Description
Book SynopsisIn Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance: Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne Cynthia Skenazi explores a shift in attitudes towards aging and provides a historical perspective on a crucial problem of our time. From the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, the elderly subject became a point of new social, medical, political, and literary attention on both sides of the Alps. A movement of secularization tended to dissociate old age from the Christian preparation for death, re-orienting the concept of aging around pragmatic matters such as health care, intergenerational relationships, and accrued insights one might wish to pass along. Such changes were accompanied by an increasing number of personal accounts of later life. Listed by Choice magazine as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2014 This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ... ix Abbreviations ... xi Introduction ... 1 1 A Sound Mind in a Healthy Body ... 15 Galen ... 17 Petrarch ... 22 Ficino and Zerbi ... 28 Cornaro ... 36 Erasmus ... 42 Montaigne ... 47 Conclusion ... 58 2 The Circulation of Power and Knowledge ... 61 Petrarch ... 64 Castiglione ... 79 Montaigne ... 86 Conclusion ... 95 3 Love in Old Age ... 98 Petrarch ... 100 Ronsard ... 105 Montaigne ... 111 Pasquier ... 119 Conclusion ... 136 4 Then and Now ... 138 The Care of the Aging Self ... 139 Erasmus’s Colloquium “The Old Men’s Chat” ... 142 A Way of Life and a Mode of Discourse: The Case of Montaigne ... 150 In Vino Veritas ... 165 Bibliography ... 167 Index ... 177
