The Medieval Life Cycle. From Birth to Rebirth

Catalog description

This seminar will examine the human life cycle as it was experienced and interpreted by men and women of medieval Europe. Age was, then as now, a significant dimension of individual lives, and our study of specific age groups, --children, teenagers, youth, adults, and the elderly-- will expose the effect age had on the course and on the representation of life, and the ways that this effect differed with geographic location, religion, gender, ethnicity, economic status, and social rank. There was therefore diversity in the patterns of life cycles, and in the prospects that stages of life held for medieval men and women. In this sociological model of the medieval life cycle, we will consider age as an aspect of social identity.