Chapter 1 ‘Middle age’ in the Middle Ages of western Europe, 1300–1500

Historiography

Academic interest in adulthood is relatively recent across all disciplines and periods, as the Introduction to this volume has outlined, and for middle age or middle adulthood the historiography has moved in fits and starts. In the 1990s, developmental psychologists were describing middle age as the ‘last uncharted territory in human development’.² Echoing that sentiment in Prime Time (1997), the historian John Benson outlined his purpose ‘to rescue the history of middle age from the deadly combination of neglect and condescension with which it has been treated’. While by 2005 the picture was changing, contributors to the study Middle Adulthood: A Lifespan Perspective still commented that ‘it seems as if the historical analysis of the concept of middle adulthood has not been of much interest’.³ For the medieval period, where the concept of adulthood has received no such lengthy scrutiny, discussions of mature adulthood have generally appeared in studies of ageing and old age. Within the last decade there has been important work undertaken on middle age (as discussed below), although the focus has been entirely on middle-aged women.⁴

Part of the problem has lain with imprecise definitions and a lack of agreed entry and exit points. The Oxford English Dictionary defines middle age as ‘the period of life between young adulthood and old age, now usually regarded as between about forty-five and sixty. Also figurative’. The ‘now usually’ is telling and acknowledges imprecision. In contemporary society the complexities are evident in uncertainties over what criteria one should use, such as chronological age (thirty-five? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? Seventy?), biological markers (reproduction/menopause?), familial or societal events (children growing up, leaving home?), or psychological approaches (how old do you feel?). Middle age has been variously described as ‘defying straightforward definition’, ‘hard to pin down’ and a ‘changeling’.⁵

Nevertheless, these concerns have not prevented modern commentators recognising middle age as a distinct category of development with notable characteristics. All describe it as a period of transition, a turning point, a bridge, a liminal age. The scientist David Bainbridge, for example, described middle age as ‘the time when the forces of creation and destruction compete on an equal footing’.⁶ Strikingly, in the case of modern Europe and America, middle age has regularly been judged to mark a period of decline: it is a narrative of lost youth, failing vitality and increasing trepidation with mortality. This view of midlife is often associated with ‘midlife crisis’, an idea commonly attributed to the psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques. In an article published in 1965, Jaques explained the midlife crisis in psychological and sociological terms as individuals tried to adjust to new and multiple responsibilities (such as family and work) on their path to a mature and independent adulthood.⁷ Such an idea became popularised from the 1970s onwards in works such as Gail Sheehy’s Passages, and is now a staple of modern publishers.⁸ Yet the theory has not gone unchallenged and, in turn, has spawned an industry of those discrediting it. Its detractors have condemned it as a Western invention, a wholly male construction and a ‘cultural fiction’.⁹ Others, like David Bainbridge, have drawn out the advantages of middle age and the benefits of a period of plateauing for cognitive development. Alongside this academic output there has been an explosion of popular works on contemporary middle age and how individuals and groups have responded to it. Whatever it means to twenty-first-century Western society, being ‘middle-aged’ is a well-used descriptor.

These modern narratives have heavily influenced scholarly investigations into historical middle age. For some writers, the focus on how a particular (i.e. modern) middle age came into existence occludes other possible earlier middle ages; they simply did not exist. Hans-Werner Wahl and Andreas Kruse argued that in societies where few people reached old age and where young adults had little freedom from societal obligations, ‘there was simply no need for a social construction of middle age as a separate and unique period of life’. In their view, ‘people rarely considered what we would call middle age … until around the beginning of the nineteenth century’.¹⁰ Others see the cultural construction of midlife as a distinct stage ‘originating only in the twentieth century’, linked to increasing longevity and declining fertility.¹¹ Among modern British historians it is not so much middle age as a concept they consider a modern invention, but the ideology of midlife decline. John Benson argued that the twentieth century witnessed a transformation in how middle age was defined, when it became ‘associated unambiguously with decay and collapse’.¹² If this concept of a midlife crisis came to fruition in Britain during the twentieth century, for historians like Kay Heath, its origins lay in the nineteenth century as ‘midlife anxiety became fully expressed as a regular part of the life course’ and as the beginning of ‘an inevitable and calamitous decline’. She points out that ‘midlife’ first entered English-language dictionaries in 1895.¹³ In other words, midlife and midlife crises are considered entirely modern inventions.

