Getting on in a gerontocracy: charity, gender, and ageing popolani in early modern Venice

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This project analyses how Renaissance Venetians perceived, interacted with and, at a broader city level, cared for andmanaged the ageing and poorer non-elite part of their population, and how they understood and sought to mitigate theeffects and signs of old age. It seeks to unpick how older popolani were woven into the city community, in what ways thiswas influenced by gender, and how it may have related to the 'myth of Venice' and the city's status as a gerontocracy.The project will focus on three key areas: the city's network of charitable care, especially its ospizi and ospedali;domestic space (which often overlapped with workspace); and material such as cheap print and ephemera that mayhave identified and offered remedies to alleviate changes and ailments associated with old age, and via which conceptsof old age were therefore constructed. It will draw on a range of sources including the records of ospizi and ospedali atthe Archivio di Stato di Venezia, parish records, printed material and costume books, artworks, and material culture. Aswell as expanding scholarship on early modern old age and ageing, by focusing on vulnerable popolani the thesis willadd to scholarship on the institutions, norms and experiences of non-elite and poorer Venetians, particularly the ways inwhich gender and charity operated among them, and the resources via which the city's vulnerable made their lives, aswell as on the relationships between domestic and institutional spaces