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Growing Old in Early Stuart England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Steven R. Smith
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Extract

It is difficult to generalize about how people at any point in time view the process of growing old and the aged themselves. Attitudes towards old people have perhaps always been ambiguous and are probably ambiguous in western societies today. In seventeenth-century England, which in so many ways combined tradition and modernity, the ambivalent attitude towards the elderly included both traditional and modern aspects in three ways. First, as with traditional societies, early modern Englishmen looked upon old age as simply another stage in life, one of the seven through which all persons must pass; at the same time, old age was seen as something entirely different, a reversal of all previous stages. The latter view, which sociologists have labeled the “implicit” view, sees life as a constant process of expansion and growth until one reaches old age when the process is halted and reversed. Secondly, as in other traditional societies, old age was seen as a period of great dignity and wisdom, with the elderly deserving the respect and admiration of all other persons. Alongside this view in seventeenth-century England, old age was thought of as a time of folly and old people were described in undesirable terms. Thirdly, there were two ways of looking at death and its nearness: the traditional Christian view, held by many seventeenth-century theologians, was that death was entirely in God's hands and was a relief from the suffering of earthly life. The more modern view, held by others in the seventeenth-century, was that death was postponable by sensible precautions or by the science of medicine. Drawing on the literature of the age, this article will attempt to show old age in all of these various ways and point out the ambiguities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 1976 , pp. 125 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1976

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. I am grateful to all those who made comments on the paper at that meeting, and to Professor Lawrence Stone of Princeton University and Professor Paul Hardacre of Vanderbilt University, both of whom have offered valuable suggestions.

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