Monica Chojnacka - Ages of Woman, Ages of Man: Sources in European Social History, 1400-1750

AGES OF WOMAN, AGES OF MAN

Sources in European Social History, 14001750

German calendar for the year 1589 showing the ages of woman and ages of man. Reproduced with permission.

AGES OF WOMAN, AGES OF MAN

Sources in European Social History, 14001750

Edited by Monica Chojnacka and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Contributor/Translators: Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Pernille Arenfeldt, Grethe Jacobsen, Eve Levin, Carol Loats, Leslie Peirce, Allyson Poska, Katharine Swett

With additional translations by: Agnes S. Arnrsdttir, Louis Grijp, Hermina Joldersma, Hilary Marland, Jeffrey Merrick, Helmut Puff, Elizabeth Rhodes, David Vassberg

First published 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-41873-8 (pbk)

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CONTENTS

(Sources listed by chapter and number)

Austria

Azores Islands

Belgium

Dalmatia

Czech Republic (Bohemia)

Denmark

Eastern Europe

England

France

,

Germany (Holy Roman Empire)

Iceland

Italy

Netherlands

Ottoman Empire

Portugal

Russia

Serbia

Spain

Switzerland

Wales

When we think about the past, many of us imagine it as rather monolithic, short on variety and slow to change. Compared to the changes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, earlier centuries seem to merge into a single image of grueling labor, archaic institutions, and poor hygiene. When we look at artistic renderings from the past, we see people with solemn faces and heavy, uncomfortable clothes. Often when we read about their lives, they seem overwhelmingly laden with hardship and oppression, or else (for a select few) extreme luxury and decadence.

Such perceptions are not entirely groundless, of course. Compared to the present, life was often very hard in pre-modern times. Travel and communication, so important to our own age, were unwieldy and undependable. Luxuries included regular baths or more than one outfit to wear; for most people these were scarce, and life expectancy was much lower than it is in the modern west. But that is not the whole picture. In many ways, women and men moved to rhythms strikingly similar to our own. Then as now, people worked hard to support their families, and rejoiced at the birth of a healthy child. They chafed at social injustice and challenged institutions they perceived as unjust. Young people worried about their future prospects, and often looked forward to having their own homes. Virtually everyone looked forward to parties, where drinking and dancing were favorite pastimes.

We can explore the differences and similarities between peoples lives in the past and our own by reading non-fiction studies or historical novels, but it is often more interesting to go directly to the historical sources themselves, that is to written and visual records produced in the period. One of the problems with this is that these records, particularly those that concern the lives of ordinary people rather than intellectual or political elites, are housed in archives around the world and written in languages we may not understand. Of course, for any period before the invention of the typewriter, records are all hand-written, which means we need to learn how to decipher them a skill called paleography before we know what they contain.

This collection seeks to overcome some of these problems, and presents a wide variety of sources concerning the lives of ordinary people in Europe for quite a long period of pre-modern history, roughly 14001750. Most of the sources are drawn directly from archives, and are printed here for the first time. The vast majority were originally written in a language other than English, and have been translated by our many contributors, who have also written the introductions to the sources. They range geographically from Europes farthest outposts in the west Iceland and the Azores in the Atlantic to its eastern reaches in Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

This collection has been organized around two main principles: stages of life and gender. In the western tradition, since the time of the ancient Greeks, people talked and wrote about the ages of man, dividing peoples life-course into specific stages. Some writers argued for four stages, corresponding to the four seasons; some twelve, corresponding to the months; and some any number in between. The number that was increasingly accepted was seven: infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, mature adulthood, older adulthood, and old age. These stages were often depicted artistically as a stepped pyramid, with the individual standing on each step and growing in size and responsibilities to mature adulthood, and then shrinking again with old age. Other artists and writers counted off the ages by decades, in which case they often settled on eight or ten stages in order to have a round number. The illustration that appears as the frontispiece to this book is an example of these, a calendar, designed to hang on peoples walls, by the German printer Michael Manger, showing the ages of man on the left and the ages of woman on the right. Death, depicted as a skeleton, accompanies the final figures on both sides.

This collection is similarly divided into eight chapters. The first three follow the classic stages: childhood, youth, and young adulthood, with the third focussing particularly on the process of finding a spouse. The next four chapters investigate aspects of adult life marriage, work, religion, and social networks and the final chapter explores widowhood and old age. Each chapter contains between twenty and thirty sources from at least ten different countries, and ends with a series of questions for discussion.