Conceptualising middle age in the Middle Ages

How then to respond as a pre-modern historian, and for a period where we lack the types of data, particularly first-hand accounts, that assist explorations of modern-day adulthood and middle age? The first point to make is that there were, of course, adults and middle-aged people in the Middle Ages. Indeed, they dominated society. It is undoubtedly true that life expectancy was low in the medieval world, and infant mortality notoriously high. Nevertheless, studies on a number of defined communities suggest that once the hazards of childhood were over, a long midlife was a real prospect. Adult life expectancy would differ greatly depending on gender and social status; for women, childbirth was a particularly dangerous time. Looking at the data for men, calculations of life expectancy made among working communities in both northern and southern England, the Italian city states and urban areas of France in the later Middle Ages indicate that those reaching their twenties could expect another three decades of life.¹⁴ Other studies show communities filled with adults and those in middle age appear to dominate England’s medieval dead. In Roberta Gilchrist’s study of medieval cemeteries in England, particularly in London and York, adults (those calculated as aged twenty-six to forty-five) represented ‘the largest group buried in most cemeteries’.¹⁵ While fewer would reach old age, therefore, middle adulthood was a real probability.

The more appropriate question, then, is how these individuals were described in the Middle Ages; were they identified as a single age group? The answer is far from straightforward. Let us first consider the term ‘adult’, which does not appear in its modern meaning in any medieval vernacular language.¹⁶ It derives from the Latin adultus/a meaning ‘full grown’ or mature.¹⁷ In medieval England, where Latin was the language of the Church and government, adultus is found in a number of Latin texts circulating at that time. The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury, for example, uses it on several occasions, yet always when he is describing someone as ‘growing up’ or ‘grown up’ and never as an age descriptor.¹⁸ This was how it was deployed when it first made its transition into European vernacular languages: a term that indicated the process of physical development had been completed.¹⁹ It was not until the sixteenth century that ‘adult’ as a life-stage term entered the English language. The first known recorded use was in 1531 when Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named the Governour referred to ‘suche persones beinge nowe adulte, that is to saye passed theyr childehode as well in maners as in yeres’.²⁰ It is a simple explanation that classifies an adult as ‘not a child’ and does so in reference to both biological age (‘yeres’) and in terms of behaviour (‘maners’).

That Elyot needed to gloss the word suggests he did not expect his readers to know unequivocally what he meant by ‘adult’. Nevertheless, the attributes he used to define the age stage were far from new. The conceptual framing of ageing as a series of stages or age groupings was widespread in the Middle Ages. A well-known schema – drawn from the classical world – was that of the ‘ages of man’ (and it was almost exclusively male), which characterised life as a series of sequential stages. They numbered anywhere between two and twelve and featured in a wide range of media.²¹ They reveal an awareness of ageing as a gradual process, with the accumulation or reduction of responsibilities over time. Different qualities were associated with each stage, along with corresponding age expectations. It is also worth underlining that, despite low life expectancies, medieval commentators always wrote in terms of the full life span, commonly referencing the biblical threescore years and ten. Yet, while terms such as ‘infant’, ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘old age’ were used in describing human development, it is immediately obvious that ‘adult’ does not appear as a fixed stage that is consistent in terminology or appearance, and the range of chronological ages selected varied considerably. As Michael Goodich noted in his study of the stages of life, ‘following adolescence the pattern tended to break down’.²²

What can be discerned, however, is a transition period between youth and old age. In writers preferring the four-stage schema, one can locate ‘adulthood’ as either the second or third stage of life. In the work of the Arabic philosopher and physician Ibn Sīnā (widely known to the West as Avicenna, 980–1037) it appears to be the second stage of life – those in their thirties – and described by medieval Latin translators as the aetas consistendi.²³ In Les Quatre Âges de l’Homme, written in the thirteenth century by Philippe de Novare, the adult years might be considered to span the second age jovant (twenty to forty) and the third moien age (forty to sixty).²⁴ In the well-known and influential six stages of Isidore of Seville (d.636 CE), it was the fourth stage iuventus and spanned the ages from twenty-eight to fifty, with the thirtieth year ‘the time of full maturity’.²⁵ This was echoed in the Middle English Stanzaic Life of Christ where ‘The ferth elde is ȝouth calt / From eȝt & twenty to fifty’ (the fourth age is called youth, from twenty-eight to fifty).²⁶ In discussions of seven or more ages, where short periods are associated with planets or other natural phenomena, we can look to Thomas of Cantimpré (d.1272) who called the fourth of his seven stages robor, reflecting the perceived strength and vigour of the age group thirty-five to fifty. A final example to note is that of the French-writing author, Jean Froissart (1337–1410), who divided the years twenty-four to fifty into three, symbolised by the sun, Mars and Jupiter, respectively.²⁷

