Old age was as idiosyncratic as the woman who experienced it. Its onset was typically marked by changes in one’s physical features, such as wrinkles or traits associated with menopause. Poor women aged earliest, around fifty, because of their strenuous lifestyles and poor diets. Wealthier women did not enter old age until some time in their sixth decade. Social standing, it appears, was a critical factor determining much of women’s old age experience.
Spanning the breadth of Europe, the period of the Renaissance, and the whole social hierarchy, more women than men reached old age and lived longer once that milestone was achieved. Quattrocentro Italy was a notable exception, hosting more aged men than women. While figures for earlier centuries are unknown, as much as 8 percent of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was over the age of sixty.
Elderly women tended to live as part of their husbands’ extended families in Italy and the Iberian peninsula, with a significant minority living in Roman Catholic religious communities as unmarried nuns. Northwestern Europe favored nuclear families, and, as long as her husband lived, the elderly woman remained, independent in her own home. Upon widowhood, she continued to function as an individual entity, although often as a subset of her adult child’s household, her bed and board provided in her deceased husband’s will as part of the passing on of the family property.
With the development of protocapitalism and a cash-and-credit economy, elderly widows tended to live apart from their children, paying their way via an annual annuity. France, which divided Northern and Southern Europe, was itself divided accordingly in its treatment of elderly women. Spain’s lower orders were distinctive: an elderly mother’s care and accommodation were rotated among her children.
Widowhood after the age of fifty virtually eliminated remarriage as a viable option. In Northwestern Europe widows tended to form independent households, cluster with other widows, or form composite households with distant relatives or nonkin. Among the poor, such households could contain an elderly woman and an orphaned child. Each helped the other, and their combined living arrangement eased the burden on the parish’s poor relief. Only in advanced old age did the elderly widow join the household of an adult child. A significant minority, 40 percent in the seventeenth century, lived alone. Southern European and Iberian household patterns resulted in the elderly widow’s continued residence in her deceased husband’s extended household.
A significant minority of women in France and England would never marry, living in independent households. Among those over fifty years old, 15 percent of the aged women in seventeenth-century Lyon and Rheims were single. Widowhood in old age provided distinct legal benefits, such as the ability to make contracts and enter into legal proceedings. For some, it also allowed them the freedom to shape the course of their own lives.
Renaissance medical knowledge underpinned the greater responsibility and power of aged widows. Built on the Galenic four humors of hot, cold, dry, and moist—or blood, phlegm, yellow bile or choler, and black bile or melancholy—it was understood that aging and menopause (at roughly age fifty) caused a woman to dry up and become harder. Her body became more “male,” and she was to be accorded respect on account of her years. However, the Galenic tradition also threatened her position. The postmenopausal woman was dangerous. Her polluting blood that had formerly been removed from her system monthly with menstruation was now considered “trapped” and increasingly dangerous. Therefore, it was medically possible for the aged woman to cause harm to those she touched or fixed with the evil eye.
In general, society expected old women to dress and act according to their age. Women who tried to look younger than their years became objects of ridicule among their fTiends and later on the stage in the figure of the “merry widow.” Marriage after menopause or to a much younger man was held in low regard. Among the lower orders, communities across Europe expressed their ill feelings by engaging in a char-avari, or “rough music,” in which a mob rushed the residence of the new couple, singing and chanting their complaints. If the young bridegroom were captured, he might be castrated.
There was no retirement in Renaissance Europe, except perhaps at the closing of the seventeenth century and only among France’s most aristocratic women. Instead, elderly women continued to do what they had previously done, be it a common spinner of wool or silk, or a patron to the arts. In all cases, their identities were derived from their occupations, and old women across Europe prided themselves on their ability to continue to perform them.
L. A. Botelho
See also Marriage;Work and Women.
Bibliography
Botelho, L., and P. Thane, eds. Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500. Harlow, UK: Longmans, 2001.
Johnson, P., and P Thane, eds. Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity. London: Routledge, 1998.
Ottaway, S., L. A. Botelho, and K. Kittredge, eds.
Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Pelling, M., and R. M. Smith. Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives. London: Rout-ledge, 1991.
Rosenthal, J. T. Old Age in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Sharhar, S. Growing Old in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1995.
World History
