Chapter 2 ‘The most constant and settled part of our life’?: Adulthood and the ages of man in early modern England

Introduction

The first use of the term ‘adult’ in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in The Boke named The Governour by Thomas Elyot, published in 1531. He described adults as ‘soche persons … passed theyr childehode’.¹ The term ‘adult’ was rarely used by writers in early modern England, but the concept of an adult life stage was understood, usually in terms of ‘perfect’, ‘ripe’ or ‘full’ age. The ages of man was a long-established model of ‘universal, ahistorical and asocial’ stages that set out an ideal life course in medieval Europe, as examined by Deborah Youngs in the previous chapter.² Life could be separated into any number of stages between three and twelve, with a seven-age scheme becoming more popular by the sixteenth century, perhaps most famously outlined by Shakespeare in the ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue from his late sixteenth-century comedy play As You Like It. The sixteenth century also saw a change in visual depictions of the ages of man from a wheel of stages to steps.³ These steps represented life as a climb from birth and childhood to the pinnacle of adulthood before declining to old age and death. This chapter analyses ages of man texts and images to examine what those continuing to explore the ages of man tradition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England understood as the key features of adulthood. Elyot’s definition of the newer term ‘adult’ as any person no longer a child reflects the complexity of thinking about how people moved through the life course. Adulthood could be seen as a pinnacle or perfect age, but could also incorporate a range of experiences as people moved out of their childhoods but still grew and changed.

Historians of youth and of family have followed Elyot’s definition of adulthood as the stage that follows childhood, and considered the transition to adulthood in some depth.⁴ Marriage is often singled out as a rite of passage that conferred adult status on men and women in early modern England, usually in conjunction with setting up an independent household.⁵ Beyond this, historians do not generally consider the life stage of adulthood past this entry point. They frequently discuss the lives of adults in research on gender, family life and economic activities but do not always consider these experiences in the context of age.⁶ Historians of the life cycle have spent more time on smaller divisions of other life stages, for example separating childhood into infancy, childhood and youth, or old age into ‘green’ and ‘decrepit’ or ‘functional/chronological/cultural’, than on the changes experienced by people between youth and old age.⁷ Discussions of marriage and parenting stand in for research on adulthood even as historians acknowledge that not all adults took on these roles.⁸ This chapter will begin by outlining some of the key features and activities associated with adulthood and then consider how the variety of ages of man schemes allowed for a nuanced understanding of what it meant to move through the life course in early modern society.

Ages of man schemes have been noted by many historians as exclusive – the phrase really did mean men for the majority of writers and artists.⁹ This raises the question of whether a history of adulthood through these sources is, in fact, the same as a history of masculinity. Alexandra Shepard has written extensively about the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy in early modern England.¹⁰ While the ‘estate’ of manhood was associated with adult age, she argues that marital status ‘transcended hierarchies of age’ in the according of status and privilege for men.¹¹ Adulthood and manhood were linked but should not be used interchangeably. This chapter will conclude by considering the inclusion of women in ages of man schemes and demonstrate that women could be included both as essential partners for adult men and for their own experiences of growth and development through the life course.

‘Adulthood’ as a stage of man’s life

The nature of ages of man schemes was that they saw life as divided into equal segments, therefore adulthood was described and theorised equal to other stages. Writers and illustrators considered ageing from a variety of perspectives, often drawing on classical ideas and theories. Humorism was an enduring theory that explained the composition of the human body as balanced between the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. It also stated that the body could be at different levels of heat or cold, and of dryness or wetness. Ideally a body should be kept in a healthy balance, but this balance varied depending on a number of factors including age and gender. Classical scholar Henry Cuffe explained in his 1607 publication The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life that ages of man schemes set out by ancient thinkers were all based on this humoral understanding of the body.¹² Adulthood was the stage of life where the humors were at their most perfect balance:

The next [stage] is our flourishing and middle age, and this is, when a man is come to the highest degree of perfection in the temper of his body … without any notorious decay or im-pairing his heat, supplying the just quantity of moisture.¹³

Adult men had a good balance of heat and dryness compared to children (warm but moist) and the elderly (cold and moist). Adulthood was also associated with summer and the sun, as the four seasons were part of humoral theory. Thomas Fortescue, in a translation of a work by Spanish humanist writer Pedro Mexia, described this as follows:

Of this Age the Sunne is chiefe Lorde and Governour … This Age is the moste perfectst, and most excellent of the others, it is the bewtie and flowre of mans life. Duringe this Age, the forces and powres, bothe of the understandinge, and bodie, acquire, and retaine their vertue, and vigor. Man therefore in this time, well advised and hardy, becometh skilfull to knowe and choose, that is good for him, he seeketh and searcheth Honour and Ritches, he laboreth to be accompted greate and renowmed, he busieth him selfe in laudable and vertuous Actions.¹⁴

Adult men were well balanced in body and mind, thus they had the ability to embody the highest ideals of virtue and success. As can be seen here, one of the appealing aspects of humorism was that it could be used to explain many aspects of life and the natural world, so it offered a comprehensive explanation of the physical and behavioural expectations around ageing.

