Abstract
A king at his peak may be a plenitude,1 but what is he in his decline as the parts begin to fall away? King Lear’s senescence consumed his world, sapping the vigor and perverting the actions of those around him like some gaseous and volatile Jupiter swallowing small orbiting moons. The all too human disaster of his failing strength and judgment spread outward, destabilizing not just a kingdom, but the smaller domestic governments within his reach.
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Notes
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King,” trans. Eliot Weinberger, in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 1999), p. 382.
Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.Trask, Bollingen Series, 36 (Princeton, 1953; repr. 1973, 1990), p. 28. See also the epilogue to the 1990 edition by Peter Godman, pp. 599–653.
And see James M. Dean, The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature, Medieval Academy Books, 101 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
Since the original version of this study, a number of examinations of old age in the Middle Ages have appeared: among them, see Michael Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: Vie Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250–1350 (Lan-ham, Md., 1989)
Georges Minois, History of Old Age from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1989); Aging and the Aged in Medieval Europe, ed. Michael M. Sheehan, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 11 (Toronto, 1990)
Joel T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1996)
Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: Winter Clothes us in shadow and pain/’; trans. Yael Lotan (London, 1997); Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity, ed. Paul Johnson and Patricia Thane (London, 1998).
See also Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History (Baltimore, 2003).
See Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (Oxford, 1969), p. 3
Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), pp. 24–29
Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsaufassung im Mitte-lalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 16 (Stuttgart, 1978)
Paul Edward Dutton, “Illustre ciuitatis etpopuli exemplum: Plato’s Timaeus and the Transmission from Calcidius to the End of the Twelfth Century of a Tripartite Scheme of Society,” Mediaeval Studies, 45 (1983): 79–119.
See Randloph Starn, “Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline,” History and Theory, 14 (1975): 15–16; Paul Edward Dutton, “Awareness of Historical Decline in the Carolingian Empire, 800–887” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1981), pp. 5–12.
Randolph Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’“ Past and Present, 52 (1971): 3–22.
See Visio Karoli Magni, ed. P. Jaffe, in Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, 4 (Berlin, 1868): 701–704
Patrick Geary, “Germanic Tradition and Royal Ideology in the Ninth Century:The Visio Karoli Magni” Frumittelalterliche Studien, 21 (1987): 274–294 and repr. in
Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 49–76; also trans, in
Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, Oct., 2004), pp. 456–57; and discussed in Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire, Regents Studies in Medieval Culture, ed. Eugene Vance (Lincoln, Neb., 1994), pp. 200–210.
See Richard Landes, “The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern,” Speculum, 75 (2000): 110–116[97–145]; “Sur les traces du millennium: La ‘Via Negativa’ (2e partie),” Le Moyen Age, 99 (1993): 1–26; Wolfram Brandes, “‘Tempora periculosa sunt’: Eschatologisches im Vorfeld der Kaiserkronung Karls des Grossen,” in Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794: Kristillisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur, ed. Rainer Berndt (Mainz, 1997), pp. 49–79; David Van Meter, “The Empire of the Year 6000: Eschatology and the Sanctification of Carolingian Politics,” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1997); and the helpful analysis of the issue by
Michael Idomir Allen, “The Chronicle of Claudius of Turin,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), p. 318 and n. 147 [288–319].
Paul the Deacon, carmen 22 (“Epitaphium Hildegardis reginae”), ed. Dummler, in MGH:PLAC 1, p. 59.24. On this queen, see Klaus Schreiner, “‘Hildegardis regina’: Wirklichkeit und Legende einer karolingischen Herrscherin,” Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte, 57 (1975): 1–70.
See Peter Laslett, “Necessary Knowledge: Age and Aging in Societies of the Past,” in Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age, ed. David L. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 3–77 and fig. 1.1.
Creighton G. Gilber, “When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?” Studies in the Renaissance, 14 (1967): 31, makes this point for Renaissance princes and popes.
Istvan Kiszely, Hie Anthropology of the Lombards, trans. Catherine Siman, B.A.R. International Series 61.1 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 163–64, on the basis of eight hundred and seventy skeletons, placed the average age of mortality for early medieval Lombard men at 34 years 9 months and for women at 34 years 2 months; but since virtually no skeletons of infants were found, the figures were lowered to 24 years 8 months and 24 years 3 months respectively. See also the parallel results provided in
Gyorgy T. Acsadi and Janos Nemeskeri, History of Human Life Span and Mortality, trans. K. Balas (Budapest, 1970), pp. 215–234
Winfried Henke and Karl-Heinz Nedder, “Zur Anthropologic der frankischen Bevolkerung von Rubenach,” Bonner Jahrbuch, 181 (1981): 395–419
Peter Laslett, The World We have Lost, 2nd ed. (London, 1971), p. 97
and Laslett, “Societal Development and Aging,” in Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, ed. Robert H. Binstock and Ethel Shanas (NewYork, 1976), pp. 97–98.
Isidore, Etymologiae 11.2.1–8, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1911); Hrabanus Maurus, De universo 7.1, in PL 111:179D On age divisions in the Middle Ages, see especially John A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986) and
Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, 1986).
See Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), pp. 190–253.
See Peter R. McKeon, “817: Une Annee desastreuse et presque fatale pour les Carolingiens,” Le Moyen Age, 84 (1978): 5–12. For the Ordinatio imperii, see MGH:Cap. 1, pp. 270–73, and Francois L. Ganshof,”Some Observations on the Ordinatio imperii of 817” (1955) in Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, pp. 273–88.
For similar retirements in England, see Clare Stancliffe, “Kings who Opted out,” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald with Donald Bullough and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 154–76.
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© 2004 Paul Edward Dutton
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Dutton, P.E. (2004). A World Grown Old with Poets and Kings. In: Charlemagne’s Mustache and other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06228-4_6
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