Abstract
dc:description.abstractThe Venetian state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was and is ordinarily characterised as a gerontocracy, governed by elderly noblemen. While the key role of age – especially old age, vecchiezza – in structuring the political life of the city is familiar, historians have overlooked how old age was defined and what it meant outside of elite circles, and more crucially how age affected everyday social and economic interactions among the working and artisan popolani who made up around ninety percent of the population. Moreover, like much of the city’s history, Venetian attitudes to age have generally been studied in isolation and as singular. This thesis instead approaches old age as it was defined and navigated among working and artisan people, and with a view to the Venetian state’s mainland empire, or terraferma, particularly its most westward territory of Bergamo, as well as Vicenza and Udine. Turning to the terraferma and focusing on the popolani complicates the narrative that Venetian attitudes towards age and the life cycle were peculiar. It also highlights how different social and environmental factors affected the impact of the life cycle on everyday life. Drawing from archival, visual, literary and material sources, the thesis offers an urban history of old age, in the sense that it is interested in how old age affected the experience of urban life, and vice versa. The first chapter examines understandings of vecchiezza in a wide range of archival, visual and printed material, highlighting points of conflict as well as continuity in how old age was conceptualised across the period c.1550-1700 and across the social spectrum. Chapters Two and Three focus on, respectively, the home and public spaces. Analysis of census data shows that roughly a third of households might have included a person over the age of fifty. Arguing that institutional and private domestic spaces must be analysed as contiguous, Chapter Two also investigates how elderly people used material property to secure their living circumstances, and thus emphasises the highly constructed nature of households and the active roles of the elderly in shaping their living circumstances. Where much scholarship on old age and the elderly has focused on the home or the hospital, Chapter Three focuses on public, urban space. Using close analysis of court records as well as legislation and visual material, it shows how urban boundaries and thresholds were constructed relative to age, and maps the everyday movement and presence of the elderly in urban space. Chapters Four and Five use old age as a lens to examine everyday practices. Chapter Four establishes a new framework for analysing the concept of care in the early modern period, which draws together domestic and institutional spaces, and attends fully to bodily, social and environmental health. Chapter Five explores the relationships between urban work practices and old age, and their connections to masculinity across the life cycle. Across the thesis, emphasis thus shifts from examining old age as a subject of historical inquiry, to employing it as a category of historical analysis. The thesis contends that age was a critical factor in social and economic relations at all levels of urban life and argues, therefore, for the importance of age as a category of historical analysis.
Degree
thesis:*- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- McFarland, Jennifer
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Laven, Mary
Subjects
dc:subject × 5Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122238
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390855