Conceptualising ageing and old age: Perspectives from Early Modern Europe
Ageing occurs in all human societies, yet how it has been experienced and understood varies profoundly across time as well as space. This panel asks how our critical conceptual vocabulary for studying ageing might be deepened and enriched by considering histories of the early modern world, with a focus on England and Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In conversation with contemporary historian Helen McCarthy, our two speakers, Laetitia Pilgrim and Jennifer McFarland, will explore how early modern societies conceptualised old age through legal, spiritual and bodily categories, how they cared for ageing bodies, and how older people exercised agency as social, political and economic actors. By historicizing key terms such as ‘experience’ ‘selfhood’ and ‘(in)dependence’, the panel aims to demonstrate the value of thinking about ageing across periods and disciplinary boundaries.
Recommended optional readings: ‘Roundtable on Chronological Age’ American Historical Review (2020), editors' introduction; and Karen Harvey and Sarah Fox, ‘Feeling old in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ Journal of British Studies (2025)
For details of the event, please visit:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/50556/
About the network
Older age not only offers profound challenges to societies, it also casts existential issues into sharp relief. Against a backdrop of increasing longevity, changing work lives, declining retirement resources and a looming crisis of care, it is more important now than ever before to develop new knowledge about aging and life course through interdisciplinary conversation and exchange. Just as gender studies revolutionized our understanding of social relations by revealing gender as a fundamental axis of power and difference, critical aging studies demonstrate how age operates as a crucial dimension of social inequality, identity formation, and lived experience.
This interdisciplinary network, ‘Precarious Aging: Critical Concepts’, aims to critically examine and reframe the terminology and conceptual frameworks that have shaped our understanding of aging in academic discourse and public policy.
For details of the network and event, please visit
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/precarious-ageing/