Physically, adulthood was associated with the apex of bodily health, largely measured by internal energy and aptitude. One of the only outwardly visual markers of male adulthood noted is the beard. Will Fisher argues that the beard was ‘one of the primary ways in which masculinity was materialized’ and ‘therefore not simply a “secondary” sexual characteristic’.¹⁵ He argues that growing a beard was so tied to masculinity that young boys were viewed as a different gender to men. Eleanor Rycroft considers this in the context of the early modern stage, suggesting that having a beardless boy play a female character was not a huge imaginative leap for the audience.¹⁶ Indeed, the men in Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ fourth and fifth stages of life are described as having beards. Conduct literature also supports Fisher’s statement that beard growth was the main visual marker of adult masculinity, for example German writer Hermannus Schottennius in a translation in 1566:

The fifth age is called mannes age, when as a man is growen to his full rype age, and that his body is past growth, & his beard buddeth from out his chinne.¹⁷

And R. Hoper, published in 1580:

at this time, both the person, age, and body of man is now fullye ripe and growen up: so that it hath ceassed to grow any further in youthfulnes: and that also the beard hath now appeared on his Chinne.¹⁸

These readings do not support the idea that adult men were perceived as a different gender to boys as these descriptions refer to the development of male youths into adult men, but it does appear that beards were a universal symbol of adulthood for men. A set of late sixteenth-century engravings of a five-age stage of life, copied from Dutch painter and architect Hans Vredeman de Vries (Figure 2.1), depicts the age range of thirty-two to forty-eight as its third stage. The men all have beards and wear doublets and breeches, clothing items associated with younger men. Catherine Richardson states that middling-sort men were likely to own fashionable and ceremonial clothes, with longer robes as more appropriate for carrying out civic responsibilities.¹⁹ The man at the front of the image who is engaged in teaching or instructing children wears a longer robe. Civic responsibility would have increased with age so a longer robe could indicate an older man.

Adult men were the most capable of reasoned judgement as they were understood to be able to control their anger and desire more effectively than youths. Thus, they were well suited for heading households, state and military leadership, and setting an example to younger and older generations. Legally, men were seen as ‘of ripe age’ at twenty-one but generally the ‘perfect’ age of man was deemed in the thirties/forties. Adult men were linked by various writers with the Latin term ‘vir’, with its connotations of virility and virtue; a person with the bodily state to practise virtuous behaviour. Heroes of classical stories like Aeneas were the embodiment of the potential of adulthood for men as they had a natural combination of bravery and wisdom that enabled them to ‘shoulder the burdens of leadership’.²⁰ Older men gained even more wisdom through their life experiences but sound judgement was linked to the strength of the body and other natural forces that were subject to decline as the body was.²¹ Adult men were at an ideal stage of life to head society as they had both physical and mental strength, where older or younger men often had to prove they could transcend their age stage to display these qualities.²² Alexandra Shepard argues that this ‘othering’ of youth and old age ‘illustrates the importance of age as a determinant of early modern hierarchies of masculinity’.²³ Emily E. Robson’s chapter in this collection demonstrates that the spiritual maturity of Protestant ministers could follow a different course and be associated with older chronological ages, albeit drawing on the language of youth and rejuvenation.

The adults in the De Vries images are distinguished by their activities, some of which correspond with the expected qualities of adult men set out in written ages of man texts, for instance Fortescue’s ‘laudable and vertuous Actions’.²⁴ The men of the third age are engaged in various activities that require reason and wise judgement, including the man instructing children, a married man talking to his wife and the military men standing guard over the scene. The Latin inscription indicates that this age is ‘full of labours’. The couple are holding hands and talking, not kissing or embracing, so it seems they are intended to depict a more mature partnership of householders rather than young lovers. While those teaching and instructing are in the foreground, there are indications of violence in this scene. Background figures are engaging in sword-fighting, a man on horseback appears to be presiding over executions and a man looks to be under threat of theft or harm from a group of armed men. Men seem to be responsible for ensuring the policing of crime, but also capable of criminality themselves. This criminal and state-sponsored violence is almost completely absent from De Vries’s fourth age depiction of men aged forty-eight to sixty-four years, except one ceremonially dressed soldier, and from the second age of men aged sixteen to thirty-two, except two men engaged in sword-fighting practice. This suggests that, although adult men were considered to have grown further into a state of rationality and wisdom, the balance of reason and physical strength could result in violence and the potential for criminality.