In these examples, we see an attempt to describe a process whereby young men became mature men, but not yet old. In chronological age this stage accords with modern adulthood, but it is also a ‘middle’ phase of life and its position in these schemas is noteworthy: it is prioritised and celebrated; it is an aspiration. Drawing on the ancient writings of Aristotle, who had promoted the theory of a person’s ideal moral mean, medieval writers saw middle age as the zenith of physical and rational development.²⁸ It was the prime of life. Physically it was the point where the body was in balance: it had all the advantages of youth (e.g. physical excellence) and old age (e.g. wisdom) but none of their excesses and defects. The Scottish poem Ratis Raving described the fifth stage of life (thirty to fifty years) as the age that incorporated within itself the good parts of youth and old age: it was a time that ‘ringis the perfeccioune of resone and discreccion’.²⁹ In ways reminiscent of later descriptions, therefore, middle age bridges youth and old age, here in terms of incorporating within itself the good elements of both. In visual depictions of the age stage it was the apex of the wheel of life or the top of an arc; it was commonly visualised as a plateau and characterised as a stable, static period, neither climbing up nor down. It was the aetas consistendi, the age of standing still.

Alongside stability and balance, other qualities included strength, wisdom and sobriety or, as the Stanzaic Life of Christ put it, ‘wit & strength most studfastlie’.³⁰ Much emphasis was placed on independence and responsibility, which could be gained legally, economically, socially or societally. When Thomas Elyot had first used the English word ‘adult’ back in 1531, it was to describe those ‘when they firste recyve any great dignitie, charge, or governance of the weale publike’.³¹ No longer being a dependant, those in middle age were now capable of managing or helping others. This was the explanation given by some writers, like Isidore of Seville, for the use of the descriptor iuventus from the Latin iuvare (‘to help’) or ‘youth’ in English, to describe adulthood.³² There were other terms used in English to describe these middle years between childhood/adolescence (growing up) and old age (in decline). They included ‘middel age’/‘elde’, ‘manhood’, ‘mannes age’, ‘ful age’, ‘mean age’ and ‘prime of life’. They all suggest a belief that a mature age stage existed, which began some years after the legal age of majority had been reached. It will be seen that all the terms are positive, powerful and ‘manly’.³³ It is for this reason that, visually, middle age was commonly represented by a bearded man, often a king, alongside the status symbols of swords, sceptre or money bags.

It is with evidence of this kind that scholars of medieval literature have supported a distinction between a positive ‘medieval’ and a negative ‘modern’ middle age. Both John Burrow and Mary Dove hesitated to use the term ‘middle age’ in their explorations of medieval poetry because of the connotations attached to the word in their contemporary English society. In the 1980s Mary Dove wrote: ‘our so-called “middle age” [has] almost entirely negative associations, whereas the medieval tendency was to exalt and glory in a middle age which … was represented as being possessed of exuberance, strength and maturity’.³⁴ Similarly, John Burrow believed that the ‘dim and negative’ twentieth-century associations of middle age could not be applied to the ‘vigorous’ figures witnessed in Ricardian poetry ‘who were no longer young, but not yet old’.³⁵ Both authors were focusing on male literary figures, but it is noteworthy that those exploring the lives of medieval women similarly do so using positive terms even if they are more likely to recognise the physical ageing of the middle aged. Anneke Mulder-Bakker and Renée Nip considered the age of forty as a turning point for women when they were post-productive and post-menopausal; their book’s subtitle describes them as ‘wise old women’, which perhaps at first suggests a decline.³⁶ Similarly, Sue Niebrzydowski defined middle age as the ‘liminal moment in a woman’s life cycle, in which she is neither young nor old’. In turning to the four stages of life, she believed a medieval woman’s middle age was closer to the autumn of life than its summer because the former is ‘more evocative of middle age and is characterized by a lessening but not the outright loss in power or strength’.³⁷ Interestingly, the focus of these studies is not on possessing physical perfection but on women undertaking new opportunities and achieving their goals. In that context, these studies show the middle age stage as positive for women, when they too came into their prime.

A period of uncertainty?

There are many other examples of the supremacy of middle age as the prime of life. They support the view that a middle stage of life existed as a concept in the pre-industrial past and adds weight to those who see a negative middle age as a modern invention. However, it was by no means the only discourse on ageing circulating in the Middle Ages.

