5. The Good Life: Ageing

Do the possibilities for a good life change as you get older, and is a long life desirable? We talk about ageing, health advice for the elderly, life expectancy, families, and the stages of life in early modern Europe. Was it possible to live a good life when old, and if so, good in what sense? This episode's examples are a ballad about an old man neglected by his son and daughter in law, and a brief reflection by the essayist Michel de Montaigne on the Bible verse, ‘To every thing there is a season’ (Ecclesiastes 3, 1-8).

Sources mentioned

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures (London: Random House, 2020)

(see the review in the London Review of Books from May 2021: Francis Gooding, ‘From its Myriad Tips’)

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (London: Collins, 2016)

Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (London: Chatto and Windus, 2010)

‘The Old Man’s Complaint Against His Wretched Son who to Advance his Marriage did Undo Himself’ (1658-64).

Montaigne, ‘All things have their season’, in Complete Works, tr. by Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003)

See here for the chapter in French: https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/montessaisvilley/navigate/1/4/29/

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