Adulthood as a stage had the potential for the ideal balance of humors, and of strength and wisdom, but the human body and mind did have potential for imbalance dependent on individual circumstance and experience. Karen Raber and Stephanie Tarbin assert that life-cycle texts ‘intended to confer a degree of self-knowledge on individuals, giving them markers by which to measure themselves; [and] establish a set of common expectations for human beings as they negotiate the challenges of growing into adulthood, and then old age’.²⁵ This was certainly the case, but the above analysis demonstrates that texts did not skip over the stage of adulthood as one of growth and challenge. Even if idealised, these descriptions set out expected behaviour and activities for adult men, as well as hinting at the consequences for deviating from the ideal. A ‘perfect’ age was possible for adult men, but it was not inevitable that everyone would achieve it.

Achieving perfection? Adulthood as a stage of change and development

Many ages of man schemes allowed for adulthood to be seen as the pinnacle or ‘prime’ age of life, especially those with an odd number of stages, for example the simple three-age system – childhood, adulthood, old age. When early modern writers discussed the three or four age stages put forward by ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Pythagoras, they acknowledged that there were stages within these stages, and generally preferred seven-age schemes.²⁶ The ‘perfect age’, if it did exist at all, was not a lengthy stage of life, perhaps ten years, usually in the thirties. So this means that there were experiences of being an adult (a young adult and an older adult) that did not fit into this ‘perfect age’ neatly. Adult behaviour and experiences developed over a longer span of chronological age. In the De Vries images, the third age has a sense of continuity with the second and fourth ages as the men take part in similar activities and wear similar clothes. The engraving of the second age shows people aged sixteen to thirty-two engaging in various activities, mostly artistic – sculpting, music, painting, reading – but also sword-fighting, which is echoed in the depictions of fighting and criminal violence in the third-age image.²⁷ The educational activities of the second age are commensurate with youth but seem to be self-directed, unlike the children who are being educated by adults in the third-age picture. In the fourth age men continue to read and engage in discussion. The soldier in the foreground continues to echo the soldierly activities of men in the third age.²⁸

This is a more unusual five-age depiction that marks the boundaries between age stages at different places. Writers acknowledged the confusion of different numbered schemes, for example Geffray Fenton who debated the value of the popular seven ages against the six ages posited by Isidore of Seville in Isidore’s much-referenced and translated work on the ages of the world from the seventh century.²⁹ Fenton commented that Isidore’s scheme did not separate virility (adult manhood) from youth as other writers did and so had the stage of ‘youth’ starting later at age twenty-nine.³⁰ Fenton preferred a three-age scheme but acknowledged smaller stages within those three ages.³¹ Henry Cuff also acknowledged multiple stages of adulthood:

the first is our youth, (for so the penurie of our English toong warranteth me to call it) when our growth is staied, and our naturall heat beginneth to be most flourishing; you may call it our Prime …; it lasteth from the fiue and twenti-eth to the fiue and thirtieth or fortieth yeere of our life: the second part of our middle age, is our Manhood, the most constant and setled part of our life, as having our life-qualities most firme and in greatest mediocritie, wherein notwithstanding our naturall heat beginnes a little to decay and decline from its vigour; yet so, as it cannot by sense be perceived, and this lasteth oftentimes till we be fiftie yeeres old.³²

He saw the ‘prime’ of life as a short one lasting between ten and fifteen years, but acknowledged youth and manhood as similar experience to this ‘prime’. Although covering fifteen years between ages thirty-two and forty-eight, De Vries similarly describes his third age as ‘short and swift’.³³ Cuff’s theory relied on the understanding of balance that could be achieved as men reached adulthood. The ‘prime’ age was one of full bodily strength but ‘greatest mediocrity’, a positive description within humoral theory that saw balance as an ideal state, was reached in the following stage of ‘manhood’. While the body began to decline in this stage, this decline was not yet evident and so men had the capacity to live in an ideal balanced and settled state. For Cuff, perfection appeared to apply only to physical strength in the stage he terms ‘youth’.

