Conceptualising Ageing and Old Age: Perspectives from Early Modern Europe

An event by the Precarious Aging Research Network About this event 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 k