Jaques’s ages of man, and the euthanasia of The Old Law, focused on how early modern
literature engages with the decline narrative of aging, as defined in this dissertation’s introduction. I showed, in the general introduction, how the decline narrative of aging is not the only model available in early modern poetry, analyzing how Edmund Waller’s “Of the Last Verses in the Book” associates old age with new and innovative types of insight that do not demand the performance of ablebodiedness in old age. This chapter deals with another major metaphor of early modern aging that does not depend on the decline narrative. I argue that the early modern interest in superlongevity construes old age as a period of productivity and generativity in order to think through the concept of national history.
Stories of the extraordinarily long lives experienced by a small group of people provided an opportunity to explore the degree to which individuals could direct the course and quality of their own aging, and to debate the degree to which one’s
environment influenced one’s length of life. As Pat Thane writes, “The possible lifespan of human beings intrigued theological, philosophical, and medical writers as optimism about the human capacity to control nature grew with the intellectual flowering of the seventeenth century” (59). Cases of extreme superlongevity—people who were believed
to have lived into their eleventh or twelfth decades or beyond—were perceived as rare but possible, an example of the advanced ages that Biblical characters would reach, and they set the horizon of possibility for the age that a human body could achieve. Men and women who lived to an extreme old age were rare and unique, but also representative of the potential of every body.
Thomas Parr, a husbandman from Shropshire, was understood to have been born in 1483 and died in 1635 at the age of 152.111 In September 1635, Parr accompanied
Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, to London to be presented to Charles I and the rest of London society, at which point the event was reported in print. In London, Parr’s superlongevity was celebrated and marveled at, and his portrait was made by Cornelius van Dalen (Thomas, “Parr, Thomas” n.p.). Accounts of Parr’s life appear multiple times in print, where he is promoted as a curiosity or a “wonder.”112 In a 1636 pamphlet titled
The Three Wonders of this Age, Parr is classed as a spectacle, depicted alongside the very tall (called here “giants”) and little people (called here “dwarfes”) (The Three Wonders
n.p.). He also appears in a 1635 pamphlet titled The Wonder of this Age: or, The Picture of a Man living, who is One hundred Fifty two yeeres old, and upward (Heywood n.p.).
The print depicts a portrait of a white-bearded Parr wearing a cap surrounded by three
111 Thane explains that Parr’s age “was probably attained by his, consciously or not, adopting his father’s
birth-date” (61).
112 Peter Laslett connects the display of centenarians to a desire to experience the Biblical miracles:
“Thomas Parr and Old Meg of Hereford were marvels to be wondered at, authentic miracles like miracles in the Scripture” (“Bewildering History” n.p). He has called the fascination with extremely long-lived men and women “the cult of centenarians” (ibid).
columns of text, and claims to offer “The true and exact Effigies, or Portraiture of
Thomas Parr, borne in the yeere 1483, in the last yeere of the Reigne of Edward the Fourth” (n.p.). The text emphasizes the accuracy of the portrait and the uniqueness of Parr’s lifespan, which is not something that can be passed on by succession: “There needs no further Description of his Person, then this Picture. And to shew that long life is not Hereditary, hee had onely two sonnes by his first Wife, the one dyed within a Moneth, the other within a few yeeres” (n.p.).113 Both of these examples include visual
representations of Parr along with accompanying text that gives a biography. Certain aspects of Parr’s life recur in the various retellings: the impact of his rural lifestyle on his longevity, his two late-in-life marriages at ages 80 and 122, and his public punishment for adultery at age 105.
The Earl of Arundel’s motivation for bringing Parr to London appears to be a desire to impress Charles I. Alan Shepard describes the objectification inherent in Parr’s treatment by his patron, suggesting that Arundel displays Parr to Charles’s court in order to curry royal favour. He also links the Earl’s antiquarian activities with an objectification of Parr that some interpret as leading to Parr’s death:
the act of having Parr carted to London is consonant with the Earl’s reputation as a zealous collector of antiquities. While his travels on the Continent usually netted him sumptuous portraits by Italian masters . . . in Parr he reels in an aged human being, a relic of the pastoral life. . . . Within a few days he is dead, a victim of Arundel’s desire to ‘exhibit’ him for the King’s amusement. As Lawrence Stone
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remarks of the fascination with collecting antiquarian specimens in the early seventeenth century, a fashion of which Arundel was a prime mover, the craze did not bespeak a genuine interest in science. Instead, ‘it encouraged the mentality of the fair-ground peep-show’ (327). Arundel is a greedy urban colonist, Parr a spectacle of biblical age, an aristocrat’s Elephant Man. (492)
It is true that Parr’s body is made into a public spectacle, an experience that he does not survive. When Parr dies not long after traveling to London, many blame his demise on the ill-effects of an urban environment and the luxuries found there, as Keith Thomas notes in William Harvey’s autopsy of Parr:
Harvey attributed Parr’s death in part to his sudden exposure to rich food and strong drink after a lifetime’s diet of cheese, buttermilk, and coarse bread; but he identified the main cause as the effect of London’s atmosphere, polluted by people, animals, and the smoke of coal fires, upon someone accustomed to the healthy air of Shropshire. (“Parr, Thomas” n.p.)114
However, to focus on Arundel’s actions and Harvey’s autopsy report is to render Thomas Parr too passive, passive in a way that he never really was for early modern people. The fact that one of our sources on Parr is the autopsy written by Harvey contributes to this tendency, as the autopsy takes as its subject the inert corpse. In contrast, I will show how Parr’s life and body were perceived to be possessed of agency; in fact, much of his celebrity is connected to the potential or fruitfulness he was perceived to possess. Parr
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Thane points out that cases of superlongevity generally occurred among those living in rural settings: “That these were generally found among the rural poor was taken as proof that the immoderate life of modern, especially urban, society was the chief cause of ‘premature’ sickness and death” (60).
offers his audience access to a shared English history, and his experience of living through multiple historical periods lends his old age strength, authority, and a sense of wonder.