Cuff’s assertion that the English term ‘youth’ is not the ideal word to describe the young adult stage and Fenton’s criticisms of Isidore’s description of youth lasting until age fifty are likely comments on the ineffectual translation of the Latin juventus, which does indicate young chronological age but perhaps not as much as the English word ‘youth’ implies. As noted in the previous chapter, this was an unresolved issue from the medieval period where writers also struggled with their translations.³⁴ The same problem applied to the translation of the Latin senectus which translates most closely in English as an old man and in a three-age stage came directly after juventus. William Vaughan took issue with age schemes that too easily described men as old. When writing about the ‘sixth age’ that usually described men aged fifty to sixty-two, he stated that ‘this age is termed (although improperly) old age’.³⁵ He considered this stage as more closely related to prime or manhood than old age in terms of shared qualities of moderation and temperance. Mary Dove suggests that men who described a ‘stepping-stone’ age between juventus and senectus were aiming to smooth over the transition between youth and old age and reassure men that the course of life ‘would be a steady and measured progress’.³⁶ Those who wrote about a transitional age – usually forty to fifty – stressed the virtues of wisdom and moderation that men of this age continued to possess even though they had begun to decline physically.³⁷ It is perhaps worth noting that some writers would have been approaching this age stage themselves when writing these texts, for example Cuff was in his late thirties and Fenton likely in his mid-thirties when they chose to write about the topic of ageing.³⁸

The imprecise nature of these translated terms meant that sometimes writers used the same terms to describe different age stages, for example youth and manhood could both be compared to the season of summer. And it is not always clear if youth or manhood/prime age was seen as the pinnacle of life. Authors known only as W.B. and E.P. describe the fourth age as formed of young men aged twenty-two to thirty-four who had begun ‘to know he is a man’ as they learned reason and discretion and exhaled ‘the thicke mists of ignorance and follie’ but describe the fifth ‘virile or man’s age’ as one of decline where ‘man begins to bee covetous, churlish, cholerick’.³⁹ Their seven-age scheme thus does not appear to have a pinnacle at all. As already seen, Cuff’s work is unclear in its descriptions of two stages of adulthood: youth and manhood. He describes youth in terms of summer ‘for that growen strength of the body and minde’ and ‘man-age’ as autumn because ‘the good giftes and indowments of our minde … receive a kind of seasonable and timely ripeness’.⁴⁰ So although summer could be viewed as the prime and ‘flowering’ or ‘flourishing’ stage of adulthood, autumn was the ‘ripening’. Both stages of adulthood could be described positively in this way and seen as a progression of learning and development.

These texts suggest that adulthood was not a period of sameness but one of change and growth. The links between different life stages can be seen in some of the steps-of-life imagery popular from the sixteenth century onwards. In an Italian engraving of nine age stages (Figure 2.2), the middle three ‘adult’ figures all engage with each other as if connected by their life experiences. The fourth-step military figure looks up at the statesman-like figure seated on the fifth step. The sixth-step figure is clearly in decline and has an hourglass next to him as a reminder. He seems to be looking back to the fourth figure, suggesting that the fourth stage between youth and manhood is in fact the perfect age, not the man at the pinnacle of the steps. Research on the behaviour of young men reflects the overlap many would have experienced between their youth and adult life stages when they were functionally adults in their capacity for work but had not achieved all the markers of adulthood like marriage or political authority.⁴¹ Rachel Moss describes adolescence in the fifteenth century as a ‘significant life cycle stage’ when youths ‘were expected to be laying the foundations of their adult lives’ but also indulging ‘in activities particular to their age’.⁴² The adolescents she refers to are largely unmarried men in their twenties who could have been considered adults, or certainly close to adult in their ability to work and relocate independently. Historians of male youth culture have noted that men who had achieved the adult marker of becoming a patriarchal householder, and thus considered in their ‘prime age’, continued to engage in youthful masculine behaviours, for example alehouse socialising and misogynistic humour.⁴³ Ages of man descriptions, although idealised texts aimed at providing moral ideals for men, included an awareness of the personal development young men should aim for.

At the other end of the adult stage, men who were past their physical ‘prime age’ could be seen at their most suited to taking on significant roles of authority and civic responsibility, having had more time to learn the qualities associated with adult masculinity. For Shakespeare, it was during the fifth age of seven that man took on the role of the wise ‘justice’, a development from the fourth-age ‘soldier’ who had a more volatile temperament: ‘jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel’. The men in De Vries’s fourth age aged forty-eight to sixty-four – past their ‘prime’ but by no means in the decrepit elderly stage – engage in multiple activities including instructing a soldier, reading and discussion, and using scientific instruments. Writers did warn of the dangers of old men who continued to behave youthfully. Puritan minister John Reading’s published sermons on ageing explained that this was understandable, as for many physical signs of old age might arrive unexpectedly: ‘clouded with pleasures and businesse, … when it seemeth farre off, it layeth hand on vs’.⁴⁴ This unexpected advance to old age, while men were busy with the adult concerns of both ‘pleasures and businesse’, explained why there were ‘so many youthfull old men’ who had not ‘put off our youthfull mind’ and indicates the blurred line between the positive mental qualities of adulthood and the negative physical deterioration of old age.

