Old age in the Dark Ages: the status of old age during the early Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 1065-1084 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS GILLEARD
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Old Age

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews the position of old age in the societies of post-Roman Europe, from the fifth to the 10th centuries. Drawing on both primary and secondary literary and material sources of the period, I suggest that living beyond the age of 60 years was an uncommon experience throughout the early Middle Ages. Not only was achieving old age a minority experience, it seems to have been particularly concentrated among the senior clergy. This, together with the growing importance of the Christian Church as the institution that stabilised post-Roman society, the decline of urban living and its attendant culture of leisure and literacy, and the transformation of kinship into a symbolic ‘family under God’ contributed to a more favourable status for old age, or at least one that was particularly favourable for older men. This was based not so much upon the accumulation with age of wealth and privilege, but upon the moral worth of old age as a stage of life. The early Middle Ages, the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, was in this respect a relatively distinctive period in the history of old age. With all around instability and the future uncertain and often threatening, survival into old age was a rare but frequently revered attainment.

scholarly journals Old Age and Poverty in Poland, 1945-1989: The Status Regarding Knowledge And Research Problems

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Dariusz Jarosz
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Old Age ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The history of old age has only relatively recently become explored as a research topic in Poland. This sketch focuses on the relationship between old age and poverty in People’s Republic of Poland. Old age, however, was a significant object of interest of the PRL authorities in at least two aspects. The first was the social security system, particularly in relation to old age and disability pensions, and the second, social care for the aged.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

scholarly journals The Complex History of old age in Pre-Modern and Modern England

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 867-871
Author(s):  
Susannah Ottaway
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Old Age

scholarly journals The Institute of Guardianship in Muslim Family Law in the Early Middle Ages

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
M. O. Dadashev
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Financial Economic ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
The Status ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Muslim Family

The article deals with the rights of the child and parents in the Muslim family law of the early Middle Ages and its formation in the 8th-10th centuries. The key rights of the child were determined and explained: the right to life, the right to naming, the right to nafaka-the right to financial support-the right to the awareness of his or her genealogy, the right to breastfeeding and the right to up-bringing (al-hidana). In addition, the article provides for the following classifications of the rights in question: basic, financial-economic, religious-ethical. Also, the author considers the issue of prohibition of adoption and gives the definition of an orphan (jatim) under Muslim family law, elucidates peculiarities of the status of orphans, the mechanism for protecting property rights of orphans, rights and duties of guardians with respect of orphans and their property, powers of the kadia (judge) regarding the issue of protecting the rights of orphans, types of guardianship. The reasons and procedure for deprivation of guardianship are also examined. In addition, the author considers parental property rights regarding children.

Paying for Old Age: Past, Present, Future

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Thomas ◽  
Paul Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Ageing Population ◽  
Social Security Systems ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
Old Age Support ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Old Age ◽  
The Uk

This chapter focuses on one fundamental aspects of an ageing population — how to pay for old age, individually and collectively. It also presents a study of the history of old age support in the UK and US and concludes that despite the quite different beginnings of the public pension and social security systems, government policy in both countries has become similarly locked in to a set of institutional arrangements which were devised to respond to immediate social and economic problems, but which have acquired a rationale and a dynamic of their own.

A History of Japanese Literature, Volume Two: The Early Middle Ages

1988 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 337
Author(s):  
Laurel Rasplica Rodd ◽  
Jin'ichi Konishi ◽  
Aileen Gatten ◽  
Earl Miner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of
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