Old Age Provision and Social Mobility Across the Life Cycle, 1600-1800" was the title of my PhD thesis which I have defended at the EUI in summer of 2023. It studies how individuals who spend spent most of their lives in respectable social status experienced social decline in old age. By studying charitable institutions which offered old age provision, it argues the downards social mobility between middle and old age was a characteristic phenomenon of early modern societies in Europe. 

My sources mainly come from several municipal archives in southern Germany, such as Nuremberg and Augsburg, but also smaller cities such as Nördlingen or Rothenburg. There, the transmission of urban hospitals is conserved, which have kept a rich trove of documents on the lives of the retirees and the institutional policies to maintain them in old age. 

The picture on the left gives this phenomenon a human face: That of Hanns Merckel, a 70-year old bookbinder, who entered a 'retirement home' in 1685 in the southern German city of Nuremberg. Quite extraordinarily, the directors chose to keep portraits of the elderly, bestowing upon us the amazing imagry of these humble people.