Despite calls since the 1970s for more research into the history of old age, there is still a relative dearth of historical studies on the elderly, especially in the pre-industrial past. This volume remedies much of that deficiency with essays exploring the lives of old men and old women, and the images of old age and aging, in early modern Europe and America. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate there was a strong association of advanced age with authority in the lived experience of older men and women. This book recognizes poverty and physical limitations were a very real threat, but challenges the tendency of existing literature on historical gerontology to associate old age with dependence and disability. Instead, what emerges from this volume is the success of older people in the past in imbuing their old age with dignity, despite the often vicious nature of old age in both popular and elite literature.

Essays are brought together on old age in early modern England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and America, enabling comparisons that cross geographical boundaries. Historians of old age, the family, demography, social history and cultural history will value this volume, as will sociologists and anthropologists interested in gerontology.

When John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, emigrated from Stuart England to America, he and the colonists who accompanied him carried much of their culture with them. Written by leading English and American scholars, the essays in "The World of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588-1649 "vigorously assert a new unity to the transatlantic and Puritan, Anglo-American sphere, integrating the English and colonial stories from a refreshingly single perspective.

Contributors:
Tom Webster (University of Edinburgh) * Mark A. Peterson (University of Iowa) * David D. Hall (Harvard Divinity School) * Alexandra Walsham (University of Exeter) * Alden Vaughan (Columbia University) * Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University) * Richard J. Ross (University of Illinois) * James S. Hart (University of Oklahoma) * Richard Godbeer (University of Miami) * Mark Valeri (Union Theological Seminary of Virginia) * Lyn Botelho (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) * Francis J. Bremer (Millersville University of Pennsylvania)