EUI Professor Lauren Kassell will give a talk in the framework of the History Department Monthly Research Meetings.
Longevity has two meanings. Life expectancy is the average length of life. For instance, according to some records, in Stratford-upon-Avon in the decades between 1570 and 1630, a third of men and a fifth of women lived beyond 60. Life span is the oldest possible age. Any of these people might have lived to 97 or even to 152, depending which source one reads. These figures vary from place to place, society to society, group to group and have changed through time. Moreover, practices of recording age at death and the normative category of chronological age have a history.
Prolongevity is the idea that it is possible to extend the length of life. Since classical antiquity, philosophers, physicians, poets, and politicians have asked, for instance: Should people expect to live longer, or not, than their ancestors? Are there things that they can do to live longer? How does living longer relate to ageing and to death, to generation and degeneration? Is immortality possible, or desirable? Are the answers to these questions the same for everyone, or do they—or indeed the possibility of asking them—differ depending on gender, status, and wealth? Questions of the length of life, just like questions of death, as an increasing number of histories have demonstrated, have provided occasions to reflect on the meanings of life and the contingencies of health and happiness.
This talk introduces a project on the history of prolongevity as a set of ideas and a social reality. It is centred on early modern England, and it reflects on how we, as historians, think about the past and the future. It is provisionally structured around food, sex, spas, spirits, data, and memory—and thus, we are beginning with food.
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