U. Kriebernegg and R. Maierhofer (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), pp. 147–57. Permission to reuse this material is gratefully acknowledged. ABBREVIATIONS Fam. Petrarch. Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri). 3 vols. Edited and translated by Aldo Bernardo. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1975; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Lettres Pétrarque. Les Lettres de la vieillesse. 4 vols. Edited by E. Nota, Ugo Dotti, Claude Laurens, and Frank La Brasca. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002–6. Sen. Petrarch, Letters of Old Age (Rerum Senilium Libri). 2 vols. Edited and translated by A. S. Bernardo, S. Levin, and R. Bernardo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. INTRODUCTION This book investigates stories of growing old from Petrarch’s to Montaigne’s time. My concerns with this project are twofold. First, I explore a shift in attitudes towards aging. From the late fourteenth to the end of the six- teenth centuries, the elderly subject became a focus of new social, medi- cal, political, and literary attention on both sides of the Alps. A movement of secularization—inspired by the revival of classical literature—tended to dissociate old age from the Christian preparation for death, and down- played the role of the afterlife, re-orienting the concept of aging around pragmatic matters such health care, intergenerational relationships, and insights one might acquire in later life and pass along. Such changes were accompanied by an increasing number of personal accounts of later life expressed from a variety of perspectives, and in multiple ways. As old age became the subject of intense personal reflection and widespread public debate, new literary forms of elder identity appeared, which drew upon previous texts, combined several sources, subverted them, and departed from them. Stories of growing old became more differentiated and com- plex, yet these self-portraits were less the faithful records of lived experi- ences than rhetorical constructions that took their full meaning in a society and culture increasingly interested in questions related to longevity. My second goal is to provide a historical perspective on a crucial prob- lem of our time. The United Nations foresees an unprecedented global demographic transformation in the near future: by 2050, people aged sixty and beyond will outnumber those under fifteen. Currently, the fast- est growing segment of the Western World is those aged eighty-five and beyond. Looking back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the few demographical statistics indicate that life expectancy at birth averaged around thirty-five years in parts of Italy and France. However, historians have noticed an extension of the life span during this period, partly the result of a decrease in birth mortality rates.1 Nevertheless, people did grow old in the Renaissance, and in larger numbers than is often thought, 1 See