ABSTRACT
This chapter speaks cultural transitions and implications for the aged. French historians have made the strongest case for a major cultural shift associated with the Enlightenment beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. Works of theater and fiction paid increasing attention to old age, and traditional comical representations of the elderly gave way to more respectful and sentimental depictions. Practitioners of 'political arithmetic' deployed data on the ages of life and began depicting populations in the form of age pyramids. Historical investigation into the late eighteenth century has identified multiple developments related to the aged. The transformation of old age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved shifts in religious and secular views, images of the aged in middle-class families, specialization of hospitals for the elderly, and the increasingly important role of grandparents. Books about grandparents and grandchildren proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, but representations of grandparents varied by social and religious groups.
