In Reference Johnson and Thane1998, Pat Thane co-edited Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity. Five of the seven chapters in the present volume are by the same authors, and both theme and format are similar. But there is one significant difference: an extraordinarily rich resource of 231 visual images. These should be understood not simply as illustrations but as records in their own right. Although organised as a chronological history, with each contributor taking a different period, the value of this collection of essays lies less in the generalities that may be gleaned and more in the wealth of examples and quotations. Two requirements follow, first to recognise that good history presents theorists with a problem, for while it may be fruitless to seek master-narratives in the social and cultural history of old age, it is equally unsatisfactory to claim infinite variety. The second is to interrogate visual and other sources and explain their links to old age as a history of ideas.
Once there was a ‘golden age’ of ageing, then a transition from veneration to degradation. No sooner have we waved goodbye to that Aunt Sally, than we find ourselves dithering with indeterminacy. Thus, while concluding that ‘received ideas of old age have changed dramatically’, from the ‘unmitigated tragedy’ of ancient times to today's ‘stage of life that (with luck, health and freedom) can be enjoyed on its own terms’ (p. 299), Thane, along with most contemporary scholars of ageing, resorts to the D-word: ‘in the past as in the present the most striking feature of old age is diversity’ (p. 14). Itself a convention of late modernity, this emphasis amounts to acknowledging that age has never been a determinant variable. Differences of class, geography, economics, religious doctrine, medicine and not least gender have seen to that. Dynastic principles explain why popes were old but kings were young in the middle ages. Medical progress defines the shift from the struggle to keeping old age at bay during the 17th century to the capability to restore elements of youth during the 20th. The nuclear households of northwest Europe and the extended ones of the Mediterranean had varying implications for elderly relatives' independence. Yet European ideas about ageing (North America and, fleetingly, the USSR are only mentioned in the 19th and 20th century chapters) have conditioned both its representation and interpretation. The enduring convention of symbolising the Ages of Man as ‘blueprints for the good life’ (p. 74) has been underpinned by different codes at different times. During the 17th century, the four humours were linked to Aristotle's four elements and the four seasons and combined in the four ages of man. The supposed inner dryness and external moisture of the aged saw them as wasting away physically while they were melancholy and phlegmatic in temperament. Since post-menopausal women no longer lost blood, it was thought that ‘this noxious substance’ remained trapped, turning to deadly venom; hence the association with witchcraft (p. 127).
Far-fetched though such claims now seem, old age has always carried an attendant morality, albeit one in which the semiotics were shifted: a toothless smile once signified wealth rather than age, sugar being a scarce and expensive commodity. Yet although paintings and later photographs help to elaborate cultural typologies, values cannot simply be read off from the visible state of the body. Renaissance philosophers distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ old people on the basis of personality, rejecting determinism and ignoring physiology: one person's wrinkles of vice were another's virtue. There was too the notion, so brilliantly evoked in Rembrandt's self-portraits, of the spirit beginning to shine as the flesh slowly deteriorated. Rather differently, 20th-century images of ‘positive ageing’ reflect the dichotomy between biological ageing and socially-imposed retirement. Contemporary research indicates that while individuals may look old, they do not necessarily feel it, hence ‘a continuous sense of self that does not match the reflection in the mirror’ (p. 300).
This, of course, rather questions the ability of pictures to capture lived experience. Indeed, en passant, one caption notes that ‘conditioned by the sentimental taste of the time, photographers could abandon documenting real life and construct a fake reality in the image of art’ (p. 250). Strangely, such important methodological questions are scarcely explicated; neither are more generic issues about visual sources. Do they merely represent painterly conventions of their time? Were sitters drawn realistically or caricatured in line with prevalent attitudes? Historians may detect comparisons with the pitfalls of Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood of 1960. By the same token, this is the first book to attempt a similarly long history of the other end of the life course. And though pictures alone provide insufficient evidence, and certainly not authenticity, once deconstructed they do lend singular guidance in understanding changing mentalities. Less tractable are the attitudes of older people, of whom, although they were many, few representative records survive. The only universal is a dualistic apprehension conveyed in Bernardino of Siena's timeless axiom: ‘Every one wishes to reach old age, but nobody wishes to be old’ (p. 94).