For one, the move to a more sober and serious stage of life was not always considered in positive terms. For Europe’s poets, the midpoint in life was marked by the cooling of the passions, which was an unwelcome reminder of the physical ageing process when exuberant youth became boring middle age. The lament for lost youth as a philosophical and literary motif was widespread across medieval Europe. It can be found in both medieval Arabic and Jewish literature, as well as the Romance languages.³⁸ Several fourteenth-century poets bemoaned the transition from young, gallant lover to sensible, responsible older man, and the internal struggles that brought. Whether writing in Welsh (Dafydd ap Gwilym) or French (Jean Froissart and François Villon), poets expressed vividly their unhappiness at finding themselves ‘past it’ and with it the lost opportunities for love (poetry) making.³⁹ They all appear to have internalised specific age expectations that determined that they should no longer act in a particular youthful way, although they are still being tempted. Here there are familiar tropes that still come through strongly in modern understandings of midlife angst as ‘the time when youthful aspirations crash into mature reality’.⁴⁰ It is perhaps not surprising then that modern writers are sometimes tempted to describe a medieval poet’s farewell to youth as a ‘midlife crisis’, one in which the narrator is full of regrets.⁴¹ For Europe’s poets, such loss of youth was (and is) clearly considered a major life stage and turning point.

The desire to push back at middle age and resist sobriety is also visible in Middle English poems where a generational clash of youth and middle age helps drive the narrative. In the Parlement of the Thre Ages we are presented with the differing outlooks of Youthe, Medill Elde and Elde (Youth, Middle Age and Age). While Youthe shows off his fine clothes and enjoys hunting, dancing and women, Medill Elde is more soberly dressed and voices his concerns over money and property. Whereas Youthe sees the horse for pleasure-riding, Medill Elde sees it as a draught animal. The poet’s own sympathies appear more aligned with carefree Youth than avaricious Middle Age; there is an implied criticism of money as motivation. In his analysis of the poem Thorlac Turville-Petre considered Middle Age far from the prime of life and rather ‘another nail in the coffin’ on the route to death.⁴² Middle age is therefore a stage marking the loss of freedoms and passions characteristic of younger ages, to be replaced by the ‘adult’ gains of resources and responsibilities. While some poets resisted the coming of sobriety, the Parlement and other moral tales railed against the complacency of midlifers with money and power who, not yet old, failed to consider the end of life sufficiently and the prospect of what awaited them. In The Parlement of the Thre Ages it is Elde (Age) who closes the poem by demonstrating that neither Youth nor Middle Age is right because nothing matters in the end if they do not reflect on, and repent for, their sins.

It was during their middle years that other real and fictional poets received their calls to repent. A notable example is provided by the fourteenth-century Piers Plowman, a series of dream visions in which the main character ‘Will’ falls asleep and meets a number of allegorical characters who instruct him in leading a good Christan life. It is at the point where he had ‘completed fyue and fourty wyntre’ (age forty-five) that the character ‘Ymaginitif’ (Imaginative) arrives to remind him to repent while there is time. Following the ‘wilde wantownesse’ of youth, he is urged ‘To amende it in ƥi myddel age’.⁴³ Medieval spiritual and allegorical literature reminded their audiences how temptations changed over the life course, and several were considered typical for those in their physical prime. The Mirror of the Periods of Man’s Life presents a picture of the adult male as prey to pride, anger, gluttony and lechery. At thirty, ‘Ful of manhode & of myȝt’, he boasts of his powers, strength and youthful abilities. At fifty, when his hair loses colour, covetousness comes calling. It is only when he reaches sixty that he laments his past indiscretions and is taunted by youth.⁴⁴ ‘Manhood’ (who became so named at twenty-one) in the English morality play Mundus and Infans similarly enjoys the peak of his power by exhibiting a range of new sins. ‘Manhood mighty am I’, he claims and is described by the phrase ‘stiff, strong, stalworth and stout’ but also as the king of Pride, Lechery, Wrath, Covetise, Gluttony, Sloth and Envy.⁴⁵ Likewise, Manhood in the Castle of Perserverence, who is given great honours, a name, riches and power, spends his time with friends such as Lust-liking, Folly and Backbiting while sitting high on Fortune’s wheel.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, they soon receive other visitors. In didactic literature, the arrival of Conscience or Penance in midlife appears to mark a new stage in a person’s development, one that comes as young adulthood recedes. In Mundus and Infans, the dialogue between Manhood and Conscience charts the move from Manhood’s preoccupation with power in the early scenes (and years) to the more sober questioning of his soul in the later ones. In this way, the process of becoming and demonstrating manliness (virility) was linked to the progress of spiritual life (becoming virtuous).

