Description: The essays in this collection present new research into a variety of questions on birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and old age, ordered in a more or less chronological manner according to the lifecycle. The volume exposes attitudes and representations of the lifecycle from the Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the
Brief description: Frederick S. Paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College, in New London, CT, USA. He is the author of Christianizing Death: The Making of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (1990), Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony: the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (2009) and numerous articles and essays on sickness, death, dying and the dead in medieval Europe.
Review Quotes: "The editors have brought together a heterogeneous but enlightening group of articles that illuminate the life cycle from many different perspectives. No overarching conclusion emerges and in a way this is the book's strength. Moving away from the normative life cycle texts the authors demonstrate that age was just as relative in past centuries as it is today." -- Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Medieval Review