Age Identity in Old and Middle English Literature

The study of aging in medieval literature has flourished in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a great deal of scholarship has focused on how Old and Middle English literature might channel or respond to learned traditions of the “Ages of Man,” which have their roots in classical philosophy and biblical exegesis. Frequently, however, this body of literature thwarts our efforts to map its narratives onto such schematic models for the normative performance of age identity. This chapter focuses on moments of ambiguity, ambivalence, and elusion relating to aging in Old English poetry and prose. It ranges through poems such as Juliana, which may have been composed as early as the eighth century, to the fifteenth-century prose Book of Margery Kempe, touching on some of the best-known interpretive cruces in medieval English literature. This chapter makes a case for the indeterminacies and multivalences of age identities in Old and Middle English literature while also pointing out those which lurk at the heart of Ages of Man traditions—for all that these models may seem neat and schematic, they insistently direct us to the strangeness and nonlinearity inherent to experiences of aging.