As the last stage of a long life, old age has been a subject about which practically every mortal has thought, sometimes with dread, sometimes with stoic acceptance, but always with the need somehow to come to terms with a challenging condition.

In the book, six authors examine how the best thinkers and artists of each historical epoch in the West have treated old age. They examine, too, the myths that have grown up around it—especially in our own time, when we firmly believe that never have people grown so old as they now do!—and the images, both visual and verbal, that have been created to encapsulate that thing which we shall all become.

Opulently and ingeniously illustrated with reproductions drawn from an astonishingly wide range of eras and media, A History of Old Age provides a welcome and refreshing look at what the subject has meant to the Greeks and the Romans, the medievals, the Romantics, and the modern men and women of rootless urban societies. This book will surprise with many of its facts about old age and the visions of it that it recounts; it will reassure as it cites from literature and from art the strength and nobility that so many writers and artists have found in the old and even the infirm; and, finally, it just may calm the fears of readers who, like it or not, know that they someday must embrace their own decrepitude.

Pat Thane is deputy director of the Institute of Historical Research, London; Tim Parkin is professor of classics, University of Canterbury; Shulamith Shahar is professor emeritus, Tel Aviv University; Marcia Pointon is professor emerita and former chair, School of History and Architecture, University of Manchester; Thomas Cole is professor at the University of Texas; and Deborah Cherry is professor of the history of art at Sussex University.

This title is out of print. Please look for it at your local libraries and/or used bookstores.