Retiring in Early Modern Germany : old age provision and social mobility across the life cycle, c. 1600-1800

Abstract

This thesis enriches our understanding of early modern social order by looking at it through a life cyclical lens. How did one’s social rank and position vary over a lifetime? Were social roles much more temporal and life cycle-dependent than we have traditionally admitted? To do so, we investigate a thus far underestimated phenomenon: the downward social mobility individuals could experience when transitioning from middle into old age. When productivity and, therefore, income from labour decreased through ageing, many men and women faced the very real risk of impoverishment in old age, thus losing the social rank and status they had previously enjoyed. The literature on old age public charity and welfare provision is replete with evidence that many elderly were affected. This thesis dwells on this, by showing that ‘downward social mobility’ between middle and old age was a significant social phenomenon, shaping the lives of many elderly individuals as well as the very social structures and perceptions of early modern social order. This thesis studies the phenomenon through the transmission of welfare institutions in several midsized southern German cities in the 17th and 18th centuries (mainly Nördlingen, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Würzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg). Hospitals in these cities devoted the largest share of their resources to maintaining numerous elderly in what essentially were ‘retirement homes’ ante litteram. By obtaining the right to bread and board until the last of their days in these institutions, an arrangement called corrodies, individuals could protect themselves against being reduced to beggary – most often against a considerable sum to be paid. Numerous administrative documents drawn up by the institutions’ officials upon the elderly’s admission lend themselves to carve out a story on two complementary scales: individual life stories as well as aggregate quantitative material. Unlike many studies based on institutional sources, this work is not concerned with institutional history. Instead, it concentrates on understanding how individuals were rooted in urban society in middle age and what trajectories alongside age-induced physical decline led them to the retirement home’s doorstep. We look at their occupations, their savings instruments, their wealth, and finally, at their portraits to comprehend the social rank these elderly departed in middle age and how their new life in retirement related to their former status. This process was most pronounced among urban ‘middling sort’, such as artisans, who enjoyed decent living standards for most of their adult working lives. Still, some could not maintain this when their working days ground to a halt, thus turning to a retirement home. These observations put together help reconstruct a phenomenon which profoundly shaped early modern social order and the lived experience of countless men and women.