The Perfect Age of Man’s Life by Mary Dove (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER expanded. Such a work might serve, but a fully satisfactory dictionary of Chaucer's names will require not only a more thorough and accurate presentation of what scholars have already discovered but much original research. No scholarorpress should let theexistence of this book discourage efforts to produce a better one. It gives me no pleasure to have to document in such detail the many failings of what should be one of the most valuable books on Chaucer to appear in our time. Professor de Weever has taken on a most difficult task, and she hasobviously worked hard to produce thisbook. It is heartbreaking thatthefinished product is so seriously flawedthat no user dare assumethat any entry in it is reliable. EMERSON BROWN, JR. Vanderbilt University MARY DOVE. The PerfectAge ofMansLife. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xiii, 175. $34.50. To represent the ways in which man grows up, changes, and grows old, medieval writers used a variety of numerical age divisions-the aetates hominum, or ages of man-sometimes numbered as four, sometimes as six, three, five, and seven; the numbers changed as the systems of thought changed. These phases often depended on correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm in relation to the natural growth cycle they shared. Thus, in the earliest theory, with Pythagorean and Hippocratic roots, the four ages, beginning withpueritia, paralleled the four seasons, starting with spring. The four ages (and seasons) also related to the four humors, sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, making up in their balance of blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm within the indi­ vidual a normal human being; the humors were also related to the cosmic regions dominated by the elements of fire, air, water, earth. Christian medieval views identified six ages-infantia,pueritia, adolescentia,juven­ tus, gravitas, senectus-to mirror the Augustinian schema of the days of creation and the ages of the world. The six-age system wasoften associated with biblical glosses, for example, those on the Gospel account of the six vessels at Cana. Another medieval view recognized a three-age systemyouth , middle age, old age-bolstered by the figures of the three Magi, 208 REVIEWS and a five-age system bolstered by the five hours named in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. In contrast, the late-medieval Arabic septen­ ary view envisioned the stages of life, both thoseofman's aging and those of the embryo's growth, as corresponding to the seven planets in a system that eventually, largely as a result of Shakespeare's influence, came to supersede the other views of the ages of man. In 1986 three books on the medieval concept of the ages of man appeared- in addition to Mary Dove's book, Elizabeth Sears's The Ages of Man: Medieva/InterpretationsoftheLife Cycle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press); and]. A. Burrow's The AgesofMan: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Each, despite overlap­ ping material, offers a slightly different approach and perspective: Sears focuses on the numbers tradition in antiquity and the Middle Ages and their popular, homiletic, and iconographic dissemination in a variety of relatedimages.Burrow, in a studylimitedtoBritishintellectual life and the history of the philosophy of nature, after an outline of the numerical concepts in the first half offers a view of the idea of naturalness mostly in medieval English writings from Bede to the end of the fifteenth century. Even more specific in her focus on philosophy and literature, Dove divides her material into three, to zero in on the middle age of man's life, that period betweenyouth and age (part 1), and, within that middle, what was known as the perfect age, theperfecta aetas, or prime (part 2), as expressed in various Ricardian poems (part 3). Dove argues that the concept of the ages of man posited a response to the threat of death and mutability either through the classical idea of media aetas as an age buffering youth from old age or as the Christian and medieval idea of "perfect age." That is, middle age was understood as a time of maturity and strength, a "perfect age" known asjuventus...