ABSTRACT
Old age in the Renaissance was the only stage of life in the Ages of Man schema that was subdivided into three distinct phases (green, white and decrepit), and it alone was regarded as a disease which contained its own distinctive regression.1 In order to counteract accelerating bodily degeneration Renaissance writers, like their medieval counterparts, conceived of life from cradle to grave as a preparation for death’s release of the soul from its ruined prison the body into the liberty of heaven.2 The proximity of death intensifi ed the urge to get one’s spiritual self into shape for life thereafter. Ideally, this preparation should begin in youth, with the inculcation of enduring habits of moderation in diet and emphasis on intellectual and spiritual enrichment. Efforts to ensure life everlasting took a variety of forms, the most compelling of which was the impulse to write up the value of old age and its unique role in educating the young into the spirituality, wisdom, temperance, prudence, virtue and good dietary habits that would enable them to cope with the tribulations of age and show them the pathway to God. The early modern period inherited from the Middle Ages strategies in grafting onto biblical example models of old age taken from the writers of antiquity, and continued to treat aging as a topic ripe for moral, political, religious and physiological projections into temporal and otherworldly futures. The inspiration for compensatory benefi ts of elderliness was Cicero’s De Senectute, and its precepts on care of the body, the mind and the soul were continuously recycled in all the health and old-age manuals from the time in which it was written to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and beyond. It was forerunner to a mixed genre of writing combining personal experience with prescription, religious precept and practical diet and exercise regimes for the old.