This is a spiritual and psychological journey without fixed chronological ages and there appears an implicit recognition that people develop at different rates. While medieval writers might adopt a regular order to the stages of life, they also recognised individual choice and circumstance. There are no clear rites of passage to mark the journey through adulthood: there would be births, deaths and marriages to witness or endure and challenges in relationships, health and wealth. All could lead to personal development and greater maturity, or not. Stability itself would be tested and perhaps hard fought.

These medieval English morality tales, therefore, did not want individuals to feel they should be standing still or become stuck in their ways. Questions would be asked of them and new responsibilities would confront them. Other evidence suggests that medieval society recognised the pressures and trials of midlife. One example can be found within a collection of Latin sermons on canon law, written in Cambridge in the 1480s, where the author describes the typical career of a canon law student in relation to the three stages of youth, middle age and old age. In contrast to the youthful beginner who tries to learn and advance too quickly, those in the next stage of life – who have achieved their qualification – are less sure of themselves. To quote Donald Logan who examined the manuscript: ‘the student of canon law can, in mid-life, find himself beset by a different danger: he can now become uncertain of himself, timorous, hesitant, reluctant to commit himself, vacillating intellectually from one position to another’.⁴⁷ That academic life could bring uncertainties in middle age can also be seen in the real-life example of Jean Gerson (b.1363) who became a canon of Notre-Dame de Paris in 1395 and was elected chancellor of the university. It was a post that weighed heavily on him and in 1399 (at the age of thirty-six) he underwent a spiritual crisis and attempted to resign. In 1400 he was so ill that he arranged his final will and testament, although his writings continue to show a keen, vigorous mind. Earlier that year he had written a letter reflecting on his decision to leave his post, which was rooted in his loss of confidence in academic life: he had grown sick of gossip; having to write inane sermons; working with ill-mannered men; and being forced to promote the ignorant and morally corrupt. To those who might accuse him of ‘changeableness if now I so passionately flee that which I once diligently pursued, let them know that my knowledge has grown with age and experience, and my hopes have been greatly frustrated. One thing, indeed, is certain: the wise man changes his ways with the times’.⁴⁸

Gerson feared being described as changeable, a characteristic usually associated with fickle youth (or women). Instead, he linked his decision to maturity; growing older could mean changing paths. For him, as for others, middle age was a time of possibilities. By the 1400s there was a strong literary tradition that the onset of middle adulthood marked a time of crossroads and opportunities. This saw the early thirties as a period of spiritual development. In a Christian context it was, conveniently, midway through the biblical life span of threescore years and ten, and when Christ had been crucified (thirty-three). The history of Christianity is filled with conversion stories, of (literally) damascene moments where adult lives changed; St Augustine’s famous transformation and conversion to Christianity occurred in his early thirties. Indeed, Peter Brown described Augustine’s Confessions as an ‘act of therapy’ for a man who was ‘entering middle age’ and was ‘forced to come to terms with himself’. Other modern historians have taken the analysis further and been tempted to cast such spiritual acts as midlife crises. In studying adult conversions in monastic communities, for example, Constance Berman explored those who entered the monasteries ‘at mid-career, or founded a new religious community after experiencing a mid-life crisis and conversion’.⁴⁹ There is a questionable assumption here that modern manifestations and terms for a life-stage event are easily transposed to pre-modern society. But what is recognised is that adulthood was far from a long period of sameness.

