Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic (review)

Old age in the Middle Ages is a somewhat recent topic for medievalists, as indicated by the title of this new and massive anthology from Albrecht Classen. It includes 22 articles, most of them lengthy and well-researched, including an 84-page introduction from Classen himself where he puts the present volume into the context of earlier old age research.

The time frame of the anthology might be referred to as 'the long Middle Ages'; it starts in the fourth century AD and goes on to the time of Diderot and Rousseau. The sources under discussion are European: from England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Little is said about Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, or the rest of the world; this reflects quite well the medievalist tradition: Britain, France, and Germany have tended to be the center of the medievalists' universe. As previously stated, the anthology is impressively big, almost 600 pages in small type with small margins.

Classen's introduction does not serve the perfunctory purpose that such often serves; in its unwavering determination to encompass the subject it is perhaps the most useful article of the whole book, if sometimes a bit stiff and inelegant in style. Classen engages with the work of the important authorities of medieval old age: Simone de Beauvoir (La Vieillesse, 1970), Georges Minois (Histoire de la vieillesse, 1987), and Shulamith Shahar (Horef ha-'oteh otanu, 1995) and exposes many of their limitations and contradictions. As he remarks towards the end: "Only the combination of the many contributions in this volume coming from a variety of academic disciplines make it possible to comprehend truly and fully the ambivalent, often contradictory, but ultimate significant role played by old people."

While such a nuanced conclusion is laudatory, it makes the conclusions of the book also somewhat disappointingly unprovocative, if hard to disagree with. Unlike de Beauvoir and Minois, who could boldly state with little evidence that negative stereotypes of old age prevailed in the Middle Ages, the contributions in this book lead to a much more varied conclusion. They also leave one with the somewhat uncomfortable feeling that perhaps old age is too big a subject to be dealt with in its entirety, as one of the main conclusions one gains from this anthology is that it is hard to generalize about it. However, this well-researched anthology does not only leave us with a nostalgia for the over-simplifications of the 1970s and the 1980s, it does highlight some, perhaps most, of the important problems that face future old age studies. For example, Classen mentions the lack of reliable statistics early on (p. 7), although he optimistically remarks that "we begin to have more reliable data." Perhaps, up to a degree. But having myself studied a small society (medieval Iceland) where the data are relatively impressive, it must be remarked that the gaps are still daunting and are likely to remain so.

The first question usually asked by the student of past representations of old age is the simple one: was it better or worse to be old in the Middle Ages? Did the old enjoy more or less respect than now? Modern 'urban folklore' often has it that there has been a decline in respect for the old in the industrialized and post-industrialized world. On the one hand, de Beauvoir and Minois found that their medieval sources for the most part accentuated the negative and the Middle Ages was a bad period for the elderly. Of course, they were over-simplifying and that is clearly demonstrated by the present volume. On the other hand, one might argue that the conclusion of Allison Coudert about the early modern period is perhaps appropriate for the whole period: "Most elderly people were neither healthy nor happy, but this did not stop people from imagining a time in which the elderly...