Despite focusing on ideals, ages of man texts acknowledged that positive development in adulthood was not inevitable. In a 1700 publication, John Bunyan cited the common (and ‘perhaps true’) saying that ‘he who is not Handsome at Thirty, nor Strong at Forty, nor Wise at Fifty, will never be either Handsome, Strong or Wise’, demonstrating both the ideal qualities of these ages and the sense that those qualities would endure through the rest of the man’s life, or not.⁴⁵ For Reading, one key aspect of adulthood was to form ‘the foundation of a comfortable old age’, demonstrating an understanding that adulthood was a time of necessary development as one moved through the life course, but warning that wickedness in youth would endure through life. He also noted similarities across life stages for individuals, including how ‘young men blame the aged for speaking much when their owne eares itch to be running out into their tongues’.⁴⁶ Although there were identifiable qualities associated with ideal adulthood for early modern writers, it was not always clear exactly what age range or stage they applied to. The overlapping terms and descriptions appear to reflect the understanding that even the ideal life course was one where development and experience could be complex.

Ages of woman?

In the majority of ages of man schemes, ‘man’ is not an inclusive term. As has been seen so far, they were idealised depictions used to understand the ageing process and instruct on how best to navigate it, but they were almost always aimed at understanding and instructing men. Humoral theory was behind many of the descriptions of ageing and women had a different humoral balance to men. Cuff explained as follows:

the male according vnto Aristotle in euerie kinde almost, is by nature better fitted for long life than the female, hauing greater force of heat, and the moisture more firm & better able to resist than the fluid substance of the female; and thence it is that women for the most part are sooner perfected than men, being sooner fit for generation, sooner in the flower and prime of their age, and finally, sooner old, for their heat though little, yet sooner preuaileth ouer that fluid thinne substance and moisture of theirs, than it possibly can ouer that solid and compact humiditie which is in man.⁴⁷

Women’s colder and wetter balance of humors meant that they reached adulthood and old age earlier than men. As Philippa Maddern and Stephanie Tarbin have noted, men and women were most alike at the age extremes of the life cycle, in the wetter and cooler stages of infancy and old age.⁴⁸ It was the stage of adulthood where men and women were physiologically most different, and so women are explicitly not included in many ages of man schemes.

The way women’s biological experiences shaped their lives has been a focus for some historians seeking alternative ways of schematising the female life cycle and offering an alternative ‘ages of woman’. Sara Read uses ‘occasions of bleeding’, including first menstruation and post-partum flow, to conceptualise the female life cycle, stating that these biological experiences were significant as transitional stages in socio-cultural experience.⁴⁹ This reflects writing about women by men in the early modern period; for example, Cuff’s quote above references the humoral balance of women that meant they were ‘fit for generation’ sooner than men. However, in the De Vries engravings, the third age of thirty-two to forty-eight includes a woman breastfeeding an infant and surrounded by other small children, suggesting that marriage and childrearing would take place at a similar age for women and men.

The ‘close association’ between women’s biology and their culturally idealised roles as wives and mothers has also led historians to consider female life cycles in uxorial terms – daughter, wife, widow.⁵⁰ The justification of this approach is often that woman’s status as daughter, wife or widow was a significant factor shaping her life experience, even more so than the associated bodily experiences.⁵¹ Research has highlighted how crucial marriage was for the lives and careers of women of different social ranks.⁵² Tim Reinke-Williams has combined these approaches and shown that women’s concerns about their physical appearance were closely connected to the life cycle, especially when linked to securing marriage.⁵³ However, solely considering women in the context of marriage and child-bearing creates a separate life cycle for them, ignoring any possible similarities to the life cycle of men.

Marriage was a significant moment in attaining full adult status for men, as well as women. Youngs describes it as ‘close to a universal rite of passage’ in late medieval Europe.⁵⁴ Ideal qualities of male adulthood were also the ideal qualities of a husband and householder. Some depictions of the ages of man include women and indicate this shared aspect of ideal adulthood. In an engraving by German artist Paul Fürst depicting the three ages of man, although the childhood images depict two boys playing, the adulthood and old age images show couples; the younger couple embracing and the older couple dining together.⁵⁵ As already noted, the De Vries image of the third age depicts a man and woman who look to be in a marital partnership, walking together (although it does seem to be the man who is talking). Even if the women are not the primary focus of this ages of man scheme, it is clear that men’s relationships with women were key to their experience of adult life.