Outside the religious context, we also find examples of those who saw their thirties as the starting point of a new, inner journey, the point where they took stock of life thus far experienced. The Florentine poet Dante is by far the best known for embarking on his literary descent into hell ‘in the middle of the journey of our life’ at the age of thirty-five/thirty-six. The narrator is a man who has lost his way, in a state of despair; he no longer knows where he is going. It was Dante’s journey that had influenced Elliot Jaques in his 1965 article on the midlife crisis as a period of self-assessment and reappraisal, and Dante regularly appears as an example of medieval attitudes to midlife.⁵⁰ He was not alone, however, in seeing the midlife as a point for reflection, for soul-searching. Francesco Petrarch (b.1304), the great Renaissance scholar, underwent a spiritual crisis in the early 1340s, following a close reading of the Church fathers, notably St Augustine. Indeed he seems to have cast his life to mirror that of Augustine’s, for instance dating his realisation of a new perspective to 1336 when he was thirty-two, the age Augustine is said to have achieved his conversion. The Secretum of 1347–53, when Petrarch was in his middle years, is often viewed as the work in which he lays bare his anxiety at the prospect of change. It comprises imaginary dialogues with St Augustine where Petrarch begins questioning his pursuit of love and fame, seeing them as the goals of youth and ‘empty pleasures’. Augustine advises Petrarch to ‘put away the childish things of infancy; quench the burning desires of youth; think not all the time of what you are going to be and do next; look carefully at what you are now’.⁵¹ The emphasis is on reflection as Petrarch looks back over his early life and its vigour, while the march of time and his own experience are forging a more mature vision. It charts his change of direction in life and writing: from celebrating the glories of the classical past (as a means to grow his reputation) towards a more personal, creative, moral and philosophical writing. It is a message that also comes through strongly in medieval Jewish literature where several writers saw forty as the age of transition from lust to sobriety and hence an ideal age to pursue wisdom.⁵²

These voices are male, and the idea of men’s lives marked by turning points, crises and conversions is well attested in a range of medieval literature.⁵³ Female writers, however, also borrowed from this tradition. The fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich wanted to experience sickness and suffering as part of her spiritual growth ‘when I ware 30 yeare olde’.⁵⁴ The writer Christine de Pizan (b.1364) began her semi-autobiographical Vision around the age of forty when ‘I had already finished half of my pilgrimage’.⁵⁵ She is at the midpoint in her life where she wishes to assess her reputation and sees herself as a traveller who looks back over paths trodden and ahead to the inevitable end. It was a new and transformative phase. Her Vision is a journey out of chaos as she traces her education and her spiritual and intellectual development. Christine’s love of learning meant that she saw ageing largely in terms of intellect and reasoning. In contrast to those male writers of love poetry mentioned earlier, Christine saw youth as an immature state, riotous and reckless, with sobriety to be welcomed. Reaching the midpoint in her life meant that ‘my age had brought me in due course to a certain degree of understanding’.⁵⁶ As an author, it allowed her to write the kind of serious works she had always wished to write but had been unable to do while young.⁵⁷ Christine was also well versed in the key writers of her day and the traditions on which they drew; she was inspired by Dante and Petrarch. All were consciously constructing narratives that would trace a path for others. They existed within a rich allegorical and didactic literature that warned of the need to reflect on one’s journey through life. While one cannot see here the decline associated with middle age in the modern world, the possibility that a person’s fortunes may go either way was well understood.

What also links Dante, Petrarch, Julian and Christine is that they had all experienced real crises before or at the point when they wrote their narratives. Christine, for instance, was writing during a period of political turmoil for France, which was on the verge of civil war. She had also faced years of adversity following the death of her husband when she had raised her family as a single mother. What further links them – and the authors of numerous books in the twenty-first century reflecting on midlife – is that they were also writing during their own middle adulthood. The lens through which we view the Middle Ages (and much of our distant past) is one almost wholly fashioned by adults. They are the ones, after all, who dominate history and direct its course. Most individuals only come to our attention in medieval documents once they have reached adulthood, and many others only when they achieved their goals in midlife. These include those who changed paths as mature adults, particularly the case of women who embarked on a new stage after child-bearing and -rearing. We can see this in the writings of holy women, when they turned their attention to a different type of creativity – and hence came to the attention of those who would later write their biographies. In 1341, when she was forty, Birgitta of Sweden went with her husband on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. It was on her return that she had her first divine vision and receive her new calling from God.⁵⁸ While unusual in her path and eventual fame, she was one of many women who embraced middle age as a new beginning.

Conclusion

This examination of middle age began by pointing out that it is a stage of adult life that continually appears elusive, with its beginning and end often in the eyes of the beholder. We can look around in the twenty-first century and see that we live in a world of multiple middle ages. Midlife identity crises rub up against those living their best life; the means to stay looking young and healthy fight for publication space alongside those individuals praised for looking as nature intended. Several processes run alongside each other that are (re)formative: a person can be both old enough and young enough depending on the context. This chapter has argued that the concept of a middle stage of life was not a modern invention, even if the terms ‘adult’, ‘midlife’ and ‘midlife crisis’ are later additions to the English language (and their equivalents in many other languages). Medieval society similarly had a more capacious understanding of middle age than is commonly assumed. There was a recognition that power, knowledge and responsibilities accumulated over time, and that wisdom came through experience.

