Longévité et âge chronologique dans l'Europe du début de l'époque moderne

The Measure of a life. Longevity and Calendar Age in Early Modern Europe


Call for Papers


Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, March 19th, 2027

Early modern Europeans were concerned with longevity in many different contexts. Philosophical and medical treatises advised readers on diets, regimens, and medical procedures intended to prolong life. Accounts of exceptionally long-lived individuals and ethnographic descriptions of distant peoples with allegedly extraordinary lifespans appealed to readers’ imaginations. Governments collected increasingly extensive population data in order to assess average life expectancy and thus exploit the demographic resources of their territories. Authorities, and financial speculators sold life annuities whose profitability depended on estimating how long buyers were likely to live. Early modern autobiographies, biographies, and funeral sermons, likewise reflected on the beginning, course, and duration of individual lives, often within an astrological framework.

Across these otherwise varied contexts, longevity raised a common problem: how could the duration of a human life be ordered, compared, and measured? Increasingly over the course of the early modern period, contemporaries answered this question by quantifying life in years elapsed since birth. Yet what now appears to be a self-evident way of measuring human lives, and thus longevity, was far from self-evident in the early modern period. People commonly understood lives through bodily and social stages such as childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age, as well as through kinship positions, religious milestones, work roles, or changes in legal status. These categories could all appear more meaningful than a precise numerical age. Time perception per se has been shown to have been much less quantitative than today. Moreover, calendar age was not always readily available: dates of birth or baptism might never have been registered or memorized, or records might have been inaccessible, forgotten, or simply lost.

Among the leading questions of the workshop are: 

• How did attempts to understand, extend, compare, or profit from human lifespans promote or prevent their quantification?
• Where did non-numerical understandings of age persist, and what did contemporaries consider an authoritative answer to the question of how old a person was?
• When did the focus on numerical age clash with qualitative descriptors of longevity, such as a Christian, healthy or productive life?
• How was calendar age used to challenge some accounts of extraordinary longevity and lend credibility to others?
• How was thinking about longevity transformed by the increasing availability of age documentation, namely parish records, across early modern Europe?
• How did calendar age and the expectation of life span interact with various personal and identity categories?

The workshop will take place on Friday, March 19th, 2027 at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, UK. Attendance in person is expected.

Please submit a CV and abstract of no more than 350 words either by using this form or by emailing them to Johannes.Pelzl@eui.eu by 11:59 PM CET on November 30th, 2026. Prospective participants will be notified within two weeks.

Travel grants may be made available upon request. Please note that as funds are limited, the availability and the amount awarded may therefore vary depending on the number of requests received. Preference will be given to independent scholars, graduate students, and early career researchers who do not have funding available through other sources. The funds will only be disbursed after the event.

This conference is co-sponsored by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge as well as Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, NL.