The children’s textbook Orbis Sensualium Pictus, written by Czech educationalist John Amos Comenius in 1658 and translated into English the following year by cleric and teacher Charles Hoole, includes a seven-step ages of man scheme depicting both sexes at each stage. Apart from the stage of infancy, represented by a single infant in a crib, each step has a male and female figure with corresponding descriptions. Stage four, the top of the step, is represented by the ‘young man’ and ‘maid’, with the fifth step held by simply ‘man’ and ‘woman’. These distinctions are largely drawn from the gendered Latin terms ‘iuvenis’ and ‘vir’ for men and ‘virgo’ and ‘mulier’ for women. It is only on the top step where the young man and maid interact with each other by holding hands in a courting-lovers pose typically associated with this stage. But the parallels drawn between men and women in schemes such as this indicate the possibility for women to be included and their journey through the life course seen on comparable terms.

This chapter has considered the question of how far the ‘perfect’ age of a man’s life corresponded with adulthood. It is also possible to ask this question of the more limited depictions of women’s life cycles. Mary Dove argues that a ‘perfect’ age was one that only men could achieve.⁵⁶ Indeed, according to humoral theory, women were never able to achieve the perfect balance that men could, but they could still reach a perfect age for their sex. Cuff refers to women being ‘sooner perfected than men’.⁵⁷ Nicholas Culpepper indicates that women’s ‘ripe’ age was after they had begun menstruation and thus were fertile.⁵⁸ This also indicates a younger age of ‘perfection’ than anticipated for men. However, as has been seen, when writers considered the transitional stages from youth to adulthood and the qualities that made up an ideal adult man, there was not complete agreement on whether the younger adult or older adult stage was the most ‘perfect’. Authors and artists varied on this depending on the number of age stages they chose. For the step-age system put forward by Comenius, the top step was occupied by a youthful man and woman. This suggests a similar degree of nuance from writers considering the qualities that constituted adulthood for women as well.

Similarly to men, women did not move straight from their ‘perfect’ age with its associations of youth and fertility to old and decrepit. Historiography on women and the life cycle in medieval and early modern England reflects the experience many had of adulthood as a stage that included biological and cultural changes, and some historians have used the term ‘middle aged’ to indicate this moment in the female life cycle. Niebrzydowski’s work on the Middle Ages states that women’s middle age was understood to ‘be marked by the loss of beauty and fertility, and the onset of sterility and the menopause’, but acknowledges that this might begin in ‘the latter part of one’s summer time’ in accordance with a four-age ages of man scheme.⁵⁹ When considering female perceptions of their own physical attractiveness across the life cycle in the seventeenth century, Reinke-Williams considers stages where women were in their twenties and looking to secure marriages and forties when they began to experience physical signs of ageing as significant moments.⁶⁰ This suggests a middle period for women in their thirties, and perhaps a pinnacle where they had achieved the main marker of adulthood as married women, but did not yet look old, similar to Cuff’s description of men whose natural heat had declined but ‘it cannot by sense be perceived’.⁶¹ However, it would seem premature by contemporary descriptions of adulthood to describe women in their forties as ‘old’. As Reinke-Williams notes, women began to notice and seek remedies for physical and mental ageing at around this age, and this suggests a change that adult women experienced as part of this stage of life.

Thus, women also underwent a transitional stage of later adulthood when they began to notice the signs of ageing, but were not really considered to be old. Ella Sbaraini defines middle age for women in the eighteenth century as between the ages of thirty and fifty, especially sexually, as they ‘were often seen as not as attractive as they once were, yet neither were they old or undesirable’.⁶² These women were ideally ‘settled’ as wives and mothers, and thus clearly adults, in much the same way as men moved through their adulthoods by gaining wisdom and experience as householders. Of course, not all women were wives and mothers, as not all men were husbands and fathers, but the existence of multiple stages of adulthood, or an in-between adult stage between youth and elderly, indicates that adulthood was a stage of life where men and women acquired qualities and capabilities to ensure they were the age group most appropriate for taking responsibility at home and in wider society.

Conclusion

Male adulthood in early modern England was characterised by qualities of reason and strength. By around the fourth decade of life, men’s bodies were deemed to be in their perfect state and they had acquired sufficient wisdom and virtue to take on and excel at important societal roles. They had crucially grown out of the sins of youth like lust and vanity, but not yet begun to physically decline. While each stage of the ages of man was presented as static and with a set of fixed characteristics, the existence of multiple age schemes reveals that writers and artists understood change, progress and decline as features of adulthood. Ages of man schemes were divided equally so those who chose to separate into more than three or four stages acknowledged several stages of adulthood that a man could move through. Women featured alongside men as they fulfilled their adult roles of husbands and householders, but could also be seen to have a separate journey through adulthood and a different moment of ‘ripe’ or ‘full’ age. Change and growth defined this stage as much as earlier or later stages.