Reading Middle English literature reveals some familiar concerns about decisions made, paths taken, responsibilities shouldered and the regrets carried during the middle years of life. This is why – as pointed out throughout this chapter – some modern scholars have chosen to use modern conceptions of midlife to analyse past subjects; there is a recognition of shared concerns. Nevertheless, how individuals in medieval England (and medieval Europe more broadly) actually explained these challenges to themselves and how they developed their version of middle age requires further work. How much did they adhere to the moral and spiritual tales reminding them to reflect on the passage of time? How many listened wistfully to poets recounting their younger years? While we will never achieve complete answers, by asking these questions we are more sensitive to how individuals in past times performed their adulthood and middle years, what they wanted to hold on to and what experience told them were ‘childish’ things they needed to put away.

Notes

1. 1. See my earlier survey on the reasons in Deborah Youngs, ‘Adulthood in Medieval Europe: The Prime of Life or Midlife Crisis?’, in Isabelle Cochlin and Karen Smyth, eds., Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 239–64.

2. 2. Orville Gilbert Brim, Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 171.

3. 3. John Benson, Prime Time: A History of the Middle Ages in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 1997), 4; Hans-Werner Wahl and Andreas Kruse, ‘Historical Perspectives of Middle Age within the Life Span’, in Sherry L. Willis and Mike Martin, Middle Adulthood: A Lifespan Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 3–4.

4. 4. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Renée Nip, eds., The Prime of Their Lives: Wise Old Women in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Sue Niebrzydowski, ed., Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011).

5. 5. Summarised in Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (New York: Scribner, 2012), 8: ‘our ideas of middle age are continually evolving, which is one reason it remains elusive, a changeling with no fixed entry or end point, clinging to youth and spilling over into old age’.

6. 6. David Bainbridge, Middle Age: A Natural History (London: Portobello Books Ltd., 2013), 36. For early discussions of middle age as a bridge, see, for example, Bernice L. Neugarten, ‘The Awareness of Middle Age’, in Bernice L. Neugarten, ed., Middle Age and Aging: A Reader in Social Psychology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 93–8.

7. 7. Elliot Jaques, ‘Death and the Mid-Life Crisis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 46 (1965): 502–14, particularly 502, 506.

8. 8. Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: Dutton, 1976); David Levinson, The Seasons of Man’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

9. 9. For example, Suzanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2020); Richard A. Schweder, ed., Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Summaries of the midlife crisis can also be found in: Stanley D. Rosenberg, Harriet J. Rosenberg and Michael P. Farrell, ‘The Midlife Crisis Revisited’, in Sherry L. Willis and James D. Reid, eds., Life in the Middle: Psychological and Social Development in Middle Age (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 47–73; Ben Hutchinson, The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), ch. 1; Mark Jackson, Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), 19.

10. 10. Wahl and Kruse, ‘Historical Perspectives’, 9, 17.

11. 11. Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington, ‘Midlife Development in a Life Course Context’, in Sherry Willis and James D. Reid, eds., Life in the Middle: Psychological and Social Development in Middle Age (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 3.

12. 12. Benson, Prime Time, 12.

13. 13. Kay Heath, Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 1–3. See, however, Barbara Crosbie’s chapter in this volume, which argues against Heath’s central thesis.

14. 14. Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–c. 1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 26.

15. 15. Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 59.

16. 16. Compare Sara Elin Roberts’s exploration of Welsh terms for those ‘in-between’ young and old: ‘Seeking the Middle-Aged Women in Medieval Wales’, in Niebrzydowski, ed., Middle-Aged Women, 25–36, particularly 27 (‘there is no precise term’).

17. 17. In classical Latin, adultus, -a, -um is a participial adjectival form (perfect participle passive) from the fourth principal part of the third conjugation verb adolesco, adolescere ‘to grow’. In Britain it was found in medieval Latin sources as adultus = to grow up, mature: R.E. Latham, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Fascicule 1 A-B (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 35.

18. 18. William Malmesbury Gesta Regum Anglorum. The History of the English Kings, vol. 1, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), for example, chs. 140, 170, 188 and 239.

19. 19. For example, Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Singleton (6 vols., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970–75): Paradiso, VII, 58–60.

20. 20. Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, edited from the 1531 edn by Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (2 vols, London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1883), vol. 2:1 (2).

21. 21. Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Michael E. Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought 1250–1350 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989); Youngs, The Life Cycle, ch. 1.

22. 22. Goodich, From Birth to Old Age, 143. See too Maria Cannon’s chapter in this volume on adulthood and the ages of man in the early modern period.

23. 23. Hasan Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon: Youth versus Old Age in Medieval Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 35; Burrow, The Ages of Man, 23.

24. 24. Burrow, The Ages of Man, 25.

25. 25. Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, eds., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XI.ii, 5.

26. 26. F.A. Foster, ed., A Stanzaic Life of Christ (EETS, os, 1987), 1.126 (5).

27. 27. Youngs, ‘Adulthood’, 170.

28. 28. Burrow, The Ages of Man, 5–10.

29. 29. J. Rawson Lumby, ed., Ratis Raving and Other Moral Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse (EETS, os, 43, 1870), 65, 70.

30. 30. Foster, A Stanzaic Life of Christ, 1.126 (5).

31. 31. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour.

32. 32. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, XI, ii, 16. For the challenges posed by the use of ‘iuventus’ to mean mature adulthood, particularly in its English translation, see Mary Dove, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), 15–16.

33. 33. Dove, The Perfect Age, 16.

34. 34. Dove, The Perfect Age, 3.

35. 35. J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the ‘Gawain’ Poet (London: Routledge, 1971), 120.

36. 36. Mulder-Bakker and Nip, The Prime of Their Lives.

37. 37. Niebrzydowski, Middle-Aged Women, 6.

38. 38. Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon, 41 and ch. 4; Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 38–40.

39. 39. Youngs, ‘Adulthood’, 171.

40. 40. Bainbridge, Middle Age, 128.

41. 41. Peter F. Dembowski, Jean Froissart and His Melidor: Context, Craft and Sense (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983), 36–9; William W. Kibler, ‘Le joli buisson de jonece: Froissart’s Midlife Crisis’, in Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds., Froissart across the Genres (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 64–6.

42. 42. Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘The Ages of Man in “The Parlement of the Thre Ages”’, Medium Ævum, 46, no. 1 (1977): 66–76 (p. 67).

43. 43. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd, eds., Piers Plowman by William Langland (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), passus XII, 3–11; Dove, The Perfect Age, ch. 11.

44. 44. ‘The Mirror of the Periods of Man’s Life’, in F.J. Furnival, ed., Hymns to the Virgin and Christ (EETS, os, 24, 1867), 58–78.

45. 45. G.A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays: Mankind, Everyman, Mundus and Infans (London: A&C Black Ltd., 1981), Mundus and Infans, lines 160–287.

46. 46. ‘The Castle of Perseverance’, in Mark Eccles (ed.), The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind (EETS, os, 262, 1969).

47. 47. F. Donald Logan, ‘The Cambridge Canon Law Faculty: Sermons and Addresses from Cambridge Dating to the 1480s’, in M.J. Franklin and Christopher Harper-Bill, eds., Medieval Ecclesiastical Studies in Honour of Dorothy M. Owen (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 157.

48. 48. Jean Gerson: Early Works, trans. Brian Patrick McGuire (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 167.

49. 49. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967, 2000), 157–8; Constance H. Berman, ‘Monastic and Mendicant Communities’, in Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, eds., A Companion to the Medieval World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 239.

50. 50. Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, canto 1:1.

51. 51. Petrarch’s Secret or The Soul’s Conflict with Passion, trans. William H. Draper (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), 160; Francesco Petrarca: My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), xv–xvi.

52. 52. Russ-Fishbane, Ageing, 39.

53. 53. Rosalynn Voaden and Stephanie Volf, ‘Visions of My Youth: Representations of the Childhood of Medieval Visionaries’, Gender and History, 12 (2000): 665–84.

54. 54. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978), 289, lines 38–9 (taken from the long text). The editors suggest that Julian’s desire to suffer when she was thirty derived from her wish to associate with Christ: 204, n. 46.

55. 55. Christine de Pizan, The Vision, trans. Glenda McLeod and Charity Cannon Willard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), bk I.1, 18.

56. 56. De Pizan, bk 111.10, 104.

57. 57. Renate Blumenfield-Kosinski, ‘The Compensations of Aging: Sexuality and Aging in Christine de Pizan with an Epilogue on Collete’, in Mulder-Bakker and Nip, The Prime of Their Lives, 10–11.

58. 58. Blumenfield-Kosinski, ‘The Compensations of Aging’, 10–11.

References