Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic. Ed. Albrecht Classen (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 2). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Pp. 575. Cloth € 98.00

The study of the history of ageing and attitudes to the old is of more than academic interest. One of the merits of this wide-ranging and thought-provoking volume is its willingness to engage with our present anxieties and assumptions as it offers new points of focus from a wide cultural and temporal perspective. We seem to want the past to provide clear exempla – positive ones showing that previous generations hold the key to dignified ageing; negative ones that assure us we are doing better. These essays offer no such easy encouragement; from late antiquity to the renaissance, the medieval past was a changing, ambivalent and confused place in which to be old or indeed to depict, in literature or art, the nature of age.

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