The increasing visual emphasis on adulthood as the pinnacle of man’s life in visual depictions of ‘the steps of life’ indicates a shift in thinking about adulthood in the sixteenth century. Walsham’s recent work on generations highlights that while 40–50 per cent of England’s population was under the age of twenty-one, society was also gerontocratic where obedience to elders was expected.⁶³ In this context, it is not surprising that there was an interest in giving young men an ideal to look towards for moral guidance. Shepard argues that patriarchal privileges were increasingly related to ‘distinctions of social position rather than divisions of age or marital status’ by the mid-seventeenth century, which perhaps explains the examination of the qualities of men at all stages of adulthood.⁶⁴ Men could achieve ‘fullness’ in body and spirit but were not automatically entitled to the associated privileges. Alexandra Walsham’s work on age, generation and the Reformation highlights the ‘complex interconnections between the spiritual life cycle and its biological counterpart’, as those following the new, Reformed faith might see themselves as spiritual children who needed, and wanted, to develop their spiritual understanding.⁶⁵ As Robson shows in this collection, spiritual maturity could certainly be achieved later in life.⁶⁶ This research supports the interpretation of adulthood as a period of potential growth or decline dependent on individual action as presented by the early modern English writers discussed here.

The impact of demographic change and new spiritual outlooks makes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an interesting moment at which to consider what it meant to be an adult. Indeed, these social and cultural changes led to the coining of the term adult itself. For writers and illustrators, the concept of the ages of man provided a flexible framework to debate and explore exactly how one might change and grow in the identity of adulthood, setting a moral example for those taking on positions of responsibility in an ever-changing society.

Notes

1. 1. ‘adult, adj. and n.’. OED Online. June 2021. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/view/Entry/2821?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=vcsmQc& (accessed 22 August 2021).

2. 2. Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–c. 1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 34.

3. 3. Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 153.

4. 4. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Henry French and Mark Rothery, ‘ “Upon your entry into the world”: Masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed elites in England 1680–1800’, Social History, 33, no. 4 (2008), 402–22; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Youth in the devil’s service, manhood in the king’s: Reaching adulthood in the eighteenth-century British army’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 8, no. 2 (2015), 163–90; Rachel E. Moss, ‘An orchard, a love letter and three bastards: The formation of adult male identity in a fifteenth-century family’ in John Arnold and Sean Brady eds., What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 226–44.

5. 5. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 288; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 74, 246; Hurl-Eamon, ‘Youth in the devil’s service’, 163.

6. 6. K. Tawny Paul, ‘Accounting for men’s work: Multiple employments and occupational identities in early modern England’, History Workshop Journal, 85, no. 1 (2018), 26–46; Mark Hailwood, ‘ “The honest tradesman’s honour”: Occupational and social identity in seventeenth-century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 24 (2014), 79–103; Tim Reinke-Williams, ‘Misogyny, jest-books and male youth culture in seventeenth-century England’, Gender and History, 21, no. 2 (2009), 324–39; Anne F. Sutton, ‘ “Serious money”: The benefits of marriage in London, 1400–1499’, The London Journal, 38, no. 1 (2013), 1–17.

7. 7. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth; Mary Abbott, Life Cycles in England 1560–1720 (London: Routledge, 1996); Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, ‘Introduction’ in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane eds., Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 4; Anna French ed., Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2019).

8. 8. Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Helen Berry, ‘Childless men in early modern England’ in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster eds., The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 158–83.

9. 9. Mary Dove, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 20; Karen Raber and Stephanie Tarbin, ‘The life cycle’ in Karen Raber ed., A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance, volume 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 27; Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rose Elliot and Annmarie Hughes, ‘Introduction: Gender and generations – Women and life cycles’, Women’s History Review, 20, no. 2 (2011), 176.

10. 10. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 7.

11. 11. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 75.

12. 12. Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Cuffe [Cuff], Henry (1562/3–1601), classical scholar and secretary to the earl of Essex’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6865 (accessed 9 August 2023).

13. 13. Henry Cuff, The differences of the ages of mans life (London, 1607, 2nd edition), 118–19.

14. 14. Thomas Fortescue, The Foreste or Collection of histories (London, 1571) from a French version by Claude Gruget of an Italian translation of Pedro Mexia, 46.

15. 15. Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance beard: Masculinity in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54, no. 1 (2001), 184.

16. 16. Eleanor Rycroft, ‘Facial hair and the performance of adult masculinity on the early modern English stage’ in Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme and Andrew Griffin eds., Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 217–28.

17. 17. Hermannus Schottennius, The government of all estates, wherein is contayned the perfect way to an honest life (London, 1566).

18. 18. R. Hoper, The instruction of a Christian man (London, 1580?), 64.

19. 19. Catherine Richardson, ‘Status’ in Elizabeth Currie ed., A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance, volume 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 129.

20. 20. J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 119–20.

21. 21. Geffray Fenton, Golden epistles (London, 1575), 155.

22. 22. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 46.

23. 23. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 23.

24. 24. Fortescue, The Foreste, 46.

25. 25. Raber and Tarbin, ‘The life cycle’, 25.

26. 26. Dove, The Perfect Age, 11.

27. 27. Ages of man: second stage, from the ages of sixteen to thirty-two, and the classical orders of architecture: Corinthian. Engraving by J. Wierix, 1577, after J. Vredeman de Vries. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dz6rnz5j/items (accessed 12 October 2023).

28. 28. Ages of man: fourth stage, from the age of forty-eight to sixty-four years and the classical orders of architecture: doric. Engraving by J. Wierix, 1577, after J. Vredeman de Vries. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dh3tkb8r/items (accessed 12 October 2023).

29. 29. Sears, The Ages of Man, 17–18, 59–61.

30. 30. Fenton, Golden epistles, 150–51.

31. 31. Fenton, Golden epistles, 157.

32. 32. Cuff, The differences, 118–19.

33. 33. Ages of man: third stage J. Wierix, 1577, after J. Vredeman de Vries. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/k7gxqq6m/items (accessed 12 October 2023).

34. 34. See Youngs’s Chapter 1 in this collection.

35. 35. William Vaughan, Naturall and Artificial Directions for health (London, 1600), 54.

36. 36. Dove, The Perfect Age, 27.

37. 37. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 41.

38. 38. It is perhaps worth noting that I turned thirty-five while writing this chapter so understand the intellectual impulse to assess adulthood as a transitional stage.

39. 39. W.B. and E.P., A Helpe to Discourse. Or A Miscelany of Merriment (London, 1619), 234–5.

40. 40. Cuff, The differences, 116.

41. 41. Maria Cannon, ‘Conceptualising childhood as a relational status: Parenting adult children in sixteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change, 36, no. 3 (2021), 309–30.

42. 42. Moss, ‘An orchard, a love letter and three bastards’, 239.

43. 43. Hailwood, ‘The honest tradesman’s honour’, 96; Reinke-Williams, ‘Misogyny, jest-books and male youth culture’, 331–5.

44. 44. John Reading, The old mans staffe (London, 1621), 5.

45. 45. John Bunyan, Meditations of the several ages of man’s life (London, 1700), 43.

46. 46. Reading, The old mans staffe, 11.

47. 47. Cuff, The differences, 106–107.

48. 48. Philippa Maddern and Stephanie Tarbin, ‘Life cycle’ in Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti eds., A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age, volume 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 25–44.

49. 49. Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

50. 50. Barclay et al., ‘Introduction: Gender and generations’, 176.

51. 51. Raber and Tarbin, ‘The life cycle’, 43–4; Cordelia Beattie, ‘The life cycle: The ages of medieval women’ in Kim M. Philips ed., A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages, volume 2 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 37.

52. 52. For example: Barbara Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43; Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69; and Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), in addition to numerous textbooks on the lives of women in early modern England.

53. 53. Tim Reinke-Williams, ‘Physical attractiveness and the female life-cycle in seventeenth-century England’, Cultural and Social History, 15, no. 4 (2018), 469–85.

54. 54. Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, 132.

55. 55. The three ages of man: a couple embrace, children play with hoops and toys and an old couple eat at a table. Engraving by P. Fürst, 1652. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/t4bt4n89/items (accessed 12 October 2023).

56. 56. Dove, The Perfect Age, 20.

57. 57. Cuff, The differences, 106–107.

58. 58. Nicholas Culpeper, Directory for midwives: or, a guide for women (London, 1676), 95.

59. 59. Sue Niebrzydowski, ‘Introduction: “Becoming bene-straw” – The middle-aged woman in the Middle Ages’ in Sue Niebrzydowski ed., Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 7.

60. 60. Reinke-Williams, ‘Physical attractiveness’, 470.

61. 61. Cuff, The differences, 119.

62. 62. Ella Sbaraini ‘ “Those that prefer the ripe mellow fruit to any other”: Rethinking depictions of middle-aged women’s sexuality in England, 1700–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 17, no. 2 (2020), 166.

63. 63. Alexandra Walsham, Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 27. This statistic does not take into account the high infant mortality rate of early modern England but does indicate a youthful society.

64. 64. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 7.

65. 65. Walsham, Generations, 76.

66. 66. See Chapter 3 of this collection.

References