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Power and Poverty Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past
Susannah R. Ottaway, ed., L. A. Botelho, Katharine Kittredge
ISBN: 0-313-31128-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31128-4
312 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 10/30/2002
List Price: $102.95 (UK Sterling Price: £71.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description: Despite calls since the 1970s for more research into the history of old age, there is still a relative dearth of historical studies on the elderly, especially in the pre-industrial past. This volume remedies much of that deficiency with essays exploring the lives of old men and old women, and the images of old age and aging, in early modern Europe and America. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate there was a strong association of advanced age with authority in the lived experience of older men and women. This book recognizes poverty and physical limitations were a very real threat, but challenges the tendency of existing literature on historical gerontology to associate old age with dependence and disability. Instead, what emerges from this volume is the success of older people in the past in imbuing their old age with dignity, despite the often vicious nature of old age in both popular and elite literature.

Essays are brought together on old age in early modern England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and America, enabling comparisons that cross geographical boundaries. Historians of old age, the family, demography, social history and cultural history will value this volume, as will sociologists and anthropologists interested in gerontology.
Table of Contents:
  • Foreword by W. A. Achenbaum
    Introduction: Authority, Autonomy, and Responsibility among the Aged in the Pre-Industrial Past by Susannah R. Ottaway
    Crafting a Good Old Age
    Aging and Memory in a Bureaucratizing World: A French Historical Experience by David G. Troyansky
    Poverty, Patriarchy, and Old Age: The Households of Revolutionary War Veterans, 1820-1830 by Jack Resch
    Social Lives of Elderly Women in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse by Sherri Klassen
    Women and Aging in Transatlantic Perspective by Anne Kugler
    Interacting with Institutions to Thrive or Survive in Old Age
    Old People and the Flow of Resources between Generations in Papal Rome, 16th to 19th Centuries by Angela Groppi
    Experience of Old Age in the Narratives of the Rural Poor in Early Modern Germany by Louise Gray
    "Labor and Sorrow": The Living Conditions of the Elderly Residents of Bocking, Essex, 1793-1807 by Jane Pearson
    Image and Reality: Social Experience Versus Cultural Representations of Old Age
    Old Age in Early Modern Castilian Villages by David Vassberg
    Stereotypes and Statistics: Old Women and Accusations of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe by Alison Rowlands
    Naturalizing Myths of Aging: A Cautionary Tale by Kirk Combe and Kenneth Schmader
    Representations of Old Age and Aging
    Aging Heroes, Buffoons, and Statesmen in Shakespeare's Plays by Janice Rossen
    Images of Old Age in Early Modern Cheap Print: Women, Witches, and the Poisonous Female Body by L. A. Botelho
    "The Ag'd Dame to Venery Inclin'd": Images of Sexual Older Women in 18th-Century Britain by Katharine Kittredge
    Appendix
    Bibliography
    Index
About the Author: SUSANNAH R. OTTAWAY is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Carleton College.

L. A. BOTELHO is Associate Professor in the History Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

KATHARINE KITTREDGE is Associate Professor in the English Department at Ithaca College.
LCC